What Is a Wine Tasting Flight, and How Does It Work?

You know the word. You've seen it on every chalkboard menu from here to the coast. Flight sounds official, almost aviation-grade, like someone is going to hand you a boarding pass and a tiny bag of pretzels. It is not that. A wine tasting flight is just several small pours of wine, served together, so you can compare them side by side instead of committing to one bottle like it's a marriage.

That's the whole concept. A few two-to-three-ounce pours, usually four to six wines, lined up so your palate can do the comparing instead of your wallet doing the guessing. No pretzels. No boarding pass. Just a sequence of glasses and the growing suspicion that you like red more than you thought.

Why not just order a glass of what sounds good?

Because "sounds good" is doing a lot of heavy lifting on a wine list, and you have no way to verify it until the glass is already in front of you and the bill is already in motion. A flight solves the problem by letting you be wrong four times for the price of being wrong once.

Say you're on the fence between our 2020 Syrah and the 2019 vintage. A flight puts both in front of you, plus maybe the 2022 Wingman Syrah for good measure, and suddenly you're not guessing anymore -- you're running your own vertical tasting with zero formal training and a mild sense of accomplishment. That sense of accomplishment is free. We don't charge extra for it, though we probably could.

What order do you actually taste them in?

Light to dark, dry to sweet, low alcohol to high. That's the textbook answer, and it's correct, and it exists so your palate doesn't get flattened by a big tannic red before it has a chance to notice anything delicate.

In practice: start with something like the 2025 Sauv Blanc or the 2025 Rose, move into the 2025 Collab Chenin Blanc, and only then start working into reds -- the 2023 Sangiovese, the 2022 Tempranillo, working up toward the 2022 Cabernet Sauvignon or the 2021 Malbec. Taste a big Cab first and everything after it tastes like flavored water. This is not a theory. This is what happens to your tongue, every time, no exceptions.

Are you supposed to spit?

You are allowed to. Nobody at the bar is grading you on it, and nobody is going to be impressed either way. Spit buckets exist for people doing serious, multi-flight, professional-grade tasting, or for anyone who has somewhere to be after. If you're not driving and you have nowhere to be, swallowing is also a valid strategy, and arguably the more honest one. We've never once seen somebody spit out the Malbec on purpose.

How is a flight different from just ordering four glasses?

Math, mostly. Four full glasses is a lot of wine and a lot of money, and also a commitment you made before you knew whether the second pour was any good. A flight gives you smaller amounts of more wines, so you're sampling breadth instead of buying depth you haven't earned yet.

It's also a different kind of attention. A full glass invites you to relax into it over dinner. A flight invites you to actually notice things -- to catch that the 2020 Malbec is rounder than the 2021, or that the Tempranillo has more going on than you expected from a grape most people can't pronounce with confidence. Flights are for noticing. Glasses are for enjoying. Both are correct. Only one of them ends with you taking notes on a cocktail napkin.

Do you need to know anything about wine before you order one?

No. This is the part people get wrong, usually because they've sat next to someone at a bar swirling and sniffing and nodding like they just diagnosed something, possibly you. A flight is not an exam. Nobody is checking whether you can identify "notes of" anything. You are allowed to say "I like this one" and "I don't like this one" and leave it there, which is in fact the entire scientific method as it applies to wine.

What a flight does for a beginner is better than vocabulary: it gives you a reference point. Taste the Sangiovese next to the Tempranillo next to the Cabernet and you will, without trying, start to notice that they are not the same thing wearing different labels. That's the whole education. You don't need the vocabulary to have the experience -- the vocabulary just shows up later, usually uninvited, usually at a dinner party, usually from someone who read one article.

What should you actually do with a flight once it's in front of you?

Compare out loud. This is the part people skip, and it's the part that makes the whole exercise worth it. Taste two wines back to back and say which one you'd order again. That's it. That's the entire skill. You don't need to identify oak or describe a finish like it's a eulogy -- you just need to notice a preference and trust it.

Bring someone. A flight tasted alone is fine, but a flight tasted with somebody who owes you a drink is better, mostly because disagreeing about which pour is best is one of the more reliably fun things two people can do at a bar without spending real money on an activity. Compare notes. Argue a little. It ends with one of you winning, but only slightly.

A flight, in the end, is just a shortcut -- a way to taste more, decide faster, and skip the part where you order a full glass of something you're not sure about and then quietly nurse your regret for the rest of the night. Come find out which one you'd order again.

Must be 21 or older. Please drink responsibly.