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Why you’ll love my wine tasting masterclasses
Ever wondered what goes on in a wine tasting masterclass at The Glass House? Let wine expert, P&O Cruises Food Hero and masterclass host Olly Smith be your guide
10 min
01 Oct 2025
Wine can feel intimidating, I get that. It can feel like there’s so much to learn – where do you possibly begin? But once you dip your toes in the water and get a bit familiar with the basics, it really does give you wings to explore the whole world of wine quite quickly. The most important thing I want people to take away from my masterclasses is that wine should bring JOY.
I like to be very informal in my classes, all friends together – it’s not an exam! I introduce each wine, and we learn to sniff, to taste, to evaluate wine in a very accessible way. We always host our sessions at The Cellar Door, which is a very intimate, cosy space-within-a-space at The Glass House. It lasts an hour, and I welcome each guest with a drink and a bit of chat. I’ve had all sorts through the door, including people who are brand new to wine, who might not think they even like wine. I’ve had young people, honeymooners, people on their 50th wedding anniversaries… I’ve even had babies (although they’re not allowed any wine!). Everybody’s welcome. The idea is that guests learn how The Glass House wine list works, but they also get the confidence to go anywhere in the world and find a wine that will thrill them every single time.
Flavour is feeling
I’ll present four very different bottles from four different countries – perhaps a light, fragrant white wine, a richer style of white, a more scented light red, and then a big, beefy red. Some wines are fresh and zesty; others are much more brooding and complex and take their time to get to know.
For me, flavour is feeling. You match wine not just to food but to mood. Obviously, roast beef is great with a nice hearty red, but you might be in the mood for something a bit lighter, and that’s fine. Go with what you fancy. My rule of thumb is to ask: is this wine from a warm or a cool place: would you sunbathe there? If you’d sunbathe there the wines are going to taste a little richer, a little fruitier, maybe a bit higher in alcohol. If it’s from up a mountain or by a lake or from a cooler place like the UK or northern France, those are going to be more nimble, more fresh, lower alcohol wines, with more acidity in the whites, more freshness in the reds. It’s a shorthand to get your bearings and think, “What kind of mood am I in?”
Movie star wines
To make wine easy to understand, I give guests anecdotes and analogies. You can have your preferences for wine in the same way that we have different favourite films or books. Whether it’s a comedy or a romance, action movie or thriller, they’re all different and you like some more than others.
I explain grape varieties in terms of personalities. They’re the lead roles – the Angelina Jolies and Brad Pitts – of the wine world! Where the grapes are grown will also have an impact on how they taste, so that’s the film’s setting. The lead role and where the film is set will give you an indication of whether you’ll like the film. Angelina Jolie in one film will be similar, but different, to Angelina Jolie in another film; just as one grape variety grown in France will taste different from the same variety grown in Australia.
But you can always still evaluate whether the wine (or film!) is good or bad. If you want one big tip on how to evaluate any wine, if flavours linger once you’ve sipped it, that is an indication of good quality. Basically, the longer a flavour lasts, the better the quality.
Wine is a conversation
The tastings are a forum for talking about wine. I’m leading the conversation, but I want guests to be curious and opinionated and ask lots of questions – I love it if my enthusiasm and knowledge sparks excitement and passion in people. A young woman came up to me recently to tell me she’d been in my class last year and she’d been so interested that she’s now studying to be a winemaker. Someone who hadn’t known much at all about wine before had changed the course of her life. I’m over the moon about that!
Another man who came to a session with his wife was quite quiet, but by the end he ran up to me and shook my hand and said, “I’m absolutely thrilled by this, I never liked red wine before and I never knew why, and now I know there are red wines that I love – I was just drinking ones that weren’t suited to my palate.”
I like to think that people can come to my class and walk out feeling more confident about wine. When they’re next in the supermarket and staring at the wall of wine, they won’t see it as a wall of mystery, they’ll feel able to walk up to it like an old friend and pick out a wine that they know they’re going to love.
What flavours excite you?
I write the wine list for The Glass House, and personally choose all the wines, but I’m passionate about training the team I work with to discover the wines for themselves, have their favourites, and talk about them in their own unique way. I can’t host every wine tasting but I’m proud that the head wine host in The Glass Houses across the fleet goes the extra mile and takes such care with guests. You’ll be in safe hands if you book any masterclass.
In training, I always come back to the most important question to ask the guest in front of you: “What is it that you love in life… What flavours excite you?” The answer doesn’t need to be about wine – they could tell you they like roast chicken or they could say, “I’m a big fan of strawberries with a dusting of icing sugar.”
Just start tasting!
What I want people to realise after a masterclass is that it’s just a short journey to a whole world of delight. They don’t need to spend a fortune to enjoy a good wine, and they absolutely do not need to know very much to get a great deal out of it. The best way to learn about wine is to taste it, so just start tasting, and feeling. If you can reach a bit more deeply and feel like you’ve connected with the wine, the next time you make a choice you will have a richer experience, and knowing that really does make me happy.
Book your Olly Smith wine tasting masterclass or a hosted dinner with Olly on a Food Heroes cruise.
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