" A study has shown that tasters can’t even really tell the difference between a glass of red and a glass of white. Another study has shown that people don’t do better than a coin flip in guessing whether a wine is cheap or expensive. Another study has shown that people, unaware of a wine’s price, might actually enjoy more expensive wines less.
“We observe that people’s preferences in blind tastings are actually inversely correlated with price, i.e., on average, when they don’t know what they’re drinking, people prefer cheaper wines,” Goldstein said."
It’s a new article by a site that does sophisticated analysis on politics and sports. But there are many thing wrong with this piece I don’t know where to start. I thought I’d throw it out and let others have at it.
Okay, now that I actually read it, it’s not a bad article. It has CHARTS!
This is more about the auction market than about what you snipped-out of it. I wasn’t aware that Latour went down in the rankings.
It’s a pretty good article. The part about people not being able to tell is mostly true. Vast majority can’t.
and if u tell someone a bottle cost a lot they enjoy it more isn’t news either. That why u taste some type of blind to evaluate without bias.
I still go back to the time I gave a waitress, who drank low priced wine, a taste of a Saxum and her eyes almost pooped out of her head with an “OH. MY. GOD.” So yes, anyone can taste the difference as long as the quality leap is big enough.
Seems like this article says as much about 538 as it does about wine. Smart Money magazine did stuff like this, esp in the last half of their life. I loved the idea of 538 when they first started, and it’s been occasionally insightful…but less so lately.
I don’t know what 538 is but it’s a useless article unless you’ve paid no attention to wine for the past 10 years.
The “studies” are old news. Who cares if tasters in a grocery store who don’t drink wine can’t tell the difference between one wine and another? It’s like saying there’s no such thing as a good or bad musician because the average person is tone deaf and consequently makes stars out of tone-deaf wanna-be singers like Nicki Minaj, Justin Bieber, etc.
And collectors are not necessarily better tasters than the random guy in the store. Some are, some aren’t. Collecting has nothing to do with acuity of taste.
It’s a real shame. They started out with a great premise, and their coverage of politics is still very good, but most of the rest of the site has degenerated to the sort of clickbait garbage you expect from Buzzfeed. So goes the Internet in 2016.
This is precisely the point, and why these pieces are so frustrating to people like WBers. There is a consistent commentary that, just because the average Joe doesn’t prefer expensive wine to cheap wine in a blind tasting, expensive wine isn’t better. That makes no sense, and indeed, the dynamic applies to just about everything–food, literature, art, etc. The average Joe will prefer Chicken Soup for the Soul to Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, but of course that doesn’t mean Chicken Soup for the Soul is better or of comparable quality, or that there is no objective quality difference between the two. It’s just that, in wine as in literature as in music, experience and acumen are rewarded.
I haven’t really followed Nate’s work since he quit doing hardcore baseball analysis; I only loosely followed his work at 538 initially. The guy is damn smart and capable of great things. It’s unfortunate if that’s really what it’s become it’s really unfortunate.
I’m a fan of 538. They try to use data to understand the world and tell interesting stories. Sometimes their stuff is really fascinating. Sometimes they miss the mark.
On this story, I just ignored the “can’t tell the difference in taste” part – the problems with that have been pretty well hashed out in this thread.
The analysis of price vs. age for Bordeaux really bothered me though. This looks like it should be a reasonable analysis. Hey, a curve! Lots of data points! But the problem is that comparing pricing across vintages using all the data ignores the distribution of wines available for sales through auction at any given time. For newer vintages you have lots of different producers available. For older vintages you have many fewer options, and they tend to cluster among the higher end producers that age better and are more in demand. For very old vintages (more than 35 years), you have extremely limited volume and extreme rarity that drives prices. So this doesn’t feel like a careful POV of a real apples-to-apples comparison that is actually useful.
For me the more interesting chunk of data is for the period 1975 - 2010. This looks fairly flat – so over 35 years “aged” wine doesn’t seem to be more expensive than the new stuff. And if you dig into the data (which I don’t have) and really look at similar sets of wine over time, I’d bet you would find all kinds of fun things out that would actually be actionable for wine lovers.
The article has some inaccuracies, as well as misses some facts too.
What I don’t get is that in the last paragraph he basically torpedoed the whole article by talking about wine he makes with his dad in the Midwest and he thinks it’s tremendous. Considering most of the readers are drinking $16 bottles or less, they probably echo his last statement more, and think people buying auction wine are out of their minds.
The last four paragraphs, which includes the stuff Seth quoted up top, are total bullshit. All this stuff:
But wait a second. Isn’t this all bullshit? A study has shown that tasters can’t even really tell the difference between a glass of red and a glass of white. Another study has shown that people don’t do better than a coin flip in guessing whether a wine is cheap or expensive. Another study has shown that people, unaware of a wine’s price, might actually enjoy more expensive wines less.
“We observe that people’s preferences in blind tastings are actually inversely correlated with price, i.e., on average, when they don’t know what they’re drinking, people prefer cheaper wines,” Goldstein said.
is horseshit. Most people will also prefer coca-cola or a milkshake to a great Bordeaux in a taste test, does this also show wine quality is meaningless? The ‘people can’t tell the difference between red and white’ is urban myth, the study people reference on that showed nothing of the kind.
Anyone who has ever popped a high quality wine on a non-geek knows how often people are impressed by it, without even any buildup. A lot of the difference between high-end and low-end wine has to do with fruit concentration and smoothness anyway, which people naturally like.
It looked flat because, as you point out, the variance in prices from 1975-2010 was dwarfed by the prices of the few high-end trophy wines from legendary early 60s vintages. In any case vintage price variation is more important than just age in determining wine prices, as we all know. As a piece of data analysis this article was almost worthless.
From a data perspective I would truly love to get hold of data from Cellartracker, match it up with auction prices, and have at it. But doubt Eric makes that kind of thing available to civilians.
![[popcorn.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/1/1ca9f29573458cca2424a66a50d6c1261081dd3e.gif "[popcorn.gif]"){kind=small}
![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
