It’s quite amusing to read about the Judgement of Paris.
(Which I learned about by watching the quite good, fruity, movie, ‘Bottle Shock’)
And see how the judges tried to worm their way out of giving an American wine the first place in a blind taste test. lol.
I’ve been drinking pop (soda, if you must) for as long as I can remember. If I order a Diet Coke and my partner orders a regular Coke I *might *notice the difference. Then that difference quickly gets blurred if I try and sip from each one. Yes, my palate probably is more like a pallet, but I’ve always wondered about the whole “this was grown on the north slope of this vineyard” type tasting anyways.
What a load of pure wine snobbery bullshit. Power of suggestion, marketing, crap.
So I thought well maybe I’m wrong. I went to the kitchen and picked up some Smuckers*, cause you know it’s made from grapes too. I’ll be damned, no tobacco, no leather, no racy cherry, no saucy little nose. Just pure grapey sugary goodness.
So you have a nice time drinking your leather and tobacco flavored crap. I have a bottle of Gnarly Head and a PBJ calling my name.
*Actually it really wasn’t Smuckers, it’s homemade jelly from my grape vine out back. Concord. 12 pints of jelly last year. I would make wine from it, but I’m afraid someone will come along and taste our Boxer’s dogshit instead of tobacco and leather.
So just because you can’t do it means that no one can? One thing I can tell you is the difference, by sight, of every model year Ford Mustang between 1964.5-1985. Can you do that? I’ve chosen to develop the dataset to enable me to do that and I have no doubt that most people could as well if they cared. Are a lot of wine reviews pretentious? No doubt.
I know, and watched it done, people who can tell you the varietal, the vinyard, and even the year in a blind test. Can I do it? Not even remotely! Can I get the general gist of the flavour components? Sure, and I may even be able to tell you it’s a shiraz vs a cab sauv.
As an aside, last year my wife would buy me beer and pour it in a glass without my seeing it in any way. They were all beers I have had before, and I had to figure out solely by taste and smell what they were. I was right about 3/4 of the time. All beer doesn’t taste the same.
All I’m saying is just because you haven’t developed the skill, that doesn’t mean it can’t exist.
I don’t know why people get so up in arms about wine tasters. If you don’t like or care about wine, who cares? I’m not a wine person myself (I mean, I like it, but I don’t have a palate for it), but I like beer, and reading various descriptions of beer does help me when picking out a new beer to try. Even though I don’t know what “leather” flavor in wine is, I’m sure there is a commonly understood flavor that wine lovers talk about, just like beer lovers may talk about hops profiles that are “piney” or “citrussy” or “spicy” or malts that are “nutty” or like “toasted bread” and yeasts that taste of banana or cloves, etc.
I have a client who did it.
His real knowledge of wine consists of two months traveling in Europe and a week-long seminar here in the states. His management skills are probably not even up to the standard of his wine skills, but he did turn a profit for at least one year - during the recession nonetheless. In case you think maybe his employees are providing the expertise, I can assure you that they’re minimum-wage college students who don’t even get paid on commission because the owner decided it was too much work to track what he was selling in any detail, and who don’t even get tips because the owner switched to a merchant service that will save him $10 a month but can’t handle tips. You’ll find better wine expertise at Wal-Mart.
All he does well is shovel the BS. Anecdote about his trip to Europe, pretentious “facts” about the wine - another bottle sold!
Stupid indeed. We had a marketing professor who had us taste test two bottles of spring water–both were unlabeled. Most tasters had opinions on the two. At the end, Prof revealed that both bottles were filled from the tap.
I feel the same way about coffee. I’ve never been able to taste the earthy undertones or the bean picker back-sweat finish that some expound.
How about the subtle note of civet colon? I’d hate to drink a mug of kopi luwak and not notice the difference from my regular brew.
The article addresses this point. It mentions that the wine tasters who were unable to produce consistent results were not amateurs or self-professed experts. They were professional judges at a major competition.
No, I can only do the Fox Body Mustangs (the LX and GLX models can be hard to discern sometimes), I’m not concerned about prior models.
I go to two liquor stores for wine. The old guy in the one store gives a no-bullshit approach to wines, e.g. “You like Barolo, well here is one made from Nebbiolo grapes that tastes pretty close but is about 1/3 the price.”
The other store has a certified sommelier. She tends to get a little bullshitty and tends to start spewing the wine review crap, but she is very cute when she does it.
I buy most of my wines from the old no-bullshitter and the other liquors from the cute sommelier.
Now pardon me, but I still have some grape jelly in the jar and it’s calling my name.
Do you need us to go find the blind tasting in which the experts couldn’t tell which wine came from a box?
Your response is precisely the problem with wine tasting. It’s essentially an accusation of “If only you had my sense of confirmation bias, you’d agree with me.”
The trained ability to discern and describe the layers of subtle flavors in a wine is a legitimate skill. However, that skill does not map directly to the ability to determine which glass is a “better,” more expensive, or otherwise “superior” wine.
And I think this is where the claims of bullshittery come from.
Seriously? You’re using the smell of sugar-laded, non-fermented grape jelly to “refute” that there are some wines with a hint of something link of tobacco?
Ok, now I know for sure that you’re not worth talking to.
It’s not flavored that way. It’s that, among the factually hundreds of compounds that affect the taste of wine, there are some that carry a hint of something resembling tobacco. This is not BS at all. It’s there.
This is not a fair paraphrase of anything I wrote.
Here’s the thing. Reviews and ratings are such are guidelines, something to help consumers find choices for themselves that they would like. They are not science, and do not pretend to be, but of course there are real skills that come into play. Some reviewers/tasters/writers are better than others.
Yes, of course human senses can be tricked. This can happen in literally any arena involving human senses, wine is hardly unique in that respect.
It is trickery if the taster is expecting the samples to be provided in good faith, which they weren’t.
And did he deliberately relabel cheap wine as expensive wine, as part of his scam? Or was he just an amateur who managed a semi-successful wine shop?
This is where you’re wrong. Many of them do pretend to be scientific, which is what annoys people who have a passing familiarity with actual science. There’s nothing wrong with giving an opinion, but multiple experiments have shown that professionals’ opinions are more influenced by labels, price, and psychological priming than by how the damn wine tastes. So what utility does a wine reviewer actually serve?
That’s certainly true. I like wine and I know a little about it, although I’m certainly not an expert. And one thing I’ve discovered over many, many years of enjoying wine is that a surefire way to ruin a perfectly good bottle (or box) is to get a oenophile in the room talking about it!
nm
Yeah, It’s trickery. That how scam artists are generally exposed, by tricking them in to revealing they are full of shit. An absurd ease with which they can be tricked is not an indictment of the test, it’s an indictment of the scam.
I watched the documentary “Somm” the other day, about the test to become a master sommelier. Some in the thread might find it interesting.
It’s available through Netflix streaming.
You do have to realize there is at least another dynamic going on here: not wanting to offend the homebrewers and thus being more “diplomatic” in their tasting notes. Plus, although I’ve never had any of those, typically those types of drinks, as you well know, have very clean taste profiles, which I certainly praise in a homebrew. Can’t explain the depth of hopping, though. I assume there are little to no hops in any of those.
Which is why UC Davis, and other food science institutions, use a red room and standardized containers in their taste tests. Serioiusly, everything looks either bright or dark red in there, so that reactions to color are minimized. So it is possible to scientifically analyze the taste of things.
Not that I have experience using the procedures. The Civil Engineering department used to share a building with Enology. So we would occassionally get tours. And just being on campus, I learned about the Wine Tasting Wheel developed by Ann C. Noble. According to articles in the student paper, wine descriptions were much more fanciful before the wheel was developed. Also according to those articles, students who took the class (which was extremely hard to get into) could learn to identify the items listed on it.
UCD’s Enology Department analyzes and experiments with the microconstituents in wine that cause specific background flavors. From personal experience,* the constituents for bell pepper and one other flavor were always stored, triple-contained, in the refrigerator and lab workers were not allowed to open the bottle unless it was in a fume hood on the weekend. If a vial was opened during the work week, the smell diffusing up the hood would cause people in nearby buildings to call in gas leaks. I’m willing to believe that the presence of certain tastes can be scientifically proven. Not that any particular review has proven them, of course. But it could be done.