Introducing Season 5 of “So, You Think you Know Wine?”

Blind Tasting meets Seán Cullen

The oh-so serious sport of wine tasting is receiving a major reality check in the Season 5 launch of WineAlign’s “So, You Think You Know Wine?”—a digital series produced by Toronto’s feltfilm.

“It’s a show where we play with wine and we play with words. Weird!” muses comedian Seán Cullen, the new host of this video series.

A wine junkie himself, Cullen is best known for his ability to produce unscripted madness by turning words into playthings. The theatre of wine tasting provides no lack of fodder for Cullen to spin his magic out of fact-based educational content.

The multi-camera format captures up-close jousting between participants who sit at a studio round table and focus on identifying the concealed “jug of freedom” (as Cullen calls it) in front of them.

Without any clues, the comedian host takes each table through the sniffing, tasting, and gurgling ritual—asking them to correctly identify the grape, country, region, year, and price of the wine. Cullen then issues each player a score but not without, first, testing a few of his own theories against the experts. A champion eventually emerges.

The series showcases some of Canada’s most widely recognized, award-winning sommeliers and wine critics as well as three top local food personalities.

Seán Cullen is a triple Gemini and Canadian Comedy Award winner. He has made multiple appearances on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and CBS’s The Late Late Show and has a number of his own specials including Comedy Central Presents, Comedy Now and was a finalist on NBC’s Last Comic Standing.

Click here to watch Round #1 or read on to learn more about the scoring and the contestants in this round.

The Scoring

The scoring on each wine remains similar to past seasons with points for Variety, Country, Region, Appellation, Vintage and Price.

Variety: 3 points
Country, Region, Appellation: up to 4 points
Vintage: up to 2 points
Price (within 10% on either side): 1 point

Round 1

In Round 1, wine experts Bill Zacharkiw of Chacun son vin, Montreal Gazette, and CHOM FM and John Szabo MS of WineAlign and City Bites face off against TV and radio host and food blogger, Pay Chen.

Let the games begin! Pour yourself a glass of wine and Watch Round #1 here.

We hope that you find this new series entertaining and that you have as much fun watching as we did filming. As usual, please send your comments to [email protected] and feel free to share this video with your friends and family.

Special thanks to our glassware sponsor, Schott Zwiesel, for their beautiful glasses and carafes used during filming.