Quandt thinks that pros like Robert Parker — or your friend who always makes a big show over the wine list at a restaurant — are essentially making it all up. Or, like some storefront psychics, possibly they think they know what they’re talking about, when in actuality they’ve merely intuited their way into a con.
Ugh. From the first two sentences, it looks like yet another gloating “studies show all wine tastes exactly the same, so wine geeks are fools” BS piece.
I diverge here: “That’s excruciatingly non-helpful if you’ve never tasted either of those things or, more likely, if my perception of cherries isn’t like yours. Because how could it be? Our noses are different. Our brains are different. Your cherry need not be my cherry.”
I think the sensation of “cherry” is based on biochemistry and is a phenomenon related to our experience of the scent/flavor molecules present in cherry. So, even if you do not have a way to sense my ‘inner cherry experience,’ we have both shared the general ‘cherry experience’ and can identify the neuro/physio/biochemical experience of a wine based on prior experience - whether the inner sensations are identical, or not. We have our shared exposures in common to use as the conduit for communication.
Whether I say ‘bitter almond’ or ‘Benzaldehyde,’ if I am using a vocabulary of common experience, my observations should be relevant to yours.
Same with color. How do I know your experience of red is the same as mine, yet we can both agree that a specific fire truck or stop sign does appear to be red - by virtue of common language if not common inner experience…
Quantifying the taste of wine is not something that we’ll see any time soon.
We are a long way away from being able to isolate and quantify all of the sensorily important compounds in a given wine.
Even if we could do so, there is no way to extrapolate from “what is in the glass” to “how well this will be liked” since taste is individual. Eventually (many, many years hence) it might be possible to plot our individual subjective preferences against a comprehensive wine analytical panel so that each and every one of us will know how much we will like a given wine even before it is tasted.
Hopefully I’ll be dead before then.
What we CAN quantify is consistency of any taster in the use of a rating scale.
The work is rigorous and time consuming. And I doubt too many professional critics will volunteer for testing.
I’ve always thought it would be interesting, though, to see how well the most well-known critics fare.
The wine economists should talk to some physiologists once in a while. I’ve been part of a tasting group for about 15 years or more and we did blind tastings monthly. The idea was to learn whatever we could and to test ourselves and our assumptions.
Describe your grandmother.
“She’s short, has white hair, slightly bent, has twinkling eyes, etc., etc., etc.”
How is that description different from any other person’s description of his grandmother?
And yet when you walk into a room you can pick her out immediately.
Why?
The human brain is wired to recognize patterns. We accept it when it comes to sight but we question it when it comes to taste? That makes no sense since taste is arguably an even older sense than sight.
Now describe a coconut. We have many things that we can compare it to - size, color, texture, weight, etc. But try to do that with your grandmother without sounding generic. And then try to do it with taste.
It’s really hard to describe the taste of one Cab, then another, then another, than a fourth, fifth sixtieth, hundredth, etc. That doesn’t mean that the human taster can’t discern the differences. It does mean that words are not necessarily sufficient.
And everyone on this forum has different tastes. We have genetic differences and cultural differences and differences in the personalities we’ve chosen to adopt. Some proudly wear the badge that Parker so conveniently bestowed and those people have convinced themselves, and in fact truly do, like wines that others find searingly acidic and fruitless. Others feel differently. I had a friend from Jamaica and she was casually eating her lunch. Another girl asked if she could try it. Of course and the first one gladly shared. But the second girl choked and ran to get water. The food was intolerably hot and spicy for her.
I think people can learn to tell the difference between a badly made wine and a better-made one and that’s about it. I don’t think people will ever agree on what’s a “good” wine and what’s not so good. There are way too many individual variables. It’s why we have the weekly discussion about points and ratings.
“About two decades ago, a bunch of economists at Princeton formed a wine-tasting club.” and more needs to be said? and sex is rated…
I don’t agree.
How do we quantify a reviewer’s subjective end-response to a wine?
I’d rather say that we can perhaps be better about quantifying descriptors, but not ratings.
We are perhaps talking about different things, Anton.
I’m talking about consistency… the degree of reproducibility that critics achieve with regard to the assignation of point scores to wines tasted blind.
We don’t need to quantify a reviewer’s subjective end-response to a wine, as the critics supply that themselves.
Until we can calibrate our noses and tongues, and I mean scientifically calibrate things like we do with a pH meter in the winery, all attempts of accurately quantifying the taste of wine are crap.
Now quantifying one’s experience tasting wines, that’s a different story. But we’re fooling ourselves if we think we can really quantify taste.