Blind tastings study

Interesting experiment:

Interesting, indeed - particularly doing the test with novices and more experienced tasters.

Very interesting is this:

An interesting finding of this research is that even when tasted blind, there was a positive correlation between preference and price—the higher the price, the more positive response—and tasters who had little to no blind tasting training seemed to prefer more acidic wines, more alcohol by volume, and less oak flavors.

My daughter is in the Oxford Blind Tasting Society with the authors. While she was always interested in wine, this has taken it to a whole new level. While I have attended blind tastings, it is nothing like what they do. Seems to range from fun to very intense.

Makes sense.

“Civilians” seem to like that profile.

From my experience hosting big parties and from a blind tasting group where others aren’t “geeks”, I can see the more ABV, but usually the high oak and low acid wines do well.

Agree about Alc, but not sure acid generally popular among casual drinkers. Oak and ripe fruit usually ring the bell.

Those are relative things, any of which will have a sweet spot for someone. So, more acidic compared to what baseline? Higher ABV compared to what? More oak than what? Depending where you set those relative baselines, you can state such vagueness either way and be correct.

A dull wine can be brightened up with more acid. Too much and it’s shrill. Increasing ABV adds body well before heat. A consumer who likes a lot of toasty savory oak as a major factor in a wine can be turned off by a dollop of caramel on top of that.



I think that’s right when novices taste wines in isolation. But I was struck years ago when I invited novice to blind tastings how often they preferred the wines I thought were better, which often meant less alcohol, more acid. Tasting several wines side by side sharpens the palate, regardless of how much experience you have.

A long while ago, at a Siduri Open House, Adam brought in a father and son coopers and they poured exactly same wine from 2 of their (French) barrels, one medium toast and one high. Same forest, same air drying regiment, just a different toast level. This was back in the Parker days and I spent about 45 minutes next to barrels observing a good number of board members who usually complained online about too much oak and their dislike for it. Well, and these were not noob palates, but mostly they picked “medium” toast barrel as the one they preferred. So, not sure its just the noobs liking more oak.

And speaking of noobs, I am not sure we should paint them all with same brush, I have come across a good number who seem more than fine picking the “right” bottle in front of them, and by right I mean more balanced (less oak, more acidity). They may not be able to use and have all the adjectives to describe flavors, but that comes from experience, same as the study suggests.