need evidence that these famous critics were fooled

I’m working on a presentation of a neuroscience concept called top-down processing and its relation to wine tasting. In brief, top-down processing is the neurologic basis of optical illusions and there are examples of top-down processing modifying sensory input coming in during winetasting.

For this lecture what I’m looking for is some sort of verification of stories I have been told of a wine tasting of fake Petrus (I think Rudy and John Kapon were involved) from the 1920s, where Robert Parker rated some of these wines very highly. I’ve also heard stories of Allen Meadows giving very high grades to supposedly counterfeit Burgundies.

I would therefore appreciate any true evidence that these people did indeed taste, and give high marks to fake wines. (PM if desired) . This would be a useful addition to studies I will present on how the brains of wine novices were fooled by the price or label.

Without knowing the quality of the replacement wine, I don’t think it’s really all that useful of an example. If, indeed, there are real scientists in the audience.

Indeed, all Parker and Meadows did, if they rated the wines highly, was to rate the wines highly. It would be hard to show that they rated the wines highly because they thought they were ritzy unless there was some objective way to determine that the wines were plonk in addition to being counterfeit. I don’t doubt that critics are influenced by the knowledge of what they are drinking, but the anecdotal information you are seeking wouldn’t be the strongest evidence of that.

Philip - I am not sure of the usefulness of the linked story to your top-down processing work, but I much enjoy the work Lettie Teague did with Chris Camarda (Andrew Will winemaker/owner) in creating a 1982 Mouton and deceiving a group in a wine tasting.

What I enjoyed is one serious wine collector ranked the fake Mouton as wine of the night, but that it remained his wine of the night even after learning it was a fake.

Great one! [cheers.gif]

No doubt you’ve see this study using MRI.

Why expensive wine appears to taste better: It’s the price tag
When a bottle costs more, the reward center in the brain plays a trick on us
Date: August 14, 2017
University of Bonn

Summary:
Price labels influence our liking of wine: The same wine tastes better to participants when it is labeled with a higher price tag. Scientists have discovered that the decision-making and motivation center in the brain plays a pivotal role in such price biases to occur. The medial pre-frontal cortex and the ventral striatum are particularly involved in this.

nice article.
Same for all luxury goods.

sounds like a pretty risky move to base your presentation on rumors

that was a fantastic article - thanks for sharing it!

Would this qualify?

I followed this at the time, though not sure what the final disposition of the case/investigation was.

What about the Hardy Rodenstock tastings involving Michael Broadbent, Robert Parker, and Jancis Robinson.

There were several threads.

Here’s a summary and note that Meadows claimed afterwards that he was suspicious, but he never bothered to say anything at the time he supposedly was suspicious.

But there are some problems with your approach. The critics don’t necessarily score wines that they have in big tastings or dinners, and if they do, those scores wouldn’t necessarily have anything to do with the scores they gave the wine at an earlier time, if they did so.

This is more to the point I think, a blog from Dr Vino about blind tasting with RP. I know a few people who were there and they weren’t impressed.

Lettie caught a lot of flack for her article when it was published, but it seems more to the point of your study. And seriously, the guy shouldn’t have been upset. I always want to prefer a cheaper wine.

Part of the reason is the way people taste wines. Look at all the TNs on here and on CT. People struggle to come up with descriptions of flavors and aromas and they talk about the acidity and tannins, usually while looking at the label. All of those things should help them remember the wine really well so they can identify it blind anywhere.

But that’s not how people taste. If someone bought wine because it was highly recommended (just look at the threads about being on this or that list), they’re probably going to score the wine favorably, and especially when someone pours you a rare old bottle, you’re not likely to sniff that it’s not up to snuff and you’d prefer something else. So Burghound and those guys who are no more skilled or adept than anyone else, will try a wine that they rarely get to drink, and if it’s halfway decent, they’ll rhapsodize about the ethereal quality of the wines from that era.

It’s kind of funny to see people write these long TNs that make you think they’ve completely understood that wine but then they can’t identify it blind a few weeks later.

Perhaps off point, but I know for a fact that many of the known critics have scored the same wine differently. I’m not saying anything
others don’t know, but if you give them two bottles that came off the same bottling line on the same day but have different labels, you’re going to get two different scores.

It’s not even nefarious. Sometimes a restaurant wants a wine and they don’t want the same label that’s sold next door in the retail shop. Or sometimes a customer backs out.

And it gets more interesting. I once put the exact same wine side by side in a shop, with completely different labels. Obviously they stated what was in the bottle, but the label designs and colors and the brand names were different. The owner wanted to see which sold better and said he’d order more of the top seller. When I came in two weeks later he was really excited about the results. They broke down by ethnic group. Who knew? In any event, the wines sold equally and he ordered more of both and over time, they developed pretty substantial followings.

Thanks for the responses.
First of all "top-down processing"is an entirely different phenomena than what is being suggested here- that the tasters were influenced by the label or price. Top-down processing involves an entirely unconscious modification of incoming sensory information based on cognitive profiles. Like I said, it is basically an optical illusion.

I googled Parker/fake Petrus and obtained several links including the two below. I’m not a lawyer but although they provide some evidence that Parker indeed gave a 100 points note to a fake Petrus, in fact calling it “out of this universe” , I’m not sure their evidence is strong enough for me to present this information. I’ll be giving this talk to winemakers, two of which have had their wine counterfeited in large quantities. I therefore want to be pretty certain of my content and would like to hear back if you think this is enough evidence.

in this article the relevant information is on one of the last pages.

When a critic insists that one was not fooled, especially by the party paying for the tasting, then that critic manages to fool only oneself while also deceiving others.

Maybe enough “evidence” to convince a naive audience but it wouldn’t hold up to a review of your peers. So I guess it depends on your goal.

I used to judge for a number of organizations. All the tastings are of course blind. One of them used to test judges by putting two bottles of the same wine into our tasting, usually one at the beginning and be towards the end. It wasn’t a case of identifying, but making sure the judges scored them within a couple of points. Somebody checked for bottle variation, so the process was seen to be fair. Not sure how they used the results, or whether judges were disinvited as we never got the results, even though we knew that it was being done.

My thought exactly. Rudy and other top forgers are probably masterful blenders.

When I first got into the wine biz, there were lots of people who had tasted vintages from the 19th century etc. Until around 1972 classic (famous) wines were cheap.
Nowadays peoples’ experience with older wines goes back thirty five years. Then there is the fact there are a lot more wineries who have been making wine since the early '70s.

Supposedly Hardy poured some 19th century Lafite for a bunch of people…every one ooed and awed until the late Haskell Norman piped up and said,. I’ve had 12 bottles of this and this one is completely different.

It is indeed the case that top-down processing is not at all the same as bias confirmation. It is more a theory of how we do perceive than a claim about how we may falsify our perceptions. That being the case, a critic who is fooled and a critic who is not fooled would both be doing their perceiving top down. So even if you could prove that a critic were fooled, what would it prove about your theory.

Top-down processing is a neurophysiologic phenomena. It has almost nothing to do with consciousness and nothing to do with bias confirmation.

I don’t see where I ever stated a “theory” and my " goal" is merely to explain the impact of top-down processing in wine appreciation to a group of wine makers and writers.

As I’m trying to explain, I would certainly like to be able to back up anything I say. Don’t know if what’s in the articles I cited give sufficient evidence. I don’t want to be accused of slandering Parker or Meadows.