The first time I tasted a serious flight blind, I confidently identified an Australian Shiraz that turned out to be a Loire Cabernet Franc. I have never fully recovered and it was the single most useful thing that ever happened to my palate.
Blind tasting isn't a party trick, though it gets treated as one. It's a method for removing bias from your own assessment, and the reason it's uncomfortable is that it works.
Why the label matters so much
The evidence on expectation effects in wine is extensive and consistent.
People rate the same wine higher when told it's expensive. Brain imaging work has found differences in activity in regions associated with pleasure depending on the stated price, which suggests the effect isn't just people reporting what they think they should — the experience itself changes.
Studies presenting identical wine in different bottles, or with different stated origins, reliably produce different ratings. Colour manipulation changes descriptor vocabulary even among trained tasters.
None of this means people are stupid or dishonest. It means perception integrates context, which is generally an adaptive feature and is a problem when you're trying to assess something.
What blind tasting is for
Two different purposes and they need different setups.
Assessment. Is this wine good, do I like it, is it worth the price. Here you want the label hidden and nothing else changed. This is the version that's genuinely useful for making buying decisions.
Identification. Working out what a wine is from its characteristics. This is the competitive sport version and it's a specific skill that doesn't necessarily correlate with being a good judge of quality.
Most people conflate them and then feel bad about being unable to identify a wine, which was never the point.
How to set it up at home
Simpler than people assume.
Wrap bottles in foil or put them in bags, numbered. Have somebody else do it if possible, and if you're alone, shuffle them so you don't know the order. Cover the capsule too — the foil at the top gives away more than you'd think.
Use identical glasses. Pour similar amounts. Taste in a room with neutral lighting and no strong smells, which rules out most kitchens immediately after cooking.
Have water and something plain to eat. Palate fatigue is real and sets in faster than expected, particularly with tannic reds.
Six wines is plenty. Beyond about eight, discrimination falls off sharply for most people.
What to do with each glass
A structure helps, because without one you'll form an impression in two seconds and then spend the rest of the time justifying it.
Look first. Colour intensity and hue tell you about age and often about variety and climate. Pale ruby versus deep purple is a real distinction.
Smell without swirling, then swirl and smell again. The difference tells you about volatility and how the wine will develop in the glass.
Then taste, and go through the structural components deliberately before you think about flavours. Sweetness. Acidity. Tannin. Body. Alcohol warmth. Length of finish.
Write it down before discussing. This is the crucial bit — if one person says "that's clearly Riesling" out loud, everybody else's perception shifts immediately. Social contagion in tasting is extremely strong.
The deductive approach
If you do want to attempt identification, work from structure rather than flavour.
High acidity suggests a cool climate or early picking. High alcohol suggests warm. Heavy tannin narrows the variety considerably. The combination of high acid and high alcohol is unusual and immediately points somewhere specific.
Then use flavour to refine. Red fruit versus black fruit, herbal versus floral, obvious oak or not.
The mistake beginners make is starting with "this smells like blackcurrant, therefore Cabernet." Descriptors are less reliable than structure and lead you astray.
What you'll learn about yourself
Several uncomfortable things, in my experience.
You'll discover that you can't reliably tell expensive from cheap in the middle of the range. Most people can distinguish very cheap from very good. The middle is much harder than anybody expects.
You'll find that you have preferences you didn't know about, and that some of them contradict what you thought. A lot of people who describe themselves as disliking sweetness turn out to prefer wines with a few grams of residual sugar.
You'll notice how much your enjoyment of a bottle normally depends on the story attached to it. Removing that is a loss as well as a clarification, which is worth acknowledging.
The reasonable conclusion
I don't think blind tasting is how wine should normally be drunk. Context, story, place and company are part of the pleasure and stripping them out makes the experience thinner.
But doing it occasionally recalibrates you. It tells you what you actually like rather than what you believe you like, and it makes you appropriately humble about confident pronouncements — your own and other people's.
After enough of them you stop being embarrassed about the Cabernet Franc. Everybody in the room has their own version of that story, including the people who taste for a living, and the ones who claim otherwise are the ones to be wary of.