One of the big problems I see with wine ratings, and any number of others, is that there is no objective criteria. At least when we judge beer at contests, we are judging against an agreed-upon set of standards. Just like required figures in figure skating. If I give a beer a 35/50, it’s because it doesn’t meet the parameters of that style of beer, as produced by the AHA. It doesn’t mean it isn’t a good beer necessarily (although it usually does), it just means it was at odds with what is standard. Hell, my Brown Ales not only push the envelope for the style, they lick them, stamp them and mail them. Judged against the norm, they score poorly. Judged by which beer we run out of first at a festival, they score rather well.
But just try to get 5 wine geeks to agree on what a Chardonnay should taste like.
Oh, I missed the part where it was “100 different wines presented as 300 different wines” and not “pour three glasses of wine and try them in a sitting.” Yeah, there’s a good chance that the wine itself is changing over the course of two days. “Breathing” a wine absolutely changes it as the most volatile flavors flash off, others get oxidized, and who knows what else happens in the meantime. I know I’ve had wine that’s gone from disappointing to outstanding after breathing for a couple hours, and opened bottles have a pretty short lifespan before they become intolerably oxidized.
Actually, no. I like to think I have a scientific background, and there is no way in hell I would expect a machine to be better able to classify different wines. Wines are far too complex chemically to build a mechanical classifier.
But you alleged that wine tasters could tell the vineyard, the maker, the grapes, the vintage, and the region, from taste alone. If they could do that, why couldn’t they figure out “by golly, this one is from exactly the same vineyard, the same maker, from the same grapes, and from the same year, as the two I had yesterday”?
If you show a mechanic 100 different cars three times each, don’t you think he will figure out when a car from the same maker, same model, same color, and same year, that it is the same car? Why then would you rate it a 91 the first time you saw it, and then a 95 after that?
I have a good beer palate and I’m hoping to get certified as a beer judge in the next couple of years, but I haven’t developed the same palate for wine. I drink a reasonable amount of it, but I haven’t really developed the vocabulary to talk about it.
I did, however, get an inadvertent blind test one night at a restaurant in Key West. A chardonnay with a name I didn’t recognize was listed on their chalkboard as being on special for $20, so we ordered a bottle, figuring it was probably plonk at that price but what the hell. We figured it was probably of the $8-10/bottle quality we enjoy at home.
When I took a sip of it, I was shocked–I had never had a wine with so much flavor in my life. It was like the wines I was used to were plinked-out notes and this was beautiful chords. And it was even more stunning with the food. I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe it, but it was clear that what I was drinking was in a whole different class than what I was used to.
Indeed, I was right–the $20 special was for a glass, and the bottle was $85. (It retails for around $45, IIRC.)
All this really means is that I have expensive taste in chardonnay. But you can’t tell me that there’s no difference between that wine and a bottle of Lindeman’s Bin 65 chard, or worse yet a bottle of cheap Merlot.
Having set up for a few commercial large-scale tastings, I can say the wines aren’t all being poured from the same bottle. Even smaller scale tastings at my local wine shop will involve the proprietor opening several bottles of an individual wine over the course of the tasting. So I don’t think the samples were from the same bottle over the two days.
One factor that IMHO will play a bigger role than oxidation in how a wine tastes over a period of time, is temperature. Even a few degrees of difference is going to have an effect on what the wine tastes like.
Knorf is more ably making a lot of the points that I would have. I’d just add that scholarly articles on sensory evaluation of wine and other goods (food products, perfume) exist and are readily Google-able. As are articles where wines with different concentrations of various chemical compounds are evaluated, in an attempt to correlate concentrations to perceived odor intensity. There’s actual scientific research out there
As to blind evaluation of varieties, geographical location, and vintage, it’s a requirement for certification by bodies such as the Court of Master Sommeliers and the Institute of the Masters of Wine. There was also an annual contest in the skill. Shame I never made time to try out.
Doing the vineyard/vintage/producer/cask trick is kind of a parlor game: equal parts Concentration, knowledge of the region and vintages (and the contents of the tester’s cellar), and luck. You have to have tasted the wine before (or had really good tasting notes from someone else), known that the wine would be in the pool of candidates, and have similar conditions for the time you originally tasted it and the time of the test. A lot of it is knowing what to expect. When I was current in the hobby, and could tell you what the wet summer in 2001 did in the Mosel, and was familiar with different houses’ styles, I could easily distinguish vineyards within a houses’ line, and houses with the same vineyard (which in Germany often doesn’t mean much, but w/e.) But I’d have to know we were tasting Mosel Rieslings to begin with. I couldn’t take a glass of white wine and go, “Piesporter Domherr, Kabinett, Reinhold Haart, 2000.” Tasting it in 2002, I could think to myself, "It’s floral, but not Muscat, and it doesn’t have that huge Chardonnay body, so not Viognier; it’s probably Riesling. Ethereal in weight, so probably no sweeter than Kabinett, and probably Middle Mosel; no petrol, so not that old. Fairly big nose, so probably young, decent concentration, so probably not 2001, maybe 2000? It tastes like something I’ve had before, and it doesn’t have that talcum powder apple blossom thing, so not Wehlen or Zeltingen Sonnenuhr. A bit mushroomy, musty: Piesporter Domherr? And since Haart’s the biggest name in Piesport, maybe it’s one of his? I’d be wrong a lot more than I’d be right, but it’s an example of how I’d go about narrowing down the list of possibilities.
When I learned which wine it was, it’d go into my mental database. I’d try to figure out which characteristics of the wine fooled me, and what possible variables led me to make my assessment that it was X while it was Y. I’d make inferences about other wines of its type, and try and taste some of those and see if my inferences were accurate. And so on. Fun hobby. I just want to emphasize that I’d miss a lot more than I’d make, even in an area where I’d had the wines a bit, and was somewhat of a knowledgeable amateur concerning the region.
To expand on Shodan’s point about cars and scores, that does happen in the car world too. Not that a magazine confuses a Porsche 911 SC with a Ferrari 550, but I’ve read different issues where the same car was tested in different settings, and ended up with different scores. Returning to wine, I can take a given group of 12 wines and rank them and show preference for A over B and B over C, and not C over A. I don’t think I can come up with a repeatable numerical score with anymore than +/- 3 pts for any of them though. Which is a pretty big friggin’ range on a 70-100 scale.
I also wasn’t tasting 50-100 wines in a day. I have been to tastings where I’ve tried to do that with some rigor and it is a gigantic pain in the ass. Despite spitting every sample, despite trying to pace myself, I don’t think I was as thorough at Hour 3 that I was at Hour 1. I wouldn’t be surprised if I didn’t recognize that you’d handed me two of the same wine at some point in the tasting.
It doesn’t help that a lot of wine just plain tastes the same. Region, grape, vintage—other than “recent,” you’ve got me. A lot of it, I’m not going to be able to narrow it down anymore than “New World-style red, heavy graphite—french oak nose, fairly thick body, so somewhat expensive. More blackberry, no underbrush or nail polish remover, hot: screw it, Aussie Shiraz? It was expensive Russian River Pinot Noir? Dammit.”
For the competition shenanigans, my guess is that it’s a combination of palate fatigue, ranking the wines in a flight ordinally; rather than assessing specific criteria and letting the sum rank the wines tasted; different temperatures for the wine; different lots of wine under the same label if the winery has poor QC; and the fact that most human beings just aren’t that precise at tasting. I’m certainly not.
Tl;Dr: There’s lots of scholarly articles on quantitative sensory appreciation of wine. There are appreciable differences in many wines and people can be trained to pick up those differences. Wine critics and competitions claim too much precision in their evaluations.
My guess is that this would be a bit harder than you say (as sachertorte noted), even with proper equipment and a lab, but in any case the human palate + brain is not a fractional distillation apparatus.
If it were just a pastime, or even a small cottage industry, it wouldn’t be a problem. I would have a chuckle and move on. But we’re talking about a multi-billion dollar industry here–and hundreds of billions for the wine industry as a whole. Wine “professionals” are a distorting influence on the marketplace. Few other industries would accept quality ratings that were the functional equivalent of tarot readings, but with wine there are enough interests that require maintaining a certain cachet and that means we get a system that can’t possibly be based on reality.
The whole “everyone knows the ratings are subjective” is just apologist garbage, IMHO. Reviewers put on all the trappings of objective analysis. They have their 100-point scales; their very specific jargon; their official certification tests. Movie reviews are bad enough, but even they don’t put on the same pretenses.
Back in the 1980s Gevalia was only available mail order [at least where I was living] and the single plantation specialty coffees were their more or less coffee of the month deal. So yes, a single plantation berry in the era of Maxwell House and no real poseur/wankey Coffee Houses selling foofy crap, Gevalia single plantation beans were exotic.
I made wine for several years but never pretended to have any special skills. I simply crushed the grapes, added the yeast, maintained the temp the best I could and hoped for the best. I got my grapes from the same abandon vineyard each year. The longer the vineyard was abandon the better the wine got each year. It was unmistakable. I could easily recognise certain years.
There should be a Poll Thread: which subjective, multi-billion art/cultural objects do you hate to the point of irrationality?
Wine and wine-tasting
Modern Art ($142 million for a grotesque Francis Bacon triptych, baby!)
Fashion
I am sure there are plenty of others. In each case, yes, there are billions spent by folks who don’t know what they are doing and who are following “experts” who also don’t know what they are doing. But there is also something to be said for investing time to learn what works for you in that particular area…
Cite that they are. Movies like Sideways affect wine sales vastly more than anything put out in Wine Spectator or Wine Enthusiast. I think they reflect the marketplace and tradition, I don’t see much evidence that they steer the industry in any particular direction. Less than movie critics, probably.
This is a ridiculous comparison. Tarot readings are based on absolutely nothing, just wild imagination. There are different, many hundreds of different, chemical compounds in wine that affect flavor, and people who try to taste the differences and describe are trying to do something real, albeit rather difficult.
Utter nonsense. Movies critics get dismissed as pretentious elitists all the time, especially on the SDMB but everywhere really.
But yes, I don’t think, and until I encountered this thread never found anyone who thought, that wine rating numbers are in any way intended to be scientific, anymore than star ratings or the Metacritic numerical ratings of movies are.
They can do it, and they have demonstrated it. Of course you are latching hard onto the one example where flaws were discovered, and ignoring the numerous examples of blind tastings going on all the time where they do demonstrate it.
Of course it’s never going to be anything like 100% of the time. Never. Wine has way too many variables and way too many examples. There are something like 140 wineries in the vicinity of the city of Walla Walla, WA, alone. No one can possibly know every wine in the world, and no one claims to. None of this is a secret. But master sommeliers can do it often enough successfully that it really has astonished me.
You might be going in with totally unreasonable expectations. Apparently quite a few are, which baffles me as someone who actually knows the industry a little bit.
Also, you should look at that “study” more carefully. It wasn’t three of the same wine in a row. It was 300 glasses of 100 different wines, all mixed up. Also, we don’t know who the people doing the tasting were, exactly – California wine judges but what that does that mean, exactly? Were any of them master sommeliers? We don’t know. Maybe none were. The fact that the mean spread was +/-4 pts actually strikes me, as someone who knows about wine, to be pretty good! Obviously it could be better. But, 100 different wines in 300 glasses over two days? That’s rough work.
Seriously. I don’t think I have ever had more than seventy glasses of wine a day myself, even back in college when I was in practice. 300 in two days is professional level right there.
While the “Sideways Effect” is claimed to have increased U.S. sales of Pinot Noir by 16 percent relative to the prior year, I’d still think the biggest critical influence on winemaking economics is still how much Robert Parker likes or doesn’t like your wine. When a couple of economists looked at the issue in 2005, and compared years where Parker tasted the vintage before the Bordelais set prices en primeur, and a vintage where he tasted it after they set their prices, they estimated that Parker’s opinion had an average effect of 2.8 Euro on the price of the bottle. According to the authors, the effect escalated dramatically with areas Parker rated more highly, like Pomerol, where it was about 8.50 Euro a bottle. Of course, production is a little lower in Pomerol, the wines are often a lot more expensive anyway, and ceteris is never paribus, but still. I can’t find production numbers for the Classified Growths in Bordeaux, but wiki says they’ve about 10-15 percent of the vineyard area and the whole AOC puts out around 400 million bottles per year. Assume they declassify 40 percent and their yields are 30-40 percent that of Bordeaux Superieur, that’s still around 10-15 million bottles a year. Anyway you look at it, at nearly 3 Euro per bottle, that’s a lot of money each he’s influenced each year.
I’d really like to see some hard data about just how much money there is for a winery with a 90 Parker point wine, versus if it were an 89 point wine. I can’t find any specifics, even at a place like the Journal of Wine Economics. Anecdotally, even if winemakers don’t claim to cater to Parker’s tastes—and since I think he’s retiring, we’ll see what happens—they are certainly cognizant of them.
This assumes that you actually want the flavor profile of a typical Parker 95+ pt wine. Another anecdote, in 2000, I had the privilege of tasting a Parker 100 pt wine (1990 Chateau Montrose) next its prior vintage, which scored somewhere in the mid 90s from him, IIRC. The '89 Montrose was great, balanced, complex, everything you’d want from a bottle of Bordeaux red. The '90 was bigger. The joke going around the table was that it was “wine syrup” and “you could stick your fork up in it.” Not that we liked it better than the ‘89, but we all saw it was bigger. In a competitive tasting, where the judge has 25 glasses in front of her, she’s going to be attracted to the one that stands out from the rest. Which is why wines like that, which are huge, overshadow most food, and are at times hot, are the wines that often win critics’ awards. And it was the emphasis towards that sort of fruit-forward, heavy extract and oaked, style that altered how many winemakers made wine. See Barolo, “traditional” vs “modern,” for one example of how a given style can change.
I will give Parker tremendous credit for being mostly immune to the gigantic conflicts of interest that used to plague the wine press, and for being remarkably consistent over the years. Love him or hate him, if you stick to his Bordeaux and California Cabernet reviews, you can read one and often form a pretty consistent picture of what the wine will be when you try it. I’ve read notes of his, especially back in the '80s when he was still giving bad grades to properties, and used what I knew of his terminology to identify a particular property when I’d only had that property’s wine one time before.
Have you done wine tasting? You don’t get a full glass, not even a “standard drink” tiny 5 oz. But 300 sips are still impressive. I’d imagine spitting is necessary, although I’d still feel horrible doing it.