Ah, another debunk the experts article.
On a related note, a somewhat similar article came out in Slate recently: Why You Should Be Drinking Cheap Wine
FIFY
Even better!
You nicely encapsulated, more eloquently than I would have, my reaction to the article. That said, I do think there’s some general merit to the idea of label, marketing, WB raves, etc. influencing our perception of a given wine.
Cheers,
Jim
That’s a good point. There are different phases we advance through as wine geeks. Once the illusion is broken of price equating to quality, or a critic’s snapshot being infallible and objective, the bias erodes away.
I’ve been around people showing their red-white expectation bias. Wines such as Syrah can show peach notes, for example, and a lot of people don’t ID it because it’s not in their expected wheelhouse. But just because they don’t ID it doesn’t mean they aren’t picking up something different. If you point it out, they get it. More importantly, once that lesson is learned, that barrier is down.
Simply because an individual experiences a placebo effect does not mean that a medication does not work. Similarly because we are influenced by our expectations does not mean we can’t perceive reality. Life doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Both expectations and reality occur in conjunction to create our experiences.
Very well said. Expectations certainly affect our tastes. That doesn’t completely negate our experience, though.
Some of the examples in the article are just silly, because they really are a matter of knowledge/ training. I can tell the difference between standard definition and HD in an instant.
That said, I do think wine is a bit different. I think even those who post here are influenced by expectations (as set by label, producer reputation, price level, etc.) more than they think. Would love it if we could organize a huge, board-wide double blind tasting experiment over an extended period of time to see if posters really do prefer board darling producers over less heralded but high-quality producers on a blinded basis, etc.
Here’s a great article on-topic by Clive Coates:
http://www.clive-coates.com/observations/blind-tasting
“The late, great Harry Waugh, once asked if he had ever confused Bordeaux with Burgundy, replied, ‘Not since lunch’.”
I agree with those who point out the differences between people with little knowledge and those with somewhat more. I’ve had people tell me that all wine tastes the same and other people who, tasting blind and not even knowing what they have, correctly guess a producer, or a nearby producer and even the vintage. It comes down to how familiar you are with it, just like recognizing that you’re in the second act of Lady Windermere’s Fan or the third movement of Mozart’s fortieth symphony. Not a parlor trick, just long familiarity and knowledge and a decent memory.
That said, whether or not someone is a “professional” or not is a meaningless distinction. Some judging panels are random, rather like the Iron Chef panels - no particular knowledge at all is required. Other panels are more serious and they first give each judge a triangular test to see how perceptive they really are. They may or may not put the same wine in 2 of the three glasses they give you to try. If you can’t identify which 2 are the same, or if you claim that 2 are the same and all 3 wines are different, you don’t get on the panel.
In blind tastings with a group, the most important thing is that everybody shut up. You DON’T talk about the wine if your goal is to try to figure out what you have. Who wants to hear that someone gets notes of graphite or whatever - keep that all to yourself. Sharing is not helping. Reveal all that later. At our tastings, the rule is you can talk about everything except the wine until all scores are in. So the agreement of the crowd is a variable that needs to be addressed in the studies mentioned. It’s a big problem with the Brochet study - he got these students all together. Should have tested them individually.
Another big problem with the article, or rather with the studies noted, is that the author assumes people correlate price with quality. Again, anyone who knows much about wine will call that for the BS it is. And it’s the problem with the other Brochet study, although that one was probably more accurate for what it reveals about label bias.
Finally, many people really just don’t know. I’ve tasted with MWs and Somms who were completely clueless when confronted with say, some CDPs of high repute and some other wines from similar grapes. Consistently, the people rated the wines they liked as the CdPs or whatever, and just as consistently, they were wrong.
Doesn’t mean they’re not “good” tasters or that the wines were good or bad, just that they didn’t know the wines.
+2. Labels and price can influence us, but there is also a big difference between great wines and plonk.
We’ve all seen that moment in a blind tasting when the wines are revealed, and people begin crawfishing back from their scores, guesses and notes that they gave in the blind tasting towards what they would have said had the wines been tasted non-blind.
“I think [the wine that I would have claimed to like better but gave a low score to] just hasn’t been open long enough – look, now it’s really starting to come into its own.”
“Yes, but this was really a better vintage in Napa than it was in Bordeaux, so the comparison isn’t fair.”
“Blind tasting isn’t a good way to appreciate [the wine I would have claimed to like better but gave a low score to], you have to have it with a different kind of food and over a longer period.”
“If we tried this tasting again 20 years from now, [the wine I would have claimed to like better but gave a low score to] would win hands down.”
“Why the f*** does everyone keep slipping Teixier wines into every blind tasting I attend???” ![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
I fully suport this article and its logical conclusion - everyone (else) should stop buying expensive wines, particularly white Burgandy, Bordeaux and the usual Napa suspects (Screagle, Bond, Maybach, SQN and while we are at it, anything made by TRB). ![[snort.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/b/bdc3944606213c4dca6c1169cf0a166c8bc4f8c9.gif "snort.gif"){kind=small}
Does “knowing” a wine make it better? I suppose being correct in a truly blind tasting about a particular wine being in a particular glass demonstrates that the producer is at a minimum consistent with their product. And to be sure, I can absolutely tell the difference between what I consider to be a good versus a bad wine. I think the real question is can you distinguish a good wine from a great wine? Good versus bad is a useless contest to me, because bad is so obviously bad. But a few $20 or so bottles I’ve had over the years have outpaced $100+ bottles. I did a genuinely blind tasting last year with my family using a $15 bottle of KJ Vintner’s Reserve Cab, a $35 Ridge Cab blend, and a $70 GdL BV Cab. The KJ was #1 for everyone, and the BV was #3 for half. They were all properly decanted and served blind (poured from decanters that I didn’t number). The true test would be to do a similar test where the drinkers don’t know what bottles or perhaps even what varietal is being poured. I knew these were Cali cabs so it wasn’t truly blind.
Lastly, I definitely believe in the power of the mind over the body, and your brain has a remarkable ability to trick you into perceiving something that is totally false. Tell someone at a wine tasting that you smell pencil shavings in the wine and 9/10 of them will say they smell it too. Not to be nice, but because you put the memory of that smell, and everyone has that memory, at the front of the mind.
These are the same arguments used to tell people that they can’t hear the difference between music played on audiophile equipment and a basic stereo, or the handling/ride on a Camry versus a BMW, etc. In common is the basic need to support a specific economic or other philosophy - “you were right for not spending the money/time on this esoteric subject and you are not missing out. In fact, you are smarter than those wine drinkers/car drivers/audiophiles/etc. I am even smarter for telling you about it.”
These are the same arguments used to tell people that they can’t hear the difference between music played on audiophile equipment and a basic stereo, or the handling/ride on a Camry versus a BMW, etc.
Yep. And actually for the most part, I believe that people can’t tell the difference. A lot of it depends on what you’re paying attention to. I used to think that all bicycles were pretty much the same except for size. Since I keep having them stolen, I’ve had to go thru a few and each time I get a new one, I notice a difference. Not even so much because I was paying attention to it but because I was used to one thing and the new one just felt different. Now I totally get what people mean when they say a particular bike is “faster” than another, handles differently, etc.
Cars are pretty much the same. Even tho I’m from the Motor City, I’m pretty much totally indifferent to them, but I get that there’s a group of people who know and appreciate the differences. Same with audio, pianos, shoes, pretty much anything there is. Since many of my interests center around food, I have a real hard time taking people seriously if they say they like chocolate and then eat a Snickers bar or some other such crap that a)only has a minimal amount of chocolate involved and that’s in the coating, which b)isn’t chocolate at all but is some kind of waxy brown substance. In the wine world, those are the people who I imagine would be subject to label bias. They don’t know, haven’t paid attention, and really can’t tell. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t many people who are very much able to distinguish things.
And the white/red thing is really interesting. I’ve done a few of those with black glasses which are also supposed to fool people. They don’t. At least if you know a little bit about wine. Every time we’ve done those, anyone who was relatively knowledgeable correctly identified the whites and the reds. I haven’t done the food dye trick but I’d love to try that one too. If you can’t tell that you’re drinking the same wine side by side, well, that’s kind of interesting.
Because we all know that there is only one thing that can possibly influence the taste of a wine.
The shape of the glass! ![[rofl.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/a/a7452fcd8e675af869f8da01174474a545b03944.gif "rofl"){kind=small}
Do people actually say this? That’s insane. I don’t know a lot about cars, but there is a clear visceral, physical difference in driving cars in each of these classes.
The article doesn’t say that none of us know anything, though that seems to be what many took away from it. It says that expectation bias is real. I might get fooled by someone who put the Lafite in the Lynch bottle and vice versa without telling me, but I’m pretty sure I’d be able to identify which was which if both were presented single blind. These are two entirely different phenomena.
The real message is not that we can’t usually tell “good” wine from “bad,” but that we are not objective beings. You can put people in different surroundings and get different results. How many times have we had the experience of enjoying food or drink in a charming place, and having the same food or drink later which disappoints? And, yes, as someone else joked, put a wine in a different glass and get different results. A group of oenology undergraduates is probably the most likely bunch in the world to try and show the authority figure that they know what is better about what appears to be the more expensive wine.
Then there is the magic of personal preference. The article and its tests are deeply flawed, but we are also fooling ourselves if we think wine judging is ever completely objective.
Somewhat on topic… True blind tasting can be very humbling, IMO. I can do fairly well with a certain level of context, but in a 100% blind scenario I am often way wrong.
I do 100% agree that expectations are a key part though- More often than not, they lead to let-downs for me though. (as in, I expected more from this wine, this is a disappointing showing).
I think the one thing this article is missing is the correlation to the moon-phase.