over the weekend i had several friends over for a blind wine tasting. the typical ra-ra with appetizers and the whole nine yards (I let the lady do her hosting thing every so often). the theme was north america over $100 wine tasting (I brought a QC for what its worth). Now I don’t know about you, but I have a lot of friends who are wines snobs, and you know, I don’t think they don’t know shit about wine. so I brought as a ringer, the 07 Avalon napa cab, you know the one that costs $10. home field advantage makes a huge difference, so as the host I slipped it in while no one was looking.
…at the end of the night as I tallied up the votes… first place, by a wide margin was the 07 napa avalon. beating harlan, screagle, hillside…
anyway, I could go on and on, but why. when all the wines are blind, and everything is equal, the truth will be told (no this is not X-files!).
anyway, I rated this wine 4th, giving it 84 points.
Any notes John? Sounds interesting. I remember when a few years back RMP gave the Avalon some love and I got one to try; sorely dissapointed with that wine. But some people liked it. Then there was the different batches solution.
Did they threaten to lynch you when they discovered the evil trick you had played on them?
Not knowing your guests, it’s hard to say. But I’ll bet the Avalon was probably much smoother, with less acidity/tannin/structure than the other wines. If so, its slurpability factor may have been the reason.
Did you supply one of the other ‘heavy hitters’? Quite a price difference between yours and the others, eh?
No real surprise at the results - but I wonder about the others in attendance. You say they are ‘wine snobs’ - have you tasted with them before? Are they all about labels - or does ‘the juice inside the bottle’ seem to matter?
Ive thrown two buck chuck into blind tastings before. No one loved them but no one complained at the quality either. I also once snuck a Kendal Jackson Chard into a white burgundy tasting and people liked it.
I don’t think there is anyone who isnt effected by labels to at least a small degree.
I put a 2 Buck Chuck Cab into a blind tasting of young Cali Cabs. I was impressed by how much my group was not fooled. The comments were like “Not defective, but nothing there.”
Just curious, was it the Avalon Napa Valley or the Avalon California? I tried both a while back (I think they were 2006’s), and I thought the Napa was really pretty decent, but the California was not good at all.
Out of curiosity, how many wines were there and did you know the order of the blinded wines? I could imagine a scenario where the person who randomly numbered the bags was not present when the bottles were bagged so that everyone is tasting single blind.
There are certainly valid reasons why this could happen, similar to why Charles Shaw Chard won some major wine competition a few years ago. The Avalon likely was different than the other wines and stood out, much like a citrusy stainless steel Chard up against oaky, ML sure lees Chards. Plus it was probably built to drink well young while the other wines were aiming for something different–big structure if not aging capacity.
Still, there aren’t many excuses to be had. These are wines built to compete–they’re meant to be drunk in this environment. They should win. If you’re going to spend $100+ on a bottle, it ought to stand out.
I suppose the pros can tell the differences with some consistency (though they rarely taste blind and if they do it’s usually in narrow peer groups). I suppose the moral of the story is not to become that good as the QPR wine will taste as good if not better.
Sounds about right. 2BC is meant to be an easy to drink wine with no obvious flaws. The lack of structure should give it away amongst more serious wines. But I think it would fare well against $10 grocery store wines, Aussie plonk and other industrial grape alcohol products.
Very interesting. I have had disappointing experiences with a lot of my more expensive cellar wines versus some cheaper languedocs, bordeauxs, and superstuscans. That said, most of the time at tastings like these I have been fooled almost never b/c the texture or complexity usually gives it away. Maybe I’ve just had the wrong ringers in the lineup.
I was at a tasting where someone not only inserted it blind, but talked it up (and truely believed what he was saying too [middle-finger.gif] ) that this was a fantastic, incredible wine. Even with the sell job, we took a sniff and tossed it out immediately.
I’m not surprised at all by these results, and I’ve been considering doing a more nuanced version of this “trickeration” but with the participants knowing that they’re being challenged to figure out, blind, which one costs more, and trying to control for as many variables as possible. “North American” opens the field up to a huge number of wines of different styles. (I’d like to know more details, if you don’t mind sharing… how many wines were tasted, were they decanted, over how much time, glasses, etc). So, I think to start we’re going to limit it to 6 wines between $10 - 100 ($10 - 20 - 40 - 60 - 80 - 100) all of the same varietal and all from the same AVA; hopefully all the same vintage, too.
I am glad you posted this because that was exactly the same experience I had when someone did this to me about 3 years ago, even to the point of him talking it up. He poured it blind against a $20 dollar or so Paso cab that was not very good. But the 2BC was undrinkable from the start. Syrupy sweet on the nose a taste that matched. My wife describes these kinds of wines as one that will give you a headache after one glass and I had to agree with her. Neither of us finished our pours. Since I had never had 2BC before but had heard that it was a decent wine, I was surprised by how bad it was. I have never tasted it since and have no desire to do so. There are plenty of lower priced wines that can show ell in a blind tasting, but from my one taste of it, I don’t think 2BC is one of them.
Similar situation - tasting in our local wine shop on April 1 several years ago, but not really suspecting anything was up, the proprietor had swapped bottles between a $35 Merlot and a 2BC. Merlot is not at all our thing (and yes this was before Sideways) but we were surprised that the supposed 2BC wasn’t bad. The $35 bottle, I took one sip and started thinking, how shall I handle this politely, while my wife was already pouring into the spit bucket and telling the proprietor, “worst wine you’ve ever poured!” Ouch!
No doubt, labels matter to some people. However, not everybody and true wine lovers I think are more than happy to find a great QPR. I’ve found in blind tastings that smoother, lower tannin, easy to understand wines with good berry & vanilla flavors are on average crowd pleasers, especially with less experienced tasters, and the more complex wines are more controversial, leaving some loving it and some hating it.
When I say wine snobs, I should clarify a little more. These are friends who like to drink wine, pretend to know more about wine then everyone else (it can become a pissing contest at times) and like to show off their trophy bottles. Don’t get me wrong. They know what they like and they like what they know (ala peter gabriel) and we always have good wine to drink whenever we go to the others house.
Yes, I did bring a more expensive bottle, a 2007 Quilceda creek. even with a 12 hour decant it was not enough. anyway, it was the $10 napa valley avalon. Being the host it was easy to slip it in as nobody really counts the bottles. It did stick out a little as being more fruit forward than the rest. But I gotta tell ya, there were other bottles that showed more heat and more jammy fruits than it. It was just in a sweet spot. I’m sure if we had opened all the bottles and given them the decant they needed, it might have changed the results. I did have several decanters to use if people wanted and told them to decant at home before they came to get their wine in a good place.
it was just one of those time when the stars align just the right way. I like the avalon and drink it midweek all the time. for the price it is a great qpr, hence the reason I put it in. the nice thing was nobody was snobbish or made excuses. others said they were going to go and buy some to try out at home (not sure why. I guess my house does strange things to wines). so all in all it was a fun, productive and educational experience. last year when we did this same event someone did bring a 2 buck chuck. now that was not a hard wine to pick out at all!
I don’t think it’s a matter of who is a better or worse taster to get duped by a far cheaper bottle. This isn’t some truism or mechanical process like death without oxygen, but rather a function of perception and open to statistical variation. Naturally there will be some people out there who have hypersensitivity and can pick out flaws that may vett the ringer from the group. But by and large, the tasters in the group were expecting $100/wine, and their minds calibrated expectations as such. The only factual numbers printed on a bottle are the ABV and quantity. Everything else is open for debate.
I can’t find the MIT graduate study that looked at this, but the conclusion was that price and quality as measured by score were weakly correlated whereas price and per-acre yield were. Supply and demand in the field played a larger role than what ended up in the bottle. Which, if you think about it, makes a lot of sense. Someone far smarter than myself can probably come up with a way to arb this opportunity.
Every 2BC I’ve ever had was so bad I don’t see how anyone could mistake it for something other than absolute garbage. As soon as you open it you can smell it across the room - hot syrupy nastiness.
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