Printable wine quizzes
Date night
Twelve questions for an evening for two: how to order, taste and serve wine, with Champagne, chocolate and a line from a film.
12 questions · answers on page 2
Two A4 pages: the questions first, then the answers. The print dialogue can also save it as a PDF.
Weinquiz · Printable
Date night
NamePoints/ 12
Where should you hold a wine glass when tasting?
What does a corked wine smell of?
At what temperature does a full-bodied red wine show best?
Which wine goes best with a dark chocolate dessert?
Which 2004 film made a monologue about Pinot Noir famous and spoilt Merlot’s business in the United States?
True or false: the monk Dom Pérignon invented Champagne.
What do the ‘legs’ or tears running down the glass after swirling reveal?
Creamy soft cheese such as Brie or Camembert: which wine style cuts its richness best?
Why is a young, tannic red wine poured into a carafe one to two hours before serving?
Roughly how much pressure is there in a bottle of Champagne?
In which unit do sommeliers measure the length of the finish?
Fat and protein soften tannin. With which cut of beef does a young, tannic Cabernet Sauvignon therefore seem softest?
weinquiz.ch/en/printable/date-night/ · Answers and explanations on page 2
For the quizmaster
How to play it as a pair
- Print page 1 twice and page 2 once; fold it with the answers inside.
- Open a bottle or order two glasses, and each of you ticks your own sheet: ten minutes, no phones.
- Unfold page 2 and read out the answers in turn. Whoever has more points chooses the wine next time; on a tie, the first to guess the grape in the glass wins.
Another round? The apéro round is for two to six players on a single phone: weinquiz.ch/party
Answers: Date night
B By the stem
Held by the stem, the wine stays away from the warmth of the hand, the bowl stays free of fingerprints and is easy to swirl. The glass is filled only about a third, to leave room for the aromas.
D Wet cardboard and a musty cellar
Cork taint smells musty, like wet cardboard, and at the same time mutes the fruit. It disappears neither with swirling nor with decanting; such a bottle is replaced.
C 16–18 °C
Full-bodied reds belong in the glass at 16–18 °C, light reds such as Gamay at 14–16 °C. The old rule of ‘room temperature’ dates from unheated rooms; above 20 °C the alcohol burns and the fruit blurs.
C A sweet Port or Banyuls
Chocolate is sweet, bitter and fatty at once: a dry wine tastes sour and thin beside it, while a sweet fortified red such as Port or Banyuls keeps up with the sugar and complements the cocoa bitterness with ripe fruit.
C Sideways
In Alexander Payne’s “Sideways”, Miles raves about the temperamental Pinot Noir grape and loudly refuses to drink Merlot. US Pinot Noir sales then rose by about 16 per cent while cheap Merlot lost ground: the “Sideways effect”.
B False
Dom Pérignon, cellarer of Hautvillers Abbey from 1668 to 1715, improved the wines of Champagne and even tried to prevent the dangerous refermentation in the bottle. The cry “I am tasting the stars!” first appears in an advertisement of the late 19th century.
B Mainly the alcohol and glycerol content
The more alcohol, glycerol and sugar a wine contains, the thicker and slower its tears, because on the glass wall alcohol evaporates faster than water (the Marangoni effect). The legs say nothing about quality.
A Dry sparkling wine such as Champagne or Cava
The acidity and fine bubbles of a dry sparkling wine cut through the creamy richness of the soft cheese and refresh the palate for the next bite. Tannic reds lack that cutting freshness.
C So that air softens the tannins and opens the aromas
In a carafe the wine takes up a lot of oxygen: reductive notes blow off and the tannins feel rounder. A young wine has no sediment yet; old, fragile wines, by contrast, are decanted gently and only just before drinking.
C About 6 bar
A bottle of Champagne holds about 5 to 6 bar, more than twice the pressure of a car tyre. That is why the glass is thick and the cork is held by a wire cage (muselet).
A In caudalies (1 caudalie = 1 second)
The caudalie (from the Latin cauda, tail) counts the seconds for which the flavour lingers after swallowing; a long finish is a mark of quality. Oechsle, Brix and Baumé, by contrast, measure the density of grape must.
A A well-marbled rib-eye
A well-marbled rib-eye supplies the most fat and protein: tannin binds to them and seems softer. A lean fillet, a tartare or a carpaccio offer less fat to cushion the young Cabernet’s tannins.
weinquiz.ch/en/printable/date-night/