Wine tasting: Is it considered drinking if you don't swallow?

[Cavorter]

I flew with some friends to a couple of vineyards and stood by while they all sampled. I then got to thinking: What if I just tasted but then spat out and made sure I didn't drink? Strictly speaking doesn't the 8 hour bottle to throttle rule apply to alcohol actually ingested? I mean how can you be drinking if you don't swallow?

 

[Jim Logajan]

Depends on whether it is red wine, white wine, or a plaid.

Whatever you do, don't inhale.

 

[Jim Logajan]

"This year, three researchers in the Netherlands published a paper in the journal Wine Studies, comparing the blood-alcohol levels of wine tasters who spit versus those who don't. Volunteers tasted 10 wines in an hour. In the first session, they spat out the wine, then rinsed their mouth with water. Two weeks later, the same volunteers (to avoid bias from body types) drank a 15-ml taste of each wine.

The researchers – from the Meander Medical Centre, a Dutch clinical hospital – chose five white wines and five reds, all between 11.5 percent and 13.5 percent alcohol.

All told, the 10 samples equaled about one glass of wine, consumed slowly over an hour. Yet five of the volunteers who swallowed had blood-alcohol levels in excess of the Netherlands' legal limit of 0.5. In contrast, the volunteers who spat averaged 0.025, indicating that spitting prevented them from absorbing about 95 percent of the alcohol in wine."
http://m.wine-searcher.com/magazine-article.lml?Xpage_url=2012%2F12%2Fmasters-of-wine-spitting

 

[Jim Logajan]

You could ingest about as much alcohol from a desert at a nice restaurant as you could from tasting and spitting.

Reminds me of Alton Brown's episode "Fermentation Nation" about cooking with beer and wine (in the food, not in the cook) and gets around to checking the claim that cooking burns off most of the alcohol:

http://www.ulive.com/video/fermentation-nation