How I learned to stop worrying and love spitting wine

The wines kept coming: one glass, then two, then five, every few minutes, refilled with a different white, rosé, or red.

I was overwhelmed by the number of wines arriving while winemakers gave their spiels at the front of the room. It was a Finger Lakes tasting, held in a ritzy downtown hotel with lavish table settings, expensive charcuterie, and dozens of empty wine glasses. I had finagled an invite, not knowing it was a formal sit-down tasting — my first ever — and I was in over my head. 

Was I supposed to finish every wine? 

Beside me, a friend sipped, swirled, then spewed wine with force into the tableside bucket. I could hear sloshing at the next table as well-dressed wine pros hovered over tall jugs. Some loudly swished and gargled wine inside their mouths like mouthwash before bed. Others dumped still-filled glasses into a center bucket.  

Me? I sipped and swallowed. I couldn’t fathom spitting out good, free wine. Yet I couldn’t finish the wines soon enough before another was poured. Twenty wines and two hours later, the alcohol had kicked in and my eyes went fuzzy. 

Turns out that not spitting in a room full of winemakers is just as awkward as spitting in front of strangers. So what’s the protocol? And in the age of COVID, what’s the best way to spit without spreading germs? 

There are strong social taboos against spitting, and it’s illegal to do it in public in many places. This wasn’t always the case; spitting in public was common, and there were special vessels to catch it, right up until scientists discovered tuberculosis was carried in sputum. The spittoon re-emerged again in wineries.

Spittoons became an integral part of professional wine tasting, to allow tasters to try multiple wines without getting drunk or overwhelming their palates. Until the pandemic, it was normal to see spitting jugs placed around tasting rooms for people to share. A well-known hazard was “splashback,” when spitting into a too-full bucket meant catching spit-and-wine mix on your clothes, or even worse, in the eye.

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