I’m starting a new thread on this subject and not drifting a current one.
I have attended a couple of Double Blind tastings and no longer waste my time with them, but I admit that’s a personal thing. Here’s why:
The wine geeks that set up the tastings of 12-15 wines always want to go over the top. They’d have (blind)a Reisling followed by a malbec, then a stickie followed by a sav blanc to a cab,etc. and sit around and discuss how “pure” the tasting was and how double blind is the only true way of reviewing a wine. Neither knowing what the wine or varietal is. I found both tasting non informative and often had touble just getting my palate cleansed between wines.
I think Matt Kramer, in discussing blind tastings several years ago, best described the situation. He said " I can make any poor wine taste great, and any great wine taste poorly, just by how I place it in the tasting line up." For me this amplifies in double blinds.
WS typically sticks to Regions and even growths when doing their tasting, i.e., they only do 1st Growths with other 1st Growths with an occasional 2nd thrown it. If Laube is doing RRV pinots, he doesn’t have Santa Barbara ones in the same flight, and he knows beforehand he’s tasting RRV pinot.
On a slightly different drift, I’ve read several threads where people seem to believe that things like terrior should never be considered in tastings and reviews, it’s only what’s in the bottle that matters. The old “visiting the winery/region is a waste of time and money, just show me what’s in the bottle” crowd.
I’d like to hear what everyone else believes! What have been your experiences with double blinds, especially for you that like to worship at that shrine.
If everyone LOVES wine #4 and a consensus opinion is that it is the best California Zinfandel they have ever tasted and the group score average is 98.4572 but it turns out to be a Barolo, does that mean it should get a 60/100 or is it still “great wine”?
If one tastes 15 zins, and a barolo gets thrown in, I believe that the novelty of the barolo will grab everyone, and people react, typically positively, to that novelty.
If you have room full of brunettes and a blond or red head come in, they’ll typically get great reviews and looks. But in a line of blonds they may be just so so.
Personally, I find double blind tasting fun, challenging and very humbling. I’m not very good at guessing, but I do find myself getting better at it the more I do double blind. It’s very easy for me to call the wine as I taste it. If a $15 Chinon tastes better than a $50 CdP, so be it. I write my impressions of what I am tasting, no preconceptions as I don’t know what I am tasting. We do try to group them with older/softer and younger/bigger styles just so that a new young Cab doesn’t blow away an older more nuanced Burgundy. I love double blind and find this my preferred method of tasting. Makes for great conversation during the tasting/dinner as well as we all discuss what we think about each wine and why we feel it is what we think it is. Just my .02 cents though.
Gordon - While I agree with you that double blind tastings can go over the top and can be particuarly a drag when the whole purpose seems to be to pull a “gotcha” and fool everyone, I actually like the format. We have a regular poker group that gets together monthly and the winner from the previous month puts the line up together and serves it blind -sometimes with a stated theme, but often served without any prior info. Everyone does put some thought into flighting, but there is often quite a spread of regions and varietals over the 12-16 wines we generally try. While I am generally awful at picking up what the wines specifically are, I do find the format lets me just focus on what I like or dislike about the wines without bringing any “label baggage” into my perceptions. Maybe once every 30 wines or so, I will correctly find something very familiar about the wine that will evoke a region or producer, and when that happens not only is it a nice ego boost, but I find it really cements that impression in my mind for future tastings. It helps that it is a good group of guys who don’t take themeselves, the wines or the poker all that seriously so there isn’t pressure around the tasting.
On your second point, everything impacts your perception of a glass of wine - the location, people you are with, mood, music on the stereo etc., so I don’t buy the idea it is only about what is in the bottle. Some of my favorite recent experiences have been tasting wines with winemakers, so when I open a bottle of their wine I am totally prejudiced by my experience with them and the great thing about that prejudice is that the wines do taste better as a result!
I’ve never heard of anyone organizing a tasting like that. And I can’t imagine why anyway would.
Here’s my idea of a double blind tasting: One member of our group brought all the wine and told us nothing about the wines. We tasted through 13 wines and discussed them throughout. Most of us recognized that many of the wines were Napa Cabs, but some bottles seemed like Bordeaux. My theory was that the guy who set up the tasting was making a point about Cali vs. Bord. One reason I thought this is that I could not believe these were 13 vintages of the same wine. None of them tasted 15 or so years old. We all made our guesses. Some of us were close. It was 13 vintages of Ch. Montelena Estate Cab. No single tasting has done more to cement my impression of a wine or a winery. I now buy this wine every year on futures.
Another example, one guy served us pairs of wine double blind. Each pair had a point: Two examples were 1986 Grange vs. a top vintage of La Chappelle and 1989 Pichon Baron vs. 1987 Dominus. I correctly guessed that the last pair was a Bordeaux vs. a Cali, but I had them backwards. I learned a lot from that. From the first pairing, I learned that Grange is among the great expressions of Syrah in the world. Another pairing involved a wine that most of us thought was a bad bottle. Slowly, one guy said “No, this bottle isn’t bad. It’s just in that horsey phase that St. Juliens get into in mid-life. If I had to bet, I would say this is Gruaud-Larose, probably the 1982.” And he was right! From that I learned that some people are better tasters than I am!
If you’re idea of a double blind tasting is the mess you describe, then I fully understand why you have the opinion you have. If someone takes the time to organize a double blind tasting with some thinking about it, then I think they are the best kind of tastings.
Gordon, the issue you seem to be having is more of a controlled environment. Generally with blind tasting (aside from someone brown bagging one for all to guess at the start) we always run a theme. Red Burg, red Zin, CDP, whatever, and then there is some times a ringer.
With hap hazard tasting, you are right, there is virtually nil to be learned.
With regards to Roberto’s comment though, it’s going to happen where a wine is stylistically out of whack. Nothing that can be done there. So many of the highest rated wines these days are out of whack (not to pick on any one, but Casanova di Neri comes to mind) seem to logically defy the “style” set forth by the zone. Does it stop it from being a good wine? No, but it sure doesn’t taste like 98% of it’s peers.
Tastings are fun and I almost always come away with some insight. But they are worse than useless for choosing wines to drink and cellar, unless tastings are the way you usually drink your wines.
I always get a kick out of people that describe themselves as experienced “tasters.” I don’t think I really started to appreciate wine until I stopped being a wine taster and became a wine drinker.
Great question and probably a matter of opinion. Does the wine taste good, absolutely from it’s group rating.
I just like a bit more varietal correctness. I don’t want a pinot that tastes like a syrah, or a syrah (or barolo in your case) that tastes like a zin. Other people find this fascinating and go after those sorts of wine.
In the end, when it comes to awarding points to a wine, not determining whether or not you think it taste good, I think varietal correctness should count for something. It’s kind of the dog show sort of thing. In best of breed and/or show, dogs are judged on how that dog lines up with what the breed is supposed to be, not how a shih zu looks standing next to a german shephard.
To me saying that the barolo is the best zin I ever tasted, is like saying that the shih zu is the best german shephard I ever owned.
I don’t typically trust scores/ratings in double blind tastings. Looking forward to see what everyone thinks. Also, how that decide the order of line-up in the double blinds!
I love blind tastings and like double-blind sometimes. I never do or attend formal double-blind tastings but when we get together at friends’ homes it is the norm that a few double blind wines will show up. Those that brought them will usually insert them when and where they want to in the mix of other wines we are drinking. I learn a ton from tasting both blind and double-blind so it’s both fun and educational for me. So my suggestion is don’t stop tasting double-blind, just stop hanging with the idiots that can’t format their tastings properly.
When I taste double blind, it is almost always one bottle at a time. There is no influence from other bottles and I am not trying to rank if I like one better than the next. I just want to decide if I like it, how much I like it and what do I think it is.
As to Matt Kramer’s comment that is easily solved. If you are tasting blind just mix the bottles up randomly. No outside influence then.
Gordon – I think double blind tastings have their place.
I’m in a group that meets every other week where everyone brings a bottle in a brown bag. We taste dry whites, reds, then sweet wines. Each member can suggest that his wine go next, so the problem of one wine showing up another is mitigated. I love the format: It focusses your attention and keeps you humble.
Still, I wouldn’t want to do all my tasting that way, and I don’t think it would be a good format for critics to use.
I’m in two other groups with other formats: One where we taste eight wines of one type (usually one region and vintage, but sometimes verticals), single blind (with a list but we don’t know which is which) and another where we meet over dinner and where the wine is usually open for all to see and evaluate with that knowledge.
Each format has its merits, and I like tasting in all three.
I agree with everyone saying that a true double blind is a waste of time, but a focused blind tasting is the absolutely best way to taste and learn. I prefer to do it in a casual environment and without many wines and gradually reveal clues.
For example: We might start with 2003 BDX as a theme and everyone bags around that. Then, after we’ve tasted through, maybe we release the list of wines being served or how many R or L bankers there are. Then, we all maybe take guesses. Great fun and extremely humbling and very educational.
what kind of tasting do you have where you know the theme (CA Cabs, for example) but do not know which labels are being poured?
what kind of tasting do you have where you know the theme (CA Cabs, for example) AND you have a list of the labels being poured, but do not know which label is being poured at any given time?
I always thought the first one was “double-blind” and the second one was “single-blind”, but after reading the comments here, I now realize I am wrong about that.
You’ve conflated two things - the methodology and the choice of wines. if your issue is that people seem to mix wines hapazardly, following a Riesling with a Malbec, that’s got nothing to do with the double blind format and everything to do with the choice and positioning of the wines. Simply put it’s not the format, it’s the organizer.
One of the more revealing double blind tastings my groups done was a couple of years ago when we did a “1997 reds from around the world, 10 years on” tasting. Everyone knew what wines were in the lineup but the person who bagged them and the person who labeled them were different (and the labeller was not around when the wines were bagged). There was a Chave Hermitage and an Aldo Conterno Cicala Barolo in there… and guess what most of us did not identify them correctly including people who routinely collect each. It was very instructive and we deliberately didn’t try to determine a ‘best’ wine (silly concept…).
What this did, though, was eliminate the 'oh this is a Barolo, there should be tar and roses let me find it" bias that non-blind tastings see. Doing this double blind eliminated ‘tells’ from the person who bagged and labeled a wine - no one could give away that the person was guessing right or wrong since no one knew.
For my own enjoyment, I like hosting single blind tastings (tasters know the varietal(s) but not the individual wines) when I have several wines of a type that I want to try. When I host and provide the wines, I’ll know the wines but I won’t know the order.
I like double blind tastings as well, but I tend to take them a little less seriously. I find my less wine-berserked friends like double blind tastings because there are distinctive visual/aromatic/taste differences between the different varietals/blends. In a single blind tasting of pinots, the differences can be much more nuanced and hard to identify for beginners.
If a critic were to review blind, I would want the critic to review single blind: grouped by varietal or geographic region. Ideally I would also want to limit the number of wines per round.
Now this is just foolish. I have no problem progressing from whites to reds or dry to sweet.
I understand Matt’s point, but in double blind with random wines and orders…as long as they’re relatively similar weight, style, and sweetness (flighted), I don’t see the problem.
Worship? I’m a huge believer and it’s incredibly effective for removing bias, but it’s only a useful tool if you use it wisely. Is a hammer an effective hand tool?..not if you use it like a screwdriver.
Double blind tastings have their place if you are only doing 2-3 wines that are very different from each other, evaluating them purely on their own merits, or in flights of several wines of very similar character. They can be fine if used as a tool to sharpen tasting skills or try a few wines abesnt of bias (such as the Sierra Carache throwdown a ways back), but it more about analysis and concentration than enjoyment. A hodge podge of wines thrown together as discussed at the beginning is completely useless because you invite way too many variables into the equation to make any sort of purposful evaluation.
Personally, I think WAY too many really great wines get put into double blind tastings. If you only have a few bottles of something really epic, you wouldn’t have any chance to savor it. I can see doing an evaluative double blind tasting of different areas of Burgundy, for example, and have it be extremely useful. But I would be irritated if a DRC was in it instead of something else, and I wasn’t able to enjoy it on its own.