I recently celebrated my 26th birthday and my Aunt gifted me two bottles of the Happy Camper Merlot which I reviewed recently. She selected a 2017 and a 2018, so I decided to taste both of them side by side, and see if I noticed a difference between the two years. I examined these wines together, and found that with both of them, they matched my previous tasting notes of the 2017 that I tasted before. The only difference I noticed is that the 2018 was perhaps slightly lighter and less intense, but not by much. If I tasted these wines without knowing that they were from different years, I would probably think that they were the same.

Part of me wonders if I didn’t notice much of a difference because my tasting skills are still developing, but for the most part I think that these two years of the Happy Camper Merlot are indeed pretty similar. Whatever the case is, both were delicious, and this experiment has left me wanting to try this comparison with more wines, to test whether the year really does make a difference, and also, to continue to sharpen my tasting technique.