The great Cabernet showdown

Blind tasting is the great leveller – both for who's tasting and what's tasted. It's a well-worn format that remains an essential exercise in wine assessment, and one of the best examples is the annual Master Blend Classification tasting organised by Australian producer Wolf Blass.

The 2013 event was staged in Montreal, London and Melbourne. In each case the same 30 Cabernet Sauvignon-based wines from the 2009 vintage are tasted blind by a panel of professionals. The marks are collated and the wines then ranked, ultimately in a combined table to create an ad hoc classification.

In each case, the...