Tag Archives: wine tasting

Why Don’t We Hear about Blind Tasting Success?

12 Thursday Oct 2017

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blind tasting scoresWhenever wine tasters fall flat on their face the press celebrates by publicizing the fact far and wide claiming it offers proof that wine tasting is nonsense. So why didn’t we hear more about this rigorous empirical study that clearly shows trained wine tasters can successfully identify varietal and region of origin?

Two teams of seven tasters each (including one reserve per side) were presented with 12 wines, six whites and six reds….The group’s overall accuracy was far superior to what could be expected from random chance. Given the thousands of potential country-variety pairs, a monkey throwing darts would have virtually no hope of getting a single one right. But 47% of the Oxbridge tasters′ guesses on grape variety were correct, as were 37% on country of origin.

The competitors′ performances on each individual glass rarely matched these headline averages. Some wines were well-nigh unmistakable: all 14 drinkers identified the Pinot Noir, 12 called the Chardonnay and Gamay right and 11 identified the Sauvignon Blanc and Cabernet Sauvignon. Similarly, 13 participants recognised that the Gamay was from France (it is scarcely grown anywhere else), and nine said that the Semillon was Australian (though only four also determined that it was a Semillon)

At the other extreme, no one knew what the Friulano was made from—an unsurprising result, since the grape is little-known internationally. Only one drinker nailed the Rioja (made from Tempranillo) and Châteauneuf-du-Pape (a Grenache-based blend), wines from prominent regions that should have been relatively easy to spot.

Similarly, the averages obscured wide differences in performance among individual drinkers….

The failure to identify Tempranillo is surprising but otherwise the results are what you would expect. Blind tasting is challenging but nevertheless employs real expertise.

This study was published earlier this year but it received very little coverage or discussion. I guess successful blind tasting doesn’t flatter the audience that they know more than the experts.

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Give It Up Guys

31 Thursday Aug 2017

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female winemakerThere is a mountain of evidence suggesting that women have a better sense of smell than men. Julie Case takes us through a summary of the data.

Then, in the 1980s, Richard L. Doty, a professor of otorhinolaryngology and the director of the Smell and Taste Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and a team of researchers designed the Smell Identification Test, which asks subjects to identify 40 odors. When the test was later used in a study on sex differences and the ability to identify odors—the results were published in 1985 in the journal Neuropsychologia—women consistently outperformed men. The test has since been commercialized and used in a myriad of ways, including the study of air pollution and olfactory dysfunction and the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease.

Beyond merely identifying odors, however, Doty says women also seem to perform better than men in detecting odors at the lowest levels of concentration, and in tests of odor discrimination and memory. In the late ’90s, a research study used MRIs to examine the volume of the brain activated when men and women were subjected to olfactory stimulants The MRI activation maps for the women’s group showed up to eight times more activated voxels (by analogy with “pixels,” “voxels” are an element of three-dimensional space) than the men’s group in specific regions of the brain.

And so on. More studies leading to the same conclusion. But then at the end of this informative article she does what women too often do when male egos are at stake—she defers:

Does having more neurons and glial cells, and being better at detecting aromas, make one a superior winemaker or somm? Not necessarily. For some, all of the extra details and minute aromas are distractions.

Well yes but you can learn to manage the distractions. If you lack the ability to detect aromas there is nothing you can do. Is it better to have lots of money that must be managed or too little money with no recourse?

Unfortunately, we get more of the same lame excuses’:

Just as the fastest person in the world doesn’t make the best soccer player, or the strongest person in the world doesn’t make the best wrestler, [wine] tasting is so much more than just being able to taste the compounds,” says Rob Ord, prestige manager for Treasury Wine Estates in California and a former diploma instructor for the International Sommelier Guild. “It’s being able to put everything together in the puzzle.

Right. But is there any evidence that women are less adept at puzzle-solving?

Moreover, says Ord, it’s impossible to be able to smell something—or at least to identify a smell—unless it’s been described, defined, or imprinted in memory with a label attached. “It’s very difficult,” he says, “to be able to pick out those compounds and say, ‘Oh yeah, this smells like peach,’ unless you’ve actually spent time smelling peach and really defining that in your palate.” Even people with the most sensitive olfactory bulbs won’t be able to break down an incredibly aromatic wine if they can’t name or define what they’re smelling.

So is there evidence that woman lack the discipline to practice labeling smells? Of course not.

Obviously, a good sense of smell is not sufficient to make you a good winemaker or somm but without it you’re at a real disadvantage.

Give it up guys—they’re probably better than we are at the most important skill in the wine business.

“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.