Twelve of us, six bottles and no tasting sheet

The Clandestine Tasting Club is a group of people who open bottles and say how they were. No fee, no membership card, nobody handing out scores. It started on Instagram in December 2024, and this site is where those bottles stop being a story that vanishes in 24 hours and become searchable, re-readable and, if you fancy it, buyable.

Where it started

In 2012, at a beginners' course at Vino & Compañía in Madrid. A Viña Gravonia from López de Heredia turned up, and that was the wine that made wine click for me. I couldn't have told you why, but something shifted. Fourteen years later I went back to the same room for a historic tasting from that winery and there it was again. Lucky me.

Getting from there to opening an account and writing about it took a while and no strategy at all. I write from Tenerife, which is an odd and very good place for this: wine gets made here at altitudes where nothing much should grow, from grapes you won't meet anywhere else, on ungrafted vines, because phylloxera never made it over. You can hear it in the accent and taste it in the glass.

How we taste

At home there are usually twelve of us and six bottles go down. Nobody spits, nobody takes notes and everyone has an opinion, whether they know wine or not. The ones who don't tend to say the most useful thing all night, because they describe what they actually smell instead of hunting for the correct word.

We run open tastings too. The "Women Producers of the Canaries" one, at Vinófilos Santa Cruz, sparked enough that a journalist at El Día ended up writing a feature on the women changing wine in the islands. And we turn up to the ones we don't organise, like the tasting that paired wine with ice cream churned on the spot with liquid nitrogen. When there's one coming, we say so on Instagram.

How we write

We don't fill in checklists. No "nectar of the gods", no "symphonies on the palate". If a wine reminds us of licking a sherbet sweet, or of those yellow wildflowers whose stems you chewed as a kid, that's what goes in, because that's what actually happened in the glass.

The house rule is simple: for every textbook note (red fruit, mineral, floral) you have to earn it with at least one image of your own. If the paragraph could sit on the back label of any bottle, it doesn't count.

And when we don't know, we say so. There are grapes we still haven't pinned down and wines that have caught us off guard. Writing that costs less than faking it and reads better.

What we don't do

• We don't get paid to write about a bottle. No winery pays to appear here.
• We don't give scores out of 100. A number can't tell you whether that bottle is for you.
• We don't hide the bottles we didn't enjoy. A wine that doesn't work teaches you something too.
• We don't mix the money in with the tasting. Where there's a commission we say where and how much, in theaffiliate disclosure.

Where to start reading

If you've just landed and don't know where to go in, these three are good doors:

• How to choose good wine without knowing about wine, for when you're stood in front of a shelf.
• Canary Islands wine: where to start without getting lost, if you want to know what all this island business is about.
• What wine to drink with cheese, because the red-wine-with-cheese cliché is wrong.

And if you'd rather go straight to the bottles, they're all inBottles, with their notes and the verdict.

Who's behind it

Rafa, from Tenerife, and a group of friends far too curious about what's inside a bottle. I also write about wine for Gastro Canarias. We write in the first person because that's what the Club is: real people with their own taste, not a faceless brand.

The real conversation happens on Instagram, which is where the bottles get opened, where we argue about whether something smells of pineapple or wet stone, and where the next tasting gets organised. If you have a recommendation, or want to tell us we got a wine wrong, that's the place.