Even those of us who really like wine may not feel like we know all that much about it — which kinds we like best, whether we gravitate toward oaky whites or fruity reds, if the sangiovese grape is the one for us. Without pretense, without snobbery, wouldn't it be fun to get a bunch of friends together with a bunch of bottles and get a bit more attuned to what strikes our individual fancies? No rules, no rights or wrongs, just some slightly reflective sipping with some wine-loving pals. Here is how to do just that.

A wine tasting with 10 random bottles may be fun, but it won't yield all that much in terms of learning — a white Bordeaux from France and a pinot noir from Oregon are two totally different wines, so it's difficult to pull out significant takeaways. You need to focus in on a direction, even one as broad as California white wines, so that you are tasting to compare and contrast wines with something in common, and this way you can walk away with a better understanding about a particular type of wine.

One way to focus and organize a wine tasting is to choose a "vertical" or "horizontal" tasting. A vertical tasting features wine from the same producer but from multiple years — if you ever visit a vineyard and do a wine tasting there, you are doing a vertical tasting. This kind of tasting illustrates the difference between vintages.

A horizontal tasting compares a group of wines with similar boundaries, such as the type of grape, region or wine style. Often a single year is selected as well, in order to really be able to compare grapes to grapes, as it were. For instance, you might taste all sangiovese — perhaps from the same year but from different producers. This is also known as a varietal tasting.

You can also decide to hone in on a single country. Then, within that country you might also choose to do a vertical or horizontal tasting, or you might just decide to taste a selection of Spanish red wines or all German rieslings. Or perhaps you pick a group of white wines from Tuscany. Or maybe the country is all that the wines have in common, and you jump from grape to grape. Again, it's just a way of focusing the tasting.

Natalie MacLean, editor of the popular wine review site clarifies: "If you compare a selection of Australian shirazes from different wineries, that’s a horizontal tasting. But comparing the shirazes of one Australian winery for each year from 2012 to 2016 is a vertical tasting."