My point was that you found the study unconvincing because it was “test subjects” instead of “wine experts”, yet you presented your min-study of aerated wine as if it were meaningful even though nobody involved was a wine expert.
Regards,
Shodan
PS - :blushes attractively at drewtwo99:
I think multiple issues are getting mixed up in this thread. Wine commentary and criticism falls into the same category as all criticism. For example, I’m generally dismissive of movie critics. I’m sure they know their stuff, but their writings about [del]movies[/del] films isn’t important to me or to my enjoyment of on-screen entertainment.
The part of this thread that bothers me are misrepresentations of studies to make wine drinkers look like idiots. The studies don’t even state what many in the media and in this thread are rubbing their fists over in glee. Any criticism or commentary is subjective by definition. That is true of music and movies and literature and food and wine. Under different conditions, the same cheese tastes different too. That doesn’t make cheese a scam.
There is some visceral joy that comes from pointing and laughing at the guy who just blew a hundred bucks on a bottle of red that “you know is worth shit.” But I also wonder, why is it, that if wine is such a scam, those so opposed aren’t incensed that people are being duped financially. Instead, I see people who are gleeful to talk down about someone else’s hobby or passion or passing interest with the notion of ‘I am smart and you are stupid’ just beneath the surface.
I know someone who against our advice absolutely believes that he needs to drink special water that is pH balanced (I know. Don’t get me started). But I don’t point and laugh at him. I’m concerned that he is being taken advantage of. It does not bring me joy.
Also, a little more on this, “green apple” is usually a flavor used to describe acetaldehyde. It’s usually considered a defect in a beer, but there may be some ales when fermented under high temperatures throw off fruity esters, some of which can be described as “apple” or “pear.” I’m guessing the description is referring to this type of flavor in the yeast. Honey is probably just honey itself, but there are also some malts that have a bit of a honey flavor.
Also, I’ve noticed that beers seem to be quite variable from batch to batch. I mean, I’ll have a beer from one tap that tastes so clearly and overwhelmingly of grapefruit (from the hops), but at another bar or from the bottle, I don’t get that same clean grapefruit hit.
Plus it may be your experience, as well. Sauvignon blancs are often described as smelling and tasting like cut grass and a little bit of cat piss. I can see the cut grass part, but I don’t get the cat piss description at all, yet it’s a very common descriptor, even among casual wine drinkers, so it’s clear to me that there must be a cat piss smell in there that I’m just not glomming onto, or I just don’t perceive it as “cat piss” but something else.
Flavor babies! LOL.
You misunderstand. The study is what it is. There isn’t a matter of convincing me or not convincing me. I’m irritated that media reporting of study changed the wording from “subject” to “wine expert”. You don’t see a problem there? For me, it isn’t a matter of whether or not the people involved were experts or not, but that they were reported to be experts when they were not.
That doesn’t invalidate the study. But the conclusion: “People can’t tell the difference between red and white wine” is very different from what was reported: “Wine Experts can’t tell the difference between red and white wine.”
I don’t have much of a wine palate, perhaps because I have sinus issues, and also because I never worked to develop one. I tend to prefer simpler (and often cheaper) wines. I let my wife do the picking and fortunately she gets a kick out of finding the bestest cheapest bottles for our table.
Right, but that’s a very different test. Anyone who can’t tell a Bordeaux from a Chablis blindfolded should turn in their taste buds. But I wouldn’t be surprised to find that there are some reds and some whites that could be mistaken. Regardless, Knorf is correct about this.
Wine experts regularly do blind tests themselves. I knew the guy who was the head of the wine department at Village Corners in Ann Arbor, MI, one of the state’s premier high-end wine distributors, at the time. I remember him describing a recent blind test of 8 different experts, including two “masters of wine” from the UK, involving 8 different bottles of the same type of wine from estates in some small region in France; several of the estates even bordered each other. Each glass was labeled with a letter or number, and every contestant had the list of actual wines present. All the experts got at least 6 correct; only he got all 8 correct. He granted that there’s a fair amount of randomness, and that he might have had only 8 correct if he’d gone a different way on one he was unsure about. But evidently they do this quite regularly, and anyone who can’t get most of them correct doesn’t last long.
I bet you’re not a musician. The audience can’t hear responsiveness, but it can hear the quality of musicianship. The audience can’t tell what it is that’s inspiring the musician, but the musician sure can.
But if your point was that the analogy was inapt, I agree: we’re just tasting the wine, not making it.
Well, you can’t tell an apple from a pear.
[quote=“drewtwo99, post:13, topic:674662”]
If there is a clear and unmistakable difference between all white and red wines, and the tones/notes/boquets/etc, then not even the strongest powers of suggestion should be able to fool an expert who has dedicated his/her life to studying and tasting wine.
Right.
Well … I suspect a lot of wine rating is BS, and the simple test of submitting three glasses of the same wine does indeed demonstrate something informative (assuming a 4-point difference is truly substantial).
There is a good analogy here to audiophiles, especially in the 3 glasses of the same wine. Ethan Winer, a critic of audiophilic BS and believer in objective measurements, points out that every time you listen to something, what you hear is different, because your mind is an active component in the listening process. Winer’s point isn’t that listening tests are therefore useless, but they have to be done carefully to avoid situational bias. Obviously, the wine tasters who were fooled with the three identical glasses weren’t very serious about avoiding bias.
Since my palate is weak, whenever I do a taste test, I make a point to switch between A and B repeatedly. That won’t eliminate something like brand-favoring bias, but it helps to minimize the situational bias (A first B second), which I find is a huge factor. Frankly, when tasting liquor, only the third good swig counts. It takes two before the palate is conditioned, and after the 3rd, it’s too desensitized! Regardless, I recently compared a rum my son recommended with what I usually drink, and darn but I really could tell the two glasses apart, the whole way through. And I think I liked his suggestion better. That said, I’d probably be happy with the less expensive of the two in any case. I’m a failure as a connoisseur.
Indeed, as I’ve pointed out to no apparent effect several times in this thread, every arena involving human senses is prone to the same kinds of randomness which is already well-known in wine tasting. Or any kind of tasting: beer, cheese, whiskey. Test-driving cars. Critiquing novels, movies, television. Predicting the outcome of sporting events, or even just refereeing sports! How consistent are the refs in any major sport, especially without video replay, but even with? How many experts really can predict sporting outcomes consistently better than the average fan?
None of this is science; science has to work very hard to weed out the noise and randomness involving human senses.
But I’m with you: I’m a bit baffled by the degree of gleeful venom of some people, including some in this thread, in attacking other people’s pastimes. Why do this? Are you utterly without your own foibles? Or are you so insecure about yourselves and the validity of your own pastimes that you are compelled to gleefully attack those of others to compensate?
Bottom line: wine ratings aren’t science, any more than stars given to movie ratings are science. So what? No one who knows anything about the subject thinks they are.
Well, to be fair, I’ve never taken wine rating numbers particularly seriously myself, any more than movie ratings. I find recommendations from critics whose taste I reasonably trust, and use that as a starting place.
I also often don’t detect all of the ephemeral smells and flavors the tasting notes suggest. Some, but not all. None of this bothers my enjoyment of wine in the least.
Right – but they should be consistent. The fact that they’re not, even with this type of trickery (three glasses of the same wine, when different wines are expected), exposes a deficiency in those experts.
Here’s what happened. They expect three different wines. They’re not, so their brains amplify the “arbitrary” differences caused by 1st glass vs. second glass and being distracted by that pretty girl and … etc. These minor variations get amplified. That’s understandable and expected. But what should not be expected is for the gap to be extremely wide. If that happens, that shows that two very similar wines will be likely to get equally unfair treatment.
There’s a big difference between objective results and ratings. Still, I agree with you to the extent that ratings should be consistent, regardless of context. The extent to which they’re not is an indication of the extent to which we can’t trust that judge’s ratings.
That’s a very good point. I loathe the way studies often get reported!
Yes.
No. My only point was that people bring different perspectives and capabilities to evaluating something, so treating the ability to assess something with either “it’s accurate!” or “it’s hooey!” in a binary way is very silly and limiting.
People bring to the act of tasting wine a huge variety of factors - cultural, physical, experiential. And EVERY one feels that their perspective matters. I don’t think anyone is arguing that it is objective or scientific - but to dismiss it out of hand seems silly and limiting, too.
It’s wine. It’s fun to get a bottle, drink some and share impressions. It’s good to have a sense for what bottles might be suitable for what occasions and with what foods that fit your price range. Beyond that, I choose not to get in a froth about it.
One thing that might be important for those arguing that identifying a wine should be the same even if the color is changed: When people identify wines, like by region, they are using the color, viscosity, etc. too.
So when someone says, “Joe Blow can identify a wine to a specific area of the Rhine!” or the like, Joe Blow is using all of his senses to do that, not just taste. So yeah, if you deliberately alter one of the things they are looking for, that’s going to fuck them up, just as if you deliberately dropped a tiny bit of sucralose or the like in there, or something that would make it thicker or thinner, or if you spritzed perfume on the inside of the glass first.
After reading this thread, reading this article from Wine Spectator magazine makes the whole thing so much funnier. (Every sentence is now a gem, but I’ve snipped it down to stay out of trouble, follow the link for the full humor).
In the Hodgson study that The Lurker Above linked to, they were experts. Judges in the California State Fair Wine Tasting, ISTM, could be considered expert.
[QUOTE=jsgoddess]
One thing that might be important for those arguing that identifying a wine should be the same even if the color is changed: When people identify wines, like by region, they are using the color, viscosity, etc. too.
So when someone says, “Joe Blow can identify a wine to a specific area of the Rhine!” or the like, Joe Blow is using all of his senses to do that, not just taste.
[/QUOTE]
But they don’t seem to do any better when the wine is unchanged, because it comes from the same bottle. The color and viscosity shouldn’t change from glass to glass, so Joe should be able to tell that the wine came from exactly the same place/grapes/vineyard/year.
And there has been no real evidence that Joe Blow can actually do what you say, and identify anything objectively verifiable from tasting a wine. Let alone saying “this is a great wine, and this is a mediocre one” without looking at the price tag.
Regards,
Shodan
First off, I wasn’t talking about that study.
Since you are so invested in this argument let’s dig a bit deeper. Based on the information presented in this thread, I was left under the impression that the expert judges of the study you are keen to discuss were given the three glasses in succession. This is not true:
That’s 100 different wines presented as 300 glasses over the span of two days. Say what you will about the stupidity of numerical scores, but I don’t find the variance surprising at all. I don’t feel that study proves anything other than what we already knew about how a wine’s taste can change over time. Yes, if you open a bottle and drink a glass now, then drink a glass two hours later, it will taste different. Not news.
Actually, I’m impressed with the amount of consistency they did achieve. I wouldn’t be able to do that (but I think all wines taste the same yucky way anyway).
No kidding. That’s a extremely difficult task for anyone. It’s dumb to expect scientific levels of consistency from wine rating numbers, especially under those circumstances.
Emerson: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds…”
ETA: I have no idea what stpauler thinks he’s proving.
Critics are like this in every field. Flawed and too influential. Find those that you seem to agree with and move on…
I think it’s a combination of sour grapes and class resentment, along the lines of “haha look at those rich people wasting their money, they don’t know the real way to live like I do!” There’s also the undeniable fact that wine description is largely pretentious wank, what with giving fifteen essentially synonymous flavors each with inappropriate modifiers, like “racy black cherries, seductive plums, crushed blackberries, and lascivious black and red currants.” People going into it blind see the florid wank, try a wine that fails to live up to the description, and decide that it’s all self-aggrandizing garbage.
The thing is, they’re still useful if you know how to read them. Toss out all the adjectives and group the flavors they list. Notes to watch out for are red fruit, dried fruit, apple-like fruit, green vegetable, citrus/pine, oak, floral, vanilla, spices, chocolate, and yes, leather/tobacco/tar, as well as tannin level, acidity, and body. If you know what sort of wine you like, you can look at the description and figure out which wines have a profile you like, and avoid getting something you don’t like. If you pay any attention to scores, then yeah, you have to keep in mind that they’re not terribly precise and the reviewer most likely has different (and probably more expensive) taste than you do. Within a category though, a wine that scores a 95 is a good bet to be one you like better than one with a score of 85.
To me, the takeaway from the “three glasses of the same wine” study is at most “the margin of error for a wine rating is +/- 4 points,” that is, two scores within 4 points of each other are essentially the same. I’d be interested in seeing a similar study done with three glasses, two of the same wine and a third of a different but similar wine. I’d wager that if the tasters had something to calibrate their palates, they’d notice much less subjective difference between two glasses of the same wine. Comments like this:
are completely missing the point though, because different treatment can make things from the same source objectively taste very different. There’s a beer that I like that tastes like grapefruit when you drink it out of the bottle, but like pineapple or mango when you pour it into a glass. This isn’t something I gleaned from the label because there’s no flavor description, this is what I found out when I tasted it, and people I know have said the same thing. It’s “Columbus IPA” from Columbus Brewing Company if you’re interested and it’s available.
It’s fine if you can’t identify what it is you like or dislike about a particular wine, or wines in general, it doesn’t hurt me any, but it’s really silly when people go around claiming “JELLY IS $2 FOR A JAR WHY ARE WINE GRAPES ANY DIFFERENT FROM CONCORD GRAPES” and pretend they’ve got the intellectual high ground. In any case, most of the flavors that are possible in wines aren’t going to be present all together, most wines are just a bit fruity and maybe oaky, and there’s nothing wrong with that, it can be delicious. But it’s really presumptuous to say that those are the only flavors that are possible, because I’ve tasted wines that have some of those other notes and most of them weren’t expensive at all. Apothic Red is (or was in the vintage I tried it) overwhelmingly vanilla-y, to the point where it tastes almost like marshmallows. The 2012 Beaujolais Nouveau from Georges DuBoef seems to vary from bottle to bottle, but some of them tasted like bubblegum or Juicy Fruit or something. I’ve only had one wine that tasted of leather and I managed to pick it out without any sort of priming, so it’s definitely a thing that happens and makes wine delicious, but it’s not the sort of thing you should expect unless you’re going out of your way to get it.
For what it’s worth, my dad has a hobby of getting wine on clearance and then sharing it liberally, so that’s where most of my wine-tasting experience comes from. Sometimes a wine turns out better than anticipated, sometimes worse, but they’re usually quite good.
tl;dr: Yeah there’s plenty of pretentious wankery in wine reviews, but these studies aren’t proof of that. Also, it’s easy enough to strip that stuff out and get useful information.
Under the circumstances, 300 glasses of 100 different wines over two days, with the judges thinking they’re getting 300 different wines and not on the lookout for any of them being the same, I think it’s a pretty mild deficiency at worst.
ETA: People have some pretty unreasonable expectations for the accuracy and consistency of human senses.
And that is why we get a disconnect. Many of us here are of scientific backgrounds. Fractional distillation would show which samples of wine were chemically identical, and therefore could easily demonstrate that numbers 3, 47, and 234 all came from the same bottle (within margin of error).
We expect similar results from a professionally trained expert, and become concerned when the experts do not seem to be able to identify samples any better than random distribution.
I think there is a middle that just got excluded.
I can’t. But that’s because there are very few things you can actually taste. The majority of “taste” is actually smell. And I absolutely can smell leather and tobacco in a glass of wine.