Tag Archives: wine tasting

“Trust Your Palate” is Bad Advice!

07 Monday Aug 2017

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I can't hear youI feel a rant coming on.

Probably the most ubiquitous piece of advice offered by wine educators and wine writers to novice wine lovers is “always trust your palate”.

This is the worst piece of advice you could give anyone. Would you tell a med student or a freshman engineering student to always trust their instincts? Trusting instincts can be a good thing but only after the “instinct” has been honed to something worthy of trust.

Now granted mistakes in wine tasting don’t have the dire consequences that medical or engineering mistakes have. The worst that can happen if you’re a novice wine drinker trusting your palate is that you will learn nothing from more experienced wine drinkers. It’s your loss; no one else is put at risk. But it is a loss nevertheless.

“Always trust your palate” assumes your current preferences and abilities are fine as they are and need no improvement. It assumes there is nothing to be learned from anyone else, no wider perspective to be achieved, no patterns out there to be discovered. Whatever it is your feeble powers of discernment reveal they must be correct just because they’re yours. That’s not only dumb; it’s arrogant.

None of the people giving this advice really believe it; if they did they would never have acquired the wine expertise they are so diligently preventing others from acquiring.

When I began to be fascinated by wine, my consuming thought was that  others were getting so much more out of a wine than I. While others were reporting heady aromas and textures and fine distinctions between varietals,  I was tasting a generic grapey flavor with all wines tasting basically the same. Had I trusted my palate I would have been forced to conclude they were hallucinating.

So do not trust your palate. Instead, assume that people with expertise might actually have something to teach you.  Assume your abilities are too unformed to deserve your full trust. Recognize that the more perspectives you gain on something the better you will understand it. Trust the learning process, not your palate.

The Decline of Blends and Nature’s Way

03 Monday Jul 2017

Posted by in Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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blending wineDespite the historical importance of blending wine, especially in Bordeaux, and the current popularity of red blends on the supermarket shelves, increasingly among the wine cognoscenti, wines from a single vineyard, a single block, a single clone, even a single barrel are popular. Winemakers today are less inclined to show off their blending expertise and would rather showcase the distinctive characteristics of a single source, especially the vineyard, unsullied by outside influence.

Is this a fad or a more or less permanent trend? It’s hard to say. No doubt the wine world is fraught with style changes—witness the reduced use of oak in Chardonnay or lower alcohol levels in Cabernet in recent years. It may be that we will tire of the whole fascination with the vineyard and return to the idea of the winemaker as the mad mixer of many influences creating a whole larger than the sum of its parts.

But, on the other hand, perhaps what we have discovered is that nature, once set in the proper direction, can produce greater differentiation on its own. Perhaps we get more differences by letting the ensemble of environmental effects take their own course rather than trying to direct them through conscious intent. If so, the current fascination with single vineyard wines will only accelerate.

In the end it’s about creating difference and nature may be more creative than we think.

A Neuroscientist on Wine

15 Thursday Jun 2017

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neuroenologyNeuroscientist Gordon Shepherd, author of Neurogastronomy, has a new book out entitled Neuroenology: How the Brain Creates the Taste of Wine (Columbia University Press, $25). Neurogastronomy was fascinating. I haven’t gotten to the new book yet but Harvey Steiman has a brief interview in which Shepherd makes several interesting points.

Shepherd thinks you have to swallow wine to get a full picture of its flavor and has charts on fluid dynamics in the mouth to back up his contention. Steiman disagrees arguing that

“…my experience as a taster tells me otherwise. I get no difference between how a wine tastes to me from actually swallowing it vs. slurping and bubbling it in my mouth, then spitting it out, so that I can stay (relatively) sober.”

I agree with Steiman here. I haven’t noticed that spitting lessens my perception of aromas.

Shepherd thought for a moment. “As you breathe out, those volatiles can carry from the mouth to the back of the nose. With practice maybe you can train your uvula to be open when tasting, and others can’t.”

Perhaps, but I have no such training and Steiman doesn’t mention any either. I think you have to trust the phenomenology here. If we’re not perceiving differences then there are no perceptible differences. Perhaps  this varies from person to person but the scientific hypothesis  needs to be supplemented with subjective reports.

Secondly, Shepherd argues that human beings are not particularly inept when describing aromas and flavors.

His peers get it wrong, he says, when they claim a poor connection between language and what we smell and taste. Our ability to describe what we taste is no different than describing a painting. “We can describe Van Gogh’s paintings of sunflowers. They look like sunflowers,” he says. “But it’s almost impossible to describe anything nonrepresentational in words to someone who hasn’t seen it. The same applies to music.

I wholeheartedly agree with this. In reviews of pop and rock albums the bulk of the commentary is about lyrics. Descriptions of the music when they exist are vague and general. The same with paintings. Discussions focus on what the painting is about. Descriptions of formal elements are either general descriptions of patterns of colors and lines or quickly become metaphorical and allusive.

Describing aesthetic experiences is inherently difficult and wine writers are no worse off than anyone else in that regard.

God Did Not Appear

02 Tuesday May 2017

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Twine godhis past weekend I attended a tasting entitled “Meeting God”. The promised divinity was the 2003 Cheval Blanc, arguably the top Chateau of St. Emilion on Bordeaux’s right bank. Some people who know Bordeaux well claim the 1947 Cheval Blanc is the best wine every made; a 6 litre bottle recently sold at auction for $304,375. 2003, on the other hand, was a scorching, hot vintage that produced wines of uneven quality at best which tempered my expectations a bit. But, you know, God even in a bad vintage ought to be really impressive.

The first impression was impressive indeed. The most opulent, exotic nose I’ve experienced on a Bordeaux showing explosive, delineated blackberry, leather, cocoa, and wet leaves. The palate however didn’t quite deliver. It was crisp, energetic and full of dried fruit but the stiff, dry tannins seemed to dominate the fruit. Over time gravel notes emerged and the midpalate softened as the nose gained a floral aspect but within an hour of aeration it was rapidly fading. A lovely wine but the basis for only a negative theology.

In the wine world I suspect monotheism is not the best ontotheology anyway. Hinduism as practiced in India where every clan, village and occupation has its own deity to worship is more representative of wine deities.

And I did find Enlightenment at this tasting. The elusive, seldom revealed Barolo demiurge made an appearance in the guise of the Poderi Luigi Einaudi “Cannubi” bottling. This 2004 was stunning with a midpalate richness and polished decadence rarely found in Barolo.

But the most divine revelation was how well a Southern California upstart showed amongst these Gods of the wine world. I slipped a Syrah from Ramona (San Diego) into the mix, the Edwards Cellars “mature oak” 2012. It completely stumped the blind tasters including yours truly. We all thought it was Italian with its energy, bright acidity and supple mouthfeel. Jaws dropped when its origin was revealed; it was among the best wines of the evening.

It was probably best that God remained hidden. Nothing good can come of the uninitiated discovering the truth that God is fermented grape juice

Wine Tasters are Smarter

10 Monday Apr 2017

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wine taster 2Making wine is a bit disreputable. People give up respectable jobs with six-figure incomes to root around in vineyards in the morning and clean out barrels in the afternoon, all to make a beverage that most people treat as an alcohol delivery system. Serving and selling wine is even more disreputable. Somms spend years memorizing wine facts just so they can listen to ignorant, unruly customers rant, and for wages that would disappoint an Uber driver. Wine writers are of course the most disreputable since we mostly work for free writing stuff than no one reads. Oh, and all of us in the wine trade are accused of being snobs so we have to tip-toe around social situations hiding our obsession while pretending to be interested in football or film.

The saving grace? We all get to taste wine. And that just makes us smarter, according to neuroscientist Gordon Shepherd:

From the first sight of the wine bottle to manipulating the wine in your mouth and then swallowing it, there is a ‘tremendous range of sensory, motor and central brain systems involved in a wine tasting’, says Yale neuroscientist Gordon Shepherd.

Taken all together, these processes involve more brain activity than listening to music or solving a complicated maths problem, he argues in his book, Neuroenology: How the Brain Creates the Taste of Wine….Molecules in the wine stimulate thousands of taste and odour receptors, according to a report on Shepherd’s book on the NPR website, ‘sending a flavour signal to the brain that triggers massive cognitive computation involving pattern recognition, memory, value judgement, emotion and pleasure’.

Unlike a maths problem – which requires a limited amount of brain activity – assessing wine engages multiple sensory systems, including seeing, smelling and tasting.

Shepherd’s findings come after a study was reported last September in the Frontiers in Human Neuroscience journal, arguing that Master Sommeliers require so much mental agility to make the grade that the sensory part of their brains becomes physically thicker.

I wish I had taken up wine tasting before going to graduate school. Perhaps I would have solved the hard problem of consciousness or the problem of moral knowledge by now.

Mr. Shepherd, by the way, does appear to be quite smart: He knows how to flatter his audience.

Revisiting the Judgment of Paris

30 Thursday Mar 2017

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judgment of parisThe famous (or infamous depending on your point of view) Judgment of Paris has rightly become an iconic moment in wine culture.

In 1976, a British wine merchant, Steven Spurrier, organized a blind tasting competition between high quality French and California wines, both white and red. To Spurrier’s surprise a California wine placed first in each category thus putting California on the wine map.

But there has always been controversy about this competition because in some ways the French wines were set up to lose. The French wines were from bad vintages unlike the California wines, they were too young to drink since the French make their wines to age, there were fewer French wines in the flights, and some of the French stars such as Lafite and Petrus were left out of the line up.

Like many before her, Master of Wine Jennie Cho Lee has taken on the enviable task of organizing a new competition between France and California with scrupulous attention to getting a fair representation from both regions:

The initial greatest hits list from Bordeaux and Napa included 64 legendary wines like Cheval Blanc 1947, Petrus 1961, Le Pin 1982, Heitz Cellars Martha’s Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon 1974 and Ridge Montebello 1978. One theme emerged after analyzing this extensive list: the 1990s was a fantastic decade for both Napa and Bordeaux, which meant if we narrowed our selection to this decade, from 1989 to 1999, then both regions would have a fair shot of winning. Plus, the advantage of having about 20 years of bottle age would benefit the wines from both regions.

The lucky judges were Cho and several Hong Kong based collectors.

Here is the list of wines that ultimately made it into the competition.

1   1991 Dominus Estate Cabernet Sauvignon

2   1990 Chateau Margaux

3   1993 Abreu Madrona Ranch

4   1994 Le Pin

5   1996 Chateau Lafite Rothschild

6   1997 Bryant Family Vineyard Proprietor Grown Cabernet Sauvignon

7   1997 Colgin Herb Lamb Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon

8   1996 Chateau Mouton Rothschild

9   1991 Harlan

10  1990 Chateau Montrose

11  1995 Dalla Valle Maya

12  1990 Chateau La Mission Haut-Brion

13  1995 Araujo Eisele Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon

14  1989 Chateau Haut-Brion

15  1990 Petrus

16  1994 Screaming Eagle

Not a bad tasting—the article doesn’t say who paid for it.

So who won the competition? The scores and final verdict are here. The top five were all French, although the scores were close, with Chateau Haut Brion 1989 taking the top honor and Screaming Eagle 1994 placing 6th, the latter being the best liked Napa wine.

As Cho concludes:

At the pinnacle of quality, Bordeaux seems to have an advantage over Napa. Perhaps it is the older vines, or the multiple century’s head start on wine growing and making, or the cooler growing conditions, or the leaner frame that allows more detail and nuances to express themselves. Whatever the explanation, this blind tasting showed that for pure quality, Bordeaux is inimitable but Napa has its charm. At this extreme, high end of the quality spectrum, the difference between a 97-point or 100-point wine, comes down to personal taste.

This outcome does not surprise me. In my limited experience with wines of this quality when it comes to age-ability Bordeaux cannot be beat. I recently tasted a 1978 Chateau Margaux that was still exquisite. But if this competition were held with recently released wines, my guess is the results would be reversed.

The difference is not only terroir or winemaking skill but culture. The French value age-ability more than Americans do, which is not surprising given the resonance of their history that goes back several centuries.

Why Demystify Wine?

29 Wednesday Mar 2017

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demystify wineOne of the enduring mysteries of this moment in the culture of wine is why almost every wine writer from obscure bloggers to the most widely read critics think their job is to demystify wine. Why?

In most areas of life, mystery is a good thing. Literature, film and science depend on mystery for their very existence. It’s what drives an unfolding plot and the dogged search for an explanation. Religion is loved in part because it lends mystery to life. Yet, when it comes to wine, mystery is something everyone thinks we would be better off without.

Perhaps this zeal to eliminate mystery comes from wine’s position as a cultural symbol of sophistication. Perhaps people feel if they lack wine knowledge they appear unsophisticated so to relieve a sense of collective inadequacy we need to make wine into something ordinary and accessible. But, more likely, wine’s complexity seems like something nearly unmasterable and just too much work. So people involved in the selling of wine try to sell it as something as comprehensible as orange juice or soda.

But this attempt to demystify wine betrays the secret of all motivation–the fun is in the mystery, not the mastery. One of the loveliest facts of life is that the more you learn, the more there is to learn. Learning increases a sense of wonder because it expands the facts on which to build horizons. That is surely true of wine knowledge.

Wine is phantasmagorical, constantly mutating, reacting to geographical and environmental conditions, and changing shape depending on who you are, when you drink, where you drink and with whom. And always with the sense that there is something else there to be uncovered. Demystification means knowing exactly what your getting. Wine is fun because it can never be reduced to a set of fixed characteristics that one could simply know.

All those confusing labels, exotic locales, varying vintages, and proliferating varietals are stage setting for the unexpected and the astonishing. To demystify it is a crime.

Distinguishing Cheap Wine from Expensive Wine

06 Monday Mar 2017

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cheap-vs-expensive-wine-300x216I suspect that most people who drink wine regularly think they are able to distinguish expensive wine from the cheap stuff. But there are numerous studies like this one that show the average wine consumer can’t do so in a blind tasting. This is not surprising. The relationship between wine quality and price is not straightforward—there is a loose correlation but with lots of exceptions. Price often has more to do with supply and demand than the intrinsic quality of the wine.

But more importantly, wine is a vague object, with features difficult to discern. The properties of fine wine are not simple sensations but involve judgments about complexity, finesse, and harmony that require the discernment of relationships between multiple sensations that experts and connoisseurs  spend years learning to appreciate.

It is strange that anyone would expect the average consumer to reliably identify quality wine. We don’t have that expectation in the arts or music. Most “average” art lovers prefer Kincade to Pollock, and Katie Perry is far more popular than Arvo Part. Enjoyment and quality are only loosely correlated.

So what’s the average wine consumer to do about this?

The good news is that learning to distinguish quality wine from cheap wine is really just a matter of gaining experience. So drink more wine. What’s so hard about that? But in fact it’s not just drinking more but drinking more thoughtfully that builds competence. Start paying more attention to what you drink and note the differences. Compare wines side by side and try to describe the nuances. If you’re on a budget that’s no problem. Start out with cheaper wines until you get good at detecting differences and then gradually move into higher price tiers keeping in mind that price isn’t necessarily an indicator of quality.

Or alternatively, just buy really expensive wine and don’t worry about it. Studies show the higher the price of a wine, the more we enjoy it. Even if you can’t tell good wine from bad  you will persuade yourself of the quality of the costly wine. Your pleasure will be based on an illusion rather than genuine quality but caring about reality is so, well, last year.

The Mind Plays Tricks

06 Monday Feb 2017

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liesLast week I participated in a blind tasting, the sort of blind tasting that all somms fear, where you’re tricked into falling flat on your face.

We were tasting wines in flights of three all of the same varietal, and we were informed of the varietal, region, and producer but did not know the order in which the wines were poured. This is a relatively easy blind tasting task, or should have been. For the third flight we were (allegedly) tasting quality Merlot or Merlot-based blends from Bordeaux, Colorado and Virginia.  But, alas, the pourer made a mistake and slipped a Syrah from Northern Rhone and a Southern-Rhone style blend from California into the line-up so only one wine was Merlot.

None of the gathering, which included several trained wine tasters and experienced wine lovers, noticed that two of the wines were not Merlot. (I correctly identified the Virginia Merlot but failed to identify the imposters.)

I do not mention this to call attention to blind-tasting miscues which are so frequent as to be unremarkable. This episode illustrates how essential top-down, cognitive processing is in determining what you taste. Because we were told the wines were Merlot no one noticed the meaty, black pepper, herbal,  or balsamic flavor notes typical of Rhone-style wines. The absence of plum or chocolate, typical of Merlot were chalked up to the wines being atypical.

In other words, what you taste depends on what you know. (I suppose one could argue we tasted the Rhone characteristics but didn’t attend to them but the result is the same)

This situation is structurally very similar to the renowned experiments carried out by Frédéric Brochet at the University of Bordeaux.  Brochet served wine science students two glasses of identical white wine except that one wine was dyed red. The students overwhelmingly described the red-appearing beverage using descriptors characteristic of red wines. This study was widely reported in the press as demonstrating that wine tasting is BS. But of course that is not what it shows at all. Like the experience with my tasting group last week, these experiments show that what we know (or think we know) will significantly determine what we taste. Blind tasters are taught to use decision-trees in which features are excluded based on what you know. When there is deception involved those decision trees inevitably lead you to the wrong inference.

Importantly, subsequent studies performed by Burnham and Skilleas and reported in The Aesthetics of Wine confirm the dependence of taste on cognition. They gave tasters a wine and asked them to determine whether it was a red wine or a white wine dyed red. The tasters overwhelmingly correctly identified the wine. When the possibility of deception is made explicit, tasters are not fooled by visual information. Again, what you believe determines what you taste.

The important implication here is not to exonerate our tasting group from an egregious error but to point out that the appreciation of wine benefits greatly from wine knowledge. If you don’t know what to look for in a wine, you probably won’t find it.

Oh, and as a side note, in that flight which included a highly respected, very expensive Syrah from Northern Rhone and a wine of similar reputation from California, the Virginia wine, Rendezvous from RdV Vineyards, was preferred by most members of the group.

Wine Aesthetics and Commerce: An Uneasy Blend

19 Monday Dec 2016

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wine and dollar billWine is an aesthetic object as worthy of our sustained attention as works of art or the wonders of nature. Yet wine aesthetics occupies a precarious position since wines’ charms also play well as an alcohol delivery system and a commodity beverage, which detracts from aesthetic appreciation.

As an aesthetic object the appreciation of wine depends on the practices of formal wine tasting. The swirling, sniffing, swishing, choice of glass, tasting standards, and tasting notes, etc. are designed to make the aesthetic properties of wine accessible to us. But these wine tasting practices are performed at public tastings, competitions, winery tasting rooms, as well as by wine media organizations, in contexts deeply influenced by the commercial aspects of the wine trade. Reviews are written to inform consumers, wine tastings aim at selling wine, awards at competitions are primarily used for marketing —it’s only at private affairs among wine lovers that aesthetics are unencumbered by commercial interests.

The limits of these wine tasting practices get some discussion in the wine media including debates about the meaning and appropriateness of scores, the relevance of endless fruit descriptors, the prevalence of disagreements among critics, etc. But the main problem with our wine tasting practices is that they seldom take into consideration the fact that wine changes in the glass and in the bottle. Most quality wines don’t show their true aesthetic value until many years after they are released. Yet, except in rare cases where investment decisions must be made, aged wines are seldom evaluated and are written about only occasionally. Even at winery tasting rooms, it’s an exception when older, more fully developed wines are offered as part of the tasting menu.

Furthermore, most published wine reviews and awards are based on very limited contact with the wine. Typically, a wine is evaluated in a group with many other wines that share some feature such as varietal or region, and critics give at best just a few moments attention to each one. This is especially true of large wine competitions where judges may taste over 100 wines in a day. The problem is that wines change in the glass as they are mixed with oxygen and volatile aromas are released. To get the full measure of a wine it must be tasted over several minutes if not hours. Some wines are closed (i.e. lacking in aromatic intensity) and may have rough textures unless decanted and allowed time to develop in the glass. The fact that wine changes in the glass is an essential part of the aesthetics of wine yet our wine tasting practices seldom take that into account. (This is why I review wines one at a time and spend at least an evening with each one.)

Thankfully, wine lovers in their private venues are able to take account of the full aesthetic merit of wine. But it is odd and a bit disturbing that public discourse about wine only occasionally focuses on these changeable features of wine that are among wine’s most important aesthetic features.