For a long time as a casual wine drinker, I have quietly assumed that the people who can sniff a glass and announce the specific grape, the country and the vintage after one swirl were simply built differently. Perhaps wired at birth with a sharper nose, a longer memory for smells, some inherited gift the rest of us were never handed.

The man at the front of the room at ProWine Singapore spent the better part of two hours dismantling that idea. The opening line, more or less, was that if a taster as ordinary as him could pass the Master Sommelier exam, anyone in the room could too. Coming from most people, that might be seen as false modesty. Coming from Andreas Rosendal, who has the scorecards to show just how hard-won the title was, it was a convincing thesis.

 

 

The Master Sommelier credential is the highest a wine professional can attain in the hospitality industry. The diploma is administered by the Court of Master Sommeliers, and it is one of the hardest qualifications in any industry, period. Fewer than 300 people in the world hold it. After a recent record sitting in Vienna in June 2025 produced nine new Masters in one go, the global tally stood at around 291, and the historic pass rate for the full diploma sits below ten percent.

 

 

The exam comes in three parts: a verbal theory grilling, a practical service test, and a blind tasting of six wines in 25 minutes, each section needing a high pass mark on its own. Andreas is Sweden's first Master Sommelier, which tells you how thin the air is at that altitude even in a serious wine-drinking country. As of early this year he is also Head of Wine Operations at 67 Pall Mall Singapore.

So when MS Andreas says blind tasting is a learned skill rather than a birthright, it is worth picking up a glass with him and listening.

Why taste blind at all, and why it is not a party trick

But why blind taste at all?

The point of blind tasting, Andreas explained, is to strip away everything that nudges our human psychology before the wine reaches our noses. The label prestige, obviously. But also the smaller tells. The weight of the bottle, because we link a heavy bottle with quality. The price. The score. Knowing a wine is expensive, or that it scored 100 points makes us naturally biased towards it.

 

 

Andreas cited brain studies on exactly this: told a wine is cheap, we more or less switch off part of the brain, because we are not expecting much. Told it is expensive, we light up a larger share of the brain and pay closer attention. This tracks with a well-known 2008 Caltech and Stanford study in which the same wine, presented at a higher price, produced more activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the region tied to perceived pleasure. The wine did not change. The brain's response to it did. Put two wines side by side knowing one is dearer, and you have already rigged the contest.

 

 

For a working sommelier this is not academic. If you cannot taste blind properly, Andreas pointed out, you end up buying for your list based on the label, the points or the price, which is exactly the set of crutches the discipline is meant to remove. His own buying process for 67 Pall Mall is to get competing samples of the same wine, taste them blind against each other, and let the best glass win without knowing which producer it belongs to.

Perhaps you have a knowledgeable wine collector friend who could pull a bottle from the fridge, stand at the table and talk for two hours about everything he finds in the glass, to the delight of everyone present, then describe the same wine something completely different the next day. For Andreas that is the giveaway of a gap in human psychology between what you think is in the wine and what is measurably there. Charming at dinner. Potentially problematic in a sommelier or wine buyer’s work.

The three types of blind tasting approaches

“Blind tasting” is often mentioned in at least three contexts.

The first is the commercial style, the sort you see in some competitions and, in spirit, on the restaurant floor. You get roughly three minutes per wine, far less than the others, and the brief is essentially to sell. You focus on the five to eight things that make the wine sound most appealing, the bits that jump out of the glass. Andreas put it neatly: if someone finishes a commercial tasting of a wine and you do not want to drink that wine, they have not done their job. You also have to cover serving temperature, the right glassware, a food match and whether it will improve with age, none of which the other formats ask for.

The second is the Master of Wine approach. The MW is the other peak of the wine world, run by the Institute of Masters of Wine and historically aimed at the trade and academic side rather than the restaurant floor. In the MW approach, identifying the wine is not the primary objective. You do not strictly need to name the wine off hand, or nail the grape or the country it’s from. What you must show is an understanding of what was done in the vineyard and the winery to make the wine taste the way it does, paired with a commercial brain: how would you distribute this, what would you do to sell it in other markets. The MW, in other words, is the credential for people who trade in wine as a business rather than serve it across a table.

 

 

The third is the Court of Master Sommeliers method, which is the tasting method that Andreas would be sharing with us. Here, the volume of objective calls is the priority. To pass the Master tasting you need to get five of the six wines right, and the standard for being “correct” is rigorous: not just the grape, but ideally the country, the region, the quality level and the vintage, with structure described precisely.

In a flight of Burgundy wine, you would be expected to place a wine as village, premier cru or grand cru. You cannot wave at “vibrant, elevated acidity”; you have to precisely commit to medium, medium-plus or high, and you only score on the answer the exam has allocated. A friend of Andreas, he said, once correctly identified six grape varieties in an exam and still did not pass the tasting, because grape alone is not enough.

Because the standard is so unforgiving, the wines themselves are reassuringly classic. You will get textbook examples, the wines a serious student has tasted many times, never something obscure or deliberately obscure. That is a small mercy that exam takers hold onto.

He walked us through the ladder he climbed, and this is where we learnt what Andreas meant when he suggested "anyone can do this". You start with the Certified theory exam which is a written paper: a white and a red, a sheet on which you tick food descriptors and circle the structure you think is right, with the possible grapes and countries already printed in front of you so you know the universe of answers before you sit down. When Andreas trains sommeliers, he drills them on a set of twenty whites and twenty reds, the usual suspects: Bordeaux, Burgundy, Saint-Émilion, Chablis, New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc.

 

 

The jump from Certified to Advanced is where it turns serious, and most people underestimate it. The Advanced exam is verbal. You sit in front of two Masters with six wines, usually three white and three red, and from the moment you touch the first glass you have 25 minutes to talk through all six using a fixed grid. The sommelier must know this grid cold. If they were still working out what the grid wants while also working out what is in the glass, they would run out of time or lose marks. Advanced requires correctly identifying four of six wines; while Master requires five of six.

Andreas’ own journey ran long. He started the Court path in 2010, having moved to London. He passed the Advanced exam in 2013, being only one of four candidates out of twenty-two to get through that day. The invitation to the Master exam followed. In 2015 he passed theory and practical at the first attempt, but tasting did not come. He sat for the tasting exam again in 2016, and again in 2017, and it continued to stay just out of reach.

 

 

Under Court of Master Sommeliers’ rules, a candidate has three years to complete all parts of the Master exam before the clock resets and everything, theory included, must be retaken. In 2018 his son was born, he decided he could not study and raise a family at once, and he stepped away from the floor entirely, moving into food and beverage management.

But it wasn’t long before he was pulled back into this world. Asked to build a training programme for a restaurant group in northern England, Andreas found that the part of the job he loved most was watching sommeliers he had mentored pass their exams and go on to become accomplished. This time around, Andreas was motivated not by title but about being a better sommelier, about asking why rather than memorising. At forty, by his own description in the middle of a “midlife crisis”, he emailed the Court in January 2024 to ask if he could try again. They offered him a seat that October in London. He passed theory and practical, and the tasting still eluded him once more – as this time he was unwell through the exam with every excuse available to him. In interviews since, he has been candid that blaming the illness would have let him avoid the real lesson, which was that his method, not his health, was the problem.

The three months he stopped tasting

On the train back from that London exam, knowing the tasting had not gone his way, Andreas started listening to podcasts about blind tasting. One memorable remark stuck with: “Blind tasting is a theory exam with wines.”

For someone who had been told for years that the answer was just to taste more, that was a meaningful reframing. Andreas paired it with the famously misattributed Einstein quote about doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result, and decided the definition fit too many tasting candidates, himself included.

With about nine months until his next exam in Austria, he did something that sounds reckless. Rather than continuing to practice blind tasting, he stopped blind tasting for three months and simply read books instead. Wine chemistry, viticulture, winemaking, the science of how the brain builds flavour. He singled out several titles that changed how he tastes.

 

 

The first is Behind the Glass by Gus Zhu. Zhu is the first Chinese national to become a Master of Wine, holds a master's in viticulture and oenology from UC Davis, and works as a research scientist on aroma compounds in the United States. Andreas's praise was specific and a little funny: it is the only wine chemistry book he could read without having to run every sentence through ChatGPT or a dictionary. What it gave him was the source of flavours, the chemistry behind smells he could recognise but never explain. A few of those are worth keeping in a wine lover’s pocket, because they double as deductive shortcuts.

Take the cheese-rind smell you sometimes get in Chablis. Andreas had assumed for years it came from malolactic fermentation. It is actually a marker of ageing in old oak, so a white-cheese-rind note tells you something about how the wine was raised, not how it was fermented.

And take salinity, the descriptor everyone reaches for while standing in a windswept coastal vineyard. The romantic story is that sea air or limestone soils put salt in the wine. The level of sodium in wine, Andreas said, is far too low to taste; what we are actually picking up are amino acids produced during ageing on the lees, which is why Muscadet sur lie, Chablis and Albariño can all read as saline despite having nothing to do with the proximity of the sea. As a deductive rule of thumb: pick up salinity, and you can reasonably narrow the field to a lees-aged wine.

Then there is white pepper, the classic tell for Grüner Veltliner. The aroma comes from a compound called rotundone, and here is the catch Zhu's book flags: roughly one in five people simply cannot smell it, a genuine genetic blind spot. This is well-documented scientifically. Rotundone is the same compound responsible for the pepper note in cool-climate Syrah, and across multiple studies somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of people show a specific anosmia to it, meaning they have otherwise normal smell but are blind to this one molecule even at high concentrations. Andreas said he is one of them. So he built a workaround: to him, Grüner to him often smells like supermarket wasabi. Not official, not something he would put in an exam, but it gets him to the right answer, and that is the whole point.

 

 

The second book is not about the wine but the taster. It was a book on the neuroscience of flavour: Neuroenology: How the Brain Creates the Taste of Wine by the late Gordon M. Shepherd, a Yale neurobiologist. Andreas took notes on every technique it suggested, tried ten to fifteen of them, and kept the three that actually worked for him. The lesson was to borrow another taster's method only if it works for your body.

One example is the advice many receive, to suck air across the wine in your mouth to aerate it and release more aroma. For many people that works. For Andreas it does not, and after nineteen years of doing it as muscle memory he found it actively got in the way of assessing structure and flavour. He stopped. In its place he “chews” the wine, working it around the mouth as if eating a steak, which pushes air up the back of the nose in a way that, for him, brings out the more delicate notes the other method buried. He also makes a point of swallowing a little, because you cannot judge high alcohol properly without the warmth it leaves at the back of the throat.

 

 

The strangest revelation involved his nostrils. He had learnt that everyone has one nostril that smells better than the other. He used to work entirely off his right and close the left. The neuroscience book pointed out that if you always hold the glass at the same distance and smell the same way, you only ever reach a fraction of the sensory surface up the nose, perhaps thirty percent. Experimenting with concentrated aroma oils, he found his left nostril was actually his best, just so sensitive that holding the glass close overwhelmed it. So now he starts with the glass held far away to catch the volatile, delicate esters with the left nostril for a sniff or two, then moves to the less sensitive right nostril up close, where he can smell longer for the heavier detail.

Whether or not your own nose is built the same way, the principle holds: vary the distance, vary the approach, and you cover more ground!

Finally Andreas methodically found all the grape profiles he could from three independent sources, the Court of Master Sommeliers, GuildSomm and Gaiser, and looked for what all three agreed on. His reasoning was that if three different experts reach for the same descriptors to identify a wine blind, there is probably something real behind it. From those overlaps he built his own profiles for every wine he was studying.

 

 

For instance, the Northern Rhône Syrah profile leaned on barbecued meat, black pepper, charcuterie and smoked bacon. While no single bottle will give you all of it, these grape profiles are maps, not a checklist. There was also the profile of a Bordeaux white wine, a Sauvignon Blanc and Sémillon blend, which ran from a steely young style to a barrel-aged version that can last fifteen years, and included one descriptor he had not believed at first: raw onion. It turned out that aged white Bordeaux can develop a sulphur reaction that smells of raw onion, and once you trust that link, raw onion becomes a near-certain pointer to aged white Bordeaux.

How A Master Sommelier trained

The studying was only half of it. The other half was a tasting regime that sounds slightly unhinged.

 

Andreas' hard-won Master Sommelier Diploma (Copyright: Andreas Rosenberg)

 

Andreas’ working base was around twenty-two white grapes and eighteen reds, all commercially common varieties you can find worldwide, with the plan to add more as his confidence grew. Within that, he went deep rather than wide on each. His Burgundy “bucket” alone held fourteen whites and thirteen reds, which made Sunday lunch at his house a very generous drinking affair.

Depth is important for someone like Andreas: if you only ever train on one expression of a wine, a different expression will fool you. For Chablis he too had several bottles at once, one made in stainless steel, one aged in old oak, one aged on the lees, plus examples from different exposures and a grand cru for good measure, so that no single style could ambush him.

Andreas also had a few straightforward rules. Never buy the same wine twice, because you want to learn the wine, not become an expert in one producer. He always tastes across age ranges, one to three years, three to five, and for Bordeaux right up to ten or twenty.

Commercial aroma kits such as Le Nez du Vin are popular for training one’s nose, but Andreas personally found that only about sixty percent such kits were very useful. To fill the gaps, he bought a hundred food-flavouring oils off Amazon, pure intense concentrates, poured them into bowls and smelled them blind until he could name them. Surprisingly, the humble lime was something Andreas struggled to identify for the longest time – he explained, we might all assume we know what lime smells like until we have to identify it with our eyes shut.

 

(Copyright: Andreas Rosenberg)

 

The volume of wines that Andreas ran through was eye-watering. From January to June 2025 he blind tasted three times a day. A morning round of blind tasting, then a comparative round where he set deliberately confusable wines against each other, then an afternoon round revisiting everything he had called wrong that morning to recalibrate. Over six months he went through over 700 bottles. After passing his exam, his doctor perhaps jokingly advised him not to drink for a couple of months.

He meticulously kept statistics on his performance. The first three months he ran at about seventy percent accuracy. April collapsed below sixty, badly enough that he told his wife he was not sure he would make it. May recovered to seventy. The last two months held steady at eighty to eighty-two. More useful than the average, he knew precisely which grapes he owned and which he did not. He could now get twenty varieties right every time. He noted that two were his weak points: Chablis and Sancerre, which he kept confusing with each other. Knowing that, each time he thought a wine was Chablis, he made a plan to return to it once the flight was done and the wine had warmed, and check whether a green, pyrazine note had emerged, because if it had, the wine would actually be a Sancerre.

On exam-day Andreas made an extra effort to control his stress, because raised cortisol blocks your ability to smell and taste. He sat in the hotel lobby in Vienna and meditated until his name was called, which he admitted looked odd but worked. He also rinsed his mouth with a neutral white before starting, so the first real white of the day does not taste artificially aggressive.

Reading the glass before you smell it

Andreas spends no more than twenty to describe the appearance of a wine, but he treats colour as an important filter that rules options out before the nose even gets involved.

 

 

The green tinge in a young white, the kind you see in a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc that is almost water-white, is chlorophyll carried from the vine into the grapes, and it points to a cool climate or a young wine. Yellow comes from carotenoids, the same pigments that make corn and bananas yellow; Chardonnay carries them, and Viognier especially, which is why Viognier can look deep yellow. A deeper gold suggests either real age or botrytis, and a golden, slightly oxidised hue is a sign of barrel ageing.

Reds get a different logic. A common trap for many aspiring Master Somms was the “holy trinity of confusion” of Rioja, Bordeaux and Chianti. But Andreas’ personal confusion was slightly different. He tended to mix up Rioja with Napa Cabernet, because the moment he caught notes of American oak he would lock onto an answer and stop reading the rest of the wine. Colour broke the habit. A garnet rim, he explained, is the oxidation of colour pigments and does not necessarily mean an old wine, since some varieties oxidise faster than others. Staining matters too: swirl the glass, and if no colour clings, you are looking at a thin-skinned grape. Napa Cabernet often stains heavily and tends to a deep ruby core with a purple hue and a garnet rim; Rioja does not stain the same way. Once he started reading staining and hue properly, he said, the Rioja-Napa mix-up disappeared.

Four glasses with no labels with MS Andreas

Now it’s time to taste our wines: four wines, two white and two red, poured blind, and Andreas walked each one through the flavour grid the way he would in an exam.

The first wine was a pale straw white with a distinct green tint, bright to the point of sparkling, which Andreas reads as a marker of high acidity, since more acid tends to make a wine look shinier. Clear, no gas, no sediment, a watery silver rim. The nose was loud and stayed loud through a full breath, which he calls high intensity. The fruit was fresh and youthful, no hint of age: lemon, lime, bergamot, hard green pear, green apple, an unripe white peach, a touch of jasmine. A strong smell of petroleum, the one he warns you against trying to learn by sniffing the forecourt, and a lime-cordial, almost pear-drop, character alongside a cold, slaty minerality.

 

 

On the palate it was bone dry with searing acidity, and here he taught the single most useful structural lesson of the day. Most of us judge acidity by how aggressive it feels, but that is mouthfeel, not the actual level of acid, and the two are not the same. The reliable way to measure acidity, Andreas said, is to watch your own saliva. High acidity makes the saliva flood almost instantly, diluting the wine, because your palate is rushing to protect your teeth. If it takes about three seconds, that is medium. Taste something like a Gewürztraminer and get no saliva at all, that is low. This wine flooded the mouth at once.

On balance, he made a point about language. This wine was not "balanced", the acidity dominated, but you should not call it unbalanced either, because that sounds like a fault. The graceful phrasing is that “the acidity leads”. Length under three seconds is short, over twenty is long. And complexity, he stressed, is not how many descriptors you can rattle off. A New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc might give you twenty, but they are nearly all primary fruit. Complexity is the range of categories present: primary fruit, secondary winemaking notes, tertiary age notes, non-fruit.

So where did the clues point? Petrol is caused by that compound TDN, and Andreas's key move was chemical. A young wine showing strong petrol therefore argues against Europe. The lime-cordial sweet-and-sour character he tied to a big daily temperature swing, sugar built up in the heat of the day and acid preserved by cold nights. Add the slate minerality and the stainless-steel freshness, and the wine was telling one coherent story about a single grape, a hot-but-high-altitude origin, a very young vintage and a particular style of winemaking.

Wine one was the Grosset Polish Hill Riesling 2023, from the Clare Valley in South Australia. Everything pointed here: young, petrol-driven, slate-edged, bone dry. Grosset was founded in 1981 by Jeffrey Grosset, and is often described as Australia's finest Riesling maker. The Polish Hill vineyard was planted in 1996 on a bed of roughly 500-million-year-old blue slate, where the vines struggle and yield tiny, intense berries, and the wine is fermented in stainless steel to keep it taut.

 

 

The second wine was a medium straw with a faint golden sheen, a notch riper-looking than the first. The nose was developing rather than fresh: lemon, Meyer lemon, orange peel, yellow apple, yellow plum, a little white peach, softer all round. There were telling non-fruit notes: a buttery, creamy character he put down to malolactic fermentation. A toasty, shaved-almond note pointing to oak, most likely French. A struck-match, flinty edge from reductive handling. And a chalky, faintly mushroomy minerality. Andreas flagged a discipline point here: once you say "chalk", you have narrowed your possible answers to a very small handful of wines, so one should use the word deliberately, the same way you would with white pepper.

On the palate it was dry, medium-plus on acidity, body and alcohol, with real weight but staying under fourteen percent, and genuinely well balanced with nothing sticking out. The deduction ran through the winemaking. Oak plus malolactic narrows the field to a small set of grapes, and he ruled them out one by one: not Viognier, which would be more floral; not Marsanne, which would bring a bruised, marzipan note; not an oaked Roussanne, which would handle its fruit differently. Having said "chalk", he felt almost obliged to land on one grape in particular, since the chalky, oak-and-malolactic profile pointed squarely at it. A single varietal, moderate-to-warm climate, three to five years old. He named a region in France and guessed a quality level too.

Wine two was a white Burgundy: the Domaine Fernand & Laurent Pillot Chassagne-Montrachet 2023, from the Côte de Beaune. The grape was Chardonnay. Andreas noted that he rated this village wine highly enough that he would have happily called it a premier cru on quality alone. He also pointed out that its fruity quality says a lot about where wine is heading: Burgundy at the village level is starting to show tropical, pineapple-like notes it did not have five years ago, as the climate warms.

 

 

The third wine moved us to reds, and as noted the colour did most of the early work. A pale ruby core with a garnet rim and, crucially, no staining when swirled, which told him thin skins. By colour alone Andreas was down to about five grapes. The nose was developing and high in intensity: predominantly red cherry, plum tomato, dried strawberry and dried raspberry, a touch of raisin, then a beautiful lift of dried violet, potpourri, rose, a little liquorice and red tea, with tertiary leather and tobacco arriving with age. Two things sharpened it. A volatile-acidity edge, nail varnish and balsamic, which he associates with a certain country's more traditional cellars. There’s also a strong earthy, truffly character.

On the palate it was dry with high tannins, and Andreas taught us the tannin equivalent of the saliva trick: feel where the drying sensation lands. Up at the cheekbones means high tannin, the middle of the mouth means medium, nothing means low. This one reached the cheekbones. Medium-plus acidity, medium-plus alcohol, a wine where the tannins clearly led, with a high complexity from the spread of fruit, floral, earthy and tertiary notes. To separate his two main candidates, he listened for what was absent: had it been the other grape, he would have expected tomato stalk, a green herbal note, oregano or thyme, and more new oak in a top example. Their absence, plus the violets, the dried red fruit, the volatile acidity and the earthiness, pointed him to one grape, one country and one region.

 

 

Wine three was the Alberto Ballarin Barolo 2021, a Nebbiolo from Piedmont. The pale colour and lack of staining, the violets and dried red fruit, the volatile lift and the high tannins were all classic Nebbiolo, and the absence of tomato-stalk and herbal notes is what steered Andreas away from Sangiovese and toward Barolo.

The fourth wine was the most obviously mature. A deep ruby core fading to a strong garnet rim, high viscosity, light-to-medium staining. The nose was clearly evolved: strawberry, redcurrant, damson plum, dried orange peel, a little red rose, then leather and tobacco confirming age. The signature was the sweet spice: coconut, caramel, chocolate, which he read immediately as American oak. On the palate, dry, medium-plus tannins but softer than the third wine, medium acidity, full body and high alcohol with that throat warmth, long and complex, with a narrow band of fruit that itself signalled maturity. Because the wine showed more winemaking than singular grape character, he called it a blend rather than a single varietal, warm climate, more than ten years old. Andreas identified this as a Rioja – he offered two unique personal markers that he uses to pin this style: barbecue flavoured chips and crayfish. Odd, he admitted, but reliable for him.

 

 

Wine four was the La Rioja Alta Gran Reserva 904, of 2011 vintage. The sweet American-oak spice, the mature tertiary fruit and the savoury depth all fit a traditional Rioja Gran Reserva. The grape is Tempranillo.

There we have it – a peek inside the mind of MS Andreas and how he so systematically and meticulously identified these four blind tasted wines.

 

 

Perhaps the most memorable part of MS Andreas’ sharing all afternoon was the idea that wine appreciation at a high level may not require God-given talent. Blind tasting is simply a wine theory exam you could study for – something he emphasised with large text on his screen. Not necessarily a gift you are born with, but a body of knowledge one can study, plus a method one can build and test and correct.

More opportunity for blind tastings at 67 Pall Mall

This highly engaging and insightful masterclass I sat in on is likely to be the first of many led by MS Andreas.

 

 

Andreas runs the wine programme these days at 67 Pall Mall Singapore, which is absolutely worth knowing to any wine drinker looking to taste more seriously The private members' club built entirely around wine occupies the penthouse of Shaw Centre on Orchard Road, across the floors that were once the private residence of Shaw Organisation founder Runme Shaw.

 

 

Education, tastings and cellar direction are central to what the club does. Members also get access to roughly 6,000 wines, more than 1,000 of them available by the glass, which the club says is the largest by-the-glass list in the region. In June 2026 the group added 67 on Scotts, a more casual wine-led dining space on the lower floors of the same building, aimed at people who are not members but want a way in.

 

@CharsiuCharlie