This Board Game Teaches You to Blind-Taste Your Wine Like a Sommelier

Reading wine guides and talking to trained sommeliers might help you learn about wine-tasting, but the only real way to hone your skills is to sip a lot of wine. Finally, there’s a board game for that.

Sommify was created by husband-and-wife team Jessica Bush and Conner “Trash Palate” Taylor to give aspiring wine experts an opportunity to blind-taste in a setting that isn’t pretentious or intimidating. First, you and your favorite drinking buddies each bring a different bottle of wine to the table and conceal them in the drawstring bags that come with the game (so each person only knows the identity of the wine they brought). When it’s your turn to be “The Somm,” you pour each player a glass of your wine, and they take turns rolling dice to move through the halls of the wine cellar (i.e. the board). As they advance, they encounter locked doors that they must unlock by guessing qualities about the wine—like sight, acidity, and tannin level—which they keep track of on their scorecards.

There are also “Bottle Shock Cards,” which could help or hinder you on your journey; maybe your vineyard is tainted with smoke from a nearby wildfire, for example, and you have to hop back two spaces. The round ends when a player reaches the end of the board and correctly guesses the grape and country from which the wine came. After that, The Somm reveals the bottle and tallies up the points from all the scorecards.

The $49 game, available on Kickstarter, is expected to ship by November 2020 and even comes with a Zoom wine-tasting hosted by a Master Sommelier. And though you can definitely bring your own wine to your game night, the Sommify creators have partnered with Lifetime Vintage on two wine kits with unlabeled half-bottles of wine that are perfect for blind-tasting. It’s $75 for three half-bottles and $95 for four half-bottles, and you’ll get two $20-off coupons when you purchase the board game.

Learn more about Sommify here.