Really? Never? Different “fruit” flavours are pretty easy to pick out in wines. Things like pear, peach etc correspond to very simple esters and I certainly notice them in wines - and I’m far from a wine connoisseur. (If I spend £10 on a bottle it had better be a special occasion!)
I can’t believe people could drink wine and never notice peach or apple flavours, for instance.
Also I’d be interested to know what wine they used to dye red for the test. The kind of reds I like could certainly never be mistaken for a white, unless there are some very strange whites out there I’ve never head of!
Well, the interesting thing is that I would say that acidic qualities of wine actual counteract sweetness, not enhance it. If I’m tasting citrus in wines, that’s pushing my description more to the non-sweet side. If I’m tasting berries, then I might describe it more as sweet. But it also depends on the tannins. Something heavily tannic might taste like jammy blackberries, but I wouldn’t describe it as “sweet,” moreso fruity. Actually, now that I think about it, I think that has a lot to do with it: fruity, low-to-medium acidity, low tannin wines often get described as “sweet” even if they are bone dry (little unfermented sugar.)
But I do think there is a noticeable difference between a “sweet” wine that is sweet because of residual sugar vs a “sweet” wine that is sweet because it has a lot of red berry or whatever flavor in it. It might be like tasting raspberry kool-aid without the sugar–remember those packs where you had to add the sugar separately? Anyhow, it’d be like tasting that vs tasting that kool-aid with sugar added to it. With no reference, you might characterize the berry kool-aid as having some sweetness to it, but when you have the sweetened version, you’d realize that perhaps the type of sweetness you are describing has a better term than “sweet.”
I find no problem in reserving the word “sweet” for relative sugar levels in wine. When I’m reading a description, I like to know how sweet a wine is. If it’s fruity and dry, I want to know it’s fruity and dry. If it’s got sugary sweetness to it, I’d like to know that, too. When I read a wine or beer description, I don’t care about the rating–I just care about the description across a range of raters to get an idea of what ballpark the flavor of drink I am buying is.
Like I said, I’ve never (and I’m not being hyperbolic here) tasted any of the various fruit/leather/coffee/etc flavours people allege can be found in wines. I don’t doubt some people can taste them (or think they can), but I’m not one of them.
I had a similar experience once. I ordered a Manhattan which was $35, but I didn’t know it was $35. I think I remarked a couple times to my friends that it was really an amazing drink, but I was shocked when I got the bill. I even went to find the menu, but sure enough, the price was printed there plain as day. I just hadn’t noticed it. But yeah, it’s certainly clear with whiskey that higher priced and renowned ingredients actually make a better drink.
Back to wine - it seems that the “it’s-all-bullshit” crowd are drawing on two major points of evidence: one, in a single test, experts we unable to identify 3 out of 300 wines over two days as being the same. Two, tasters, who may or may not have been experts, were unable to properly identify whether a wine was white or red when the white wine had been food-dyed.
I think the criticisms of that evidence in this thread is quite on-point: identifying the common wines in that context is a really unreasonable expectation, and the food-dye trick only proves what we already know - that it’s fairly easy to fool the senses. More interesting would be actual, scientific answers to these questions: are wine experts able to, with reasonable consistency - identify the same flavor notes in wine when they don’t know what the wine is, but they aren’t being tricked? If the answer to that question is yes, then I think a) what they’re doing is not bullshit and b) it’s probably useful, since it will actually help the wine-drinking public identify wines similar to ones they like, and pair the wines with food appropriately.
Well, I can point to some of the chemicals actually involved in some of the flavors, so it’s not just a matter of people “thinking” they can do it–there’s actual chemicals involved. Apple flavor comes from malic acid in the wine. A buttery flavor comes from malolactic fermentation, which changes the malic acid into lactic acid which also throws off diacetyl. Lactic acid + diacetyl is exactly what gives cultured butter, buttermilk, some of its characteristic flavor. Leather flavors come from tannin (and tannin is used in tanning leather), so if you have an older wine where the fruit flavors are a bit more faded, and the tannins are heavy and pronounced, one can describe this as having a “leather” flavor, although I just say it’s very tannic. Vanilla notes in wine come from, well, vanillin from aging in oak barrels.
I find it useful to make the distinction: the quality of acid that seems “fruity” and the residual sugar that is genuinely sweet are worth distinguishing when it comes to finding wine I prefer.
ETA: I like fruity acid but I don’t like very much residual sugar in general. That’s only a generality, but it suits me. Nothing wrong with sweet wine, I just don’t prefer it. In the “dry” vs. “sweet” continuum, I prefer dry. That means I need to distinguish between fruity and actual residual sugar, because many dry (i.e., little or not residual sugar) white wines can have delicious fruity acidic elements that a beginner (or someone who just doesn’t care) might call sweet because of the fruit association.
It’s a worthy distinction, really.
Did you enjoy knocking over that strawman? Why not give it another good whack. That’s the spirit.
Now that’s just cruel, lumping creationists and audiophiles together; at least an audiophile can prove the existance of Monster Cable and 100kHz flat line tweeters, even if they don’t actually make a difference…
In my defense, I did arrange them in increasing order of nuttiness. In other words, oenophiles < audiophiles < homeopaths < creationists. I’m pretty sure most oenophiles know the difference between wine and *water *with red food coloring.
Tarot readings are just a type of cold reading. Cold readings are “legitimate” in a certain sense, but obviously fall apart when done in a blind situation.
What tarot readers have in common with wine tasters is that the abilities of the latter seem to fall apart when they can’t see the label. Wine is indeed a complex chemical soup but that doesn’t mean that anyone actually has the ability to discern these nuances.
Perhaps you missed the part where I said movie reviews are bad enough.
The difference is that I’ve never seen a movie review where it was implicit that the reviewer had superior senses than the average movie watcher. They’re just people who watch movies and write about them.
The problem isn’t quite that they’re unscientific. The problem is more that they give a false sense of precision which is totally out of proportion with the actual objective abilities of wine tasters.
The public does take the scores seriously. Here is one short blurb that I found quickly. The poster (from a vineyard) is generally in favor of the 100 point score, but admits a frustrating threshold between an 89 and 90 score.
Arguably, this means the public has already figured out the game: 90+ is good, and <90 sucks. The odd part is that, according to the post, medals do not have the same positive influence. The numeric score seems to have more weight, even though it’s still effectively a binary recommendation. I might posit that the 100-point score looks more objective and “scientific” to the general public, but that is admittedly pure supposition–I genuinely wonder what the right answer is.
OK, then let’s see some cites. Because so far, all we have in this thread is some examples where experts can’t do what you claim under controlled conditions, and your anecdote where you say they can.
I’m not sophisticated enough to really be able to tell the difference, so I almost always buy the <$10 wine. Hell, the three buck Chuck is good enough for me.
No offense, but that isn’t anything near what Knorf claimed.
The claim was that wine experts could tell the maker, grapes, year, region, and vineyard solely from the taste and smell of the wine. In the study already mentioned, they couldn’t, because they couldn’t tell that the same wines were being given them three times apiece.
This is to establish their credentials, in that they can (supposedly) tell something objectively verifiable about the wine.
It reminds me somewhat of the “recovered memories” thing of a few years back. If someone wants me to believe that they actually recovered a memory not available for years, then I would like to see them report something verifiable, to show that they aren’t just making it up, either voluntarily or otherwise. Or maybe like spiritualism. If I am expected to believe that it is my dear departed Aunt Bertha, then let’s hear something that can’t be gleaned from a cold reading.
Or like the story about Groucho Marx. Groucho is at a séance, and the medium summons up the spirit.
I know I’m late to the party, but that’s not true.
That is what the Wall Street Journal reported (and what sachertorte quite reasonably repeated), but as usual the newspaper screwed it up. The actual study can be accessed here (pdf), and says:
So not 100 different triplicates, just four; and the triplicates are (in general) all served together as opposed to hours or days apart.
The scoring is kind of confusing, but it essentially boils down to an 80-to-100 point scale, with two-point increments (80, 82, 84, etc). The 80-100 scale is mapped from gold, silver, and bronze medal (and no medal) ranking, with each medal group being six points apart.
For each triplicate, the author looked at how repeatable each judge was in scoring the three repeats. The median range for all judges for all triplicates was about 4 points. The author also looked at the maximum range each judge had among their four samples. The median of that was about 8 points.
More interestingly, most of the perfect consistency - where the judge ranked the same wine exactly the same all three times - was when the wine scored poorly (no medal); in other words, judges seemed to do a good job identifying wines they did not like. On the other extreme, somewhere around 1/3 of the time, judges scored the same wine six or more points apart - in a different medal group entirely; about 10% of the time they scored 12 or more points apart (two entire medal groups).
Oh, sorry. I was just replying to the general idea that it’s all bullshit. I certainly agree that there is a level of BS to general wine talk, but that goes for talking about food, beer, music, football, etc. I also happen to think that the wine rating system is a bunch of crap, but I do like reading descriptions of wines to know what I’m getting myself into.
I want an accurate description of the wine e.g light body, full body, dry, sweet, etc. I do not want flowery descriptors that do not accurately portray the wine within.
There is a huge difference between “cilantro tastes like soap” and “this saucy sprig of cilantro is bursting with flavors. The nose shows a brooding Ivory Dish Soap that translates on the palate to notes of crushed Palmolive and spasming Irish Spring with an explosion of Camay Body Bar in the finish along with the requisite chawing terbaccer and horse tack”.*
I know, some of these are actually detergents and not soaps
The intellectually honest person would balance a single study–which may or may not have included any actual master sommeliers–with the numerous other examples of blind tastings where the sommeliers were able to do so, before coming to such a definitive conclusion and mocking everyone who enjoys wine tasting, and the whole industry, as BS.
As I said, not with 100% accuracy by any means, by accurately enough that if you have reasonable expectations, it can be astonishing.
But I find the descriptions generally are in the ballpark. So…I don’t know what the problem is. My hobby drinks are beer and whiskey. If you read descriptions of beer and whiskey, you might think it’s all nonsense, but there are common flavor descriptors that do actually mean something to those who are into those drinks vs. someone who is not as experienced.
Then, as mentioned, perhaps you could cite a few of the other numerous examples of blind tastings where master sommeliers could identify a wine with the kind of accuracy you claim. Because there haven’t been any in this thread.
