Yep - you get a 2-fer this week. Trying to make up for not being as diligent as I should on posting our weekly definitions. So here you go:

Horizontal Tasting - A Horizontal Tasting involves wines that all come from the same vintage. You decide the vintage and you determine if you are going to place any other limitations on the wines involved. You might decide to have only red wines, or wines from a single grape variety or just "Bordeaux First Growths"; but, the wines will all be from a single vintage. A horizontal tasting is a good way to see which winery was most successful within a given year. You can also begin to detect styles for which a given winery may be known. For instance, if you had a horizontal tasting of wines that all came from the 1997 vintage and were only Cabernet Sauvignons from the Napa Valley, you would find that some of the wines were 'bigger' and had more aging potential. Others might express more forward bouquet at an early age. This type of tasting tells you more about the producers than about the vintage since you are really comparing multiple wineries instead of different years.

Vertical Tasting - A vertical tasting involves wines from different vintages but all the wines will come from the same winery. If the winery produces more than one type of wine, you would select a single wine from that winery and taste multiple vintages of that wine. For instance, you might have 3 vintages of Brandon Hills Vineyard Pinot Gris. When you hold a Vertical tasting, you are learning more about the differences between different vintages rather than the differences in wineries.