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It's crazy how much of the wine world is an 'emperor's new clothes' kind of situation. There was a study done a little while ago (http://www.caltech.edu/news/w

It's crazy how much of the wine world is an 'emperor's new clothes' kind of situation. There was a study done a little while ago (http://www.caltech.edu/news/wine-study-shows-price-influences-perception-1374 http://www.caltech.edu/news/wine-study-shows-price-influence...) which showed that people perceive wine very differently depending on price. Even if it's the same wine. So somebody who's told they're tasting a $90 bottle will rate it much better than somebody who's told they're tasting a $5 bottle, even though they're both drinking the exact same thing. After all the uproar over Brochet's "The Color of Odors", I did a tasting with a few friends where I chilled red and white wines down to the same temperature, and had them try the wines blindfolded. Across 6 people who all considered themselves wine enthusiasts, it was pretty dicey even being able to tell a Merlot from a Sauv Blanc. Maybe it was my just my lame friends, or maybe I chose bad wines. Or maybe not. Different professional wine tasters will rate a given wine extremely differently. And they'll comment on different 'subtle notes of chocolate' in a product that is entirely made of grapes and yeast. I would be genuinely surprised if a double-blind test revealed that aging a particular bottle actually makes it taste better in a measurable way. Different, maybe. But if 'better' is subjective, then it's by definition not 'better' in an absolute sense. I enjoy a nice glass of wine, don't get me wrong. But the culture around it is elitist and unscientific, and I'm glad to see winemakers trying to tear it down a peg or two.

gascan 8y ago
they'll comment on different 'subtle notes of chocolate' in a product that is entirely made of grapes and yeast. This, at least, is IMO not a valid criticism. I make beer, and two easy examples are cloves & banana. Fermenting beer too warm leads the yeast to overproduce esters, which taste like bananas. Too cold leads the yeast to overproduce phenols, which taste like cloves. It's very real & very obvious.
- meddlepal 8y ago
  And it's often done on purpose.
- ravenstine 8y ago
  Are there any studies that show how reliably people can perceive these subtle notes?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - amyjess 8y ago
    Go drink a Hefeweizen and tell me what you think. I recommend something by Ayinger. Though chances are most American supermarkets will just have Franziskaner, which is perfectly fine if you can't find Ayinger (note: avoid American examples, even if they call themselves "Hefeweizen". American wheat beers are a totally different style and lack the banana and clove notes of German Hefeweizen). It's not subtle. At all. Hefeweizen contains large amounts of both banana esters and clove phenols, and drinking one is like drinking spicy banana bread. The first time I had one, it was so different from everything I had before that that it was outright jarring (this was shortly after I turned 21, before I knew much about beer).
    - kawfey 8y ago
      This, except I first tried a hefe and noticed the banana bread flavor in Public House Brewery's Hefeweizen, which is a US brewery. Its a flavor present in every hefe I've drank and brewed myself, but I won't argue the fact German Hefe's are a whole nother level of flavor.
      - amyjess 8y ago
        The reason why I mentioned avoiding US breweries was because of the American Wheat Beer style [0], which is very different from an actual Hefe, and unfortunately some AWBs use "Hefeweizen" in the brand name (e.g. Widmer, and I think Pyramid too). Of course there are some US breweries who brew to the German style, and I'll take your word for it that Public House Brewery does, but my suggestion of avoiding US breweries was aimed at someone who isn't familiar with beer at all and probably wouldn't take nearly as well to "pull out your phone and Google every example you see in the supermarket to make sure it's a proper Hefe and not an AWB" as they would to "look at the label and see if the brewery is German". [0] http://www.bjcp.org/style/2015/1/1D/american-wheat-beer/ http://www.bjcp.org/style/2015/1/1D/american-wheat-beer/
- amyjess 8y ago
  And then on top of that you have strains of yeast that are specifically bred to produce large amounts of both, such as the yeast strains used in Hefeweizen (German-style wheat beer; specifically, the cloudy kind that still contains the yeast sediment) [yes, I know you know this, but I'm explaining for the wider audience]. In fact, the main difference between German-style and American-style wheat beers is that German-style examples have lots of banana esters and clove phenols, while American-style examples don't. The sole reason for the difference is the strain of yeast used. And it's not just a wheat beer thing: in general, American yeast strains are bred to produce cleaner fermentations than European strains. The distinct flavors of English and especially Belgian beers are due to the fermentation byproducts produced by the local yeast. I love beer chemistry.
  - soundwave106 8y ago
    Homebrewer here as well. There's plenty of chemical compounds that yeast produce that give various notes that kind of resemble something else. For instance aldehydes (notably acetaldehyde) is a yeast byproduct that gives off a "green apple" flavor. Usually in beers this is considered a flaw, but I notice that some wines promote that aspect as positive if it's not overwhelming. Diacetyl is another one -- this has a "buttery" flavor. This is considered a flaw in some styles, but is naturally present in others (English ales notably often have a little bit of this in it). Some wines are very "buttery", I understand in particular those that use a process called malolactic fermentation (where diacetyl is a byproduct) are prone to it. From what I can Google you can get chocolate notes in wine either from the tannins in grapes, or the charring process used on barrels. However, I haven't been able to Google specific chemicals. In beer, "chocolate notes" can come from some of the toasted / roasted malts out there (IMHO more on the pale end of the "chocolate malt" spectrum -- darker "chocolate malts" taste more "coffee" like to me). A fair bit of places offer a "off flavor" kit for beers that allow you to train your tastebuds on at least the common "faults".
    - kawfey 8y ago
      On an extreme side of "off flavors," a friend of mine "scientifically" brewed a few 1gal batches to see what happens when you don't follow the rules: one fermented in the heat of the summer, one without proper sanitization (except for the bottles), one he spat in, and one he dropped a few dog hairs in. None of them were suitable for consumption.
- jpk 8y ago
  I tend to agree. I'll also point out that it's partly an issue of language. I feel like (at least in the case of English) the words for describing taste are less developed than, say, sights. So while I can describe a car finish as "matte black", or "iridescent blue-green" without resorting to simile, I can't describe flavors without saying something like, "it tastes like {another thing you may have also tasted}". So wine tasters end up leaning on seemingly wacky comparisons to communicate the subtleties they perceive (real or imagined).
  - calt 8y ago
    I always thought that "notes of blank" was kind of silly until I saw this flavor wheel for coffee [0], and it clicked that tasters simply had a vocabulary that they tended to draw from because flavors are hard to describe. [0] https://counterculturecoffee.com/learn/resource-center/coffee-tasters-flavor-wheel https://counterculturecoffee.com/learn/resource-center/coffe... Edit: fixed link
    - sgc 8y ago
      They are blocking hotlinking on that image, do you have the page link?
      - gingericha 8y ago
        https://counterculturecoffee.com/learn/resource-center/coffee-tasters-flavor-wheel https://counterculturecoffee.com/learn/resource-center/coffe...
    - jobigoud 8y ago
      I like the body gradient indicating the viscosity. Except for the 2% milk, this looks like they couldn't find the right adjective.
    - dbrgn 8y ago
      I can totally relate. For me, it "clicked" when I saw a TV show where one of the moderators went to a tasting session and tried to learn how to taste wine. They showed an aroma wheel similar to this one: http://www.regalwineco.com/sites/all/themes/newregalwineco/education/AromaWheel.jpg http://www.regalwineco.com/sites/all/themes/newregalwineco/e... The aroma wheel helps to categorize the different tastes, and to give them names. It's really hard to describe what you're tasting if you're not experienced. I'm not experienced at all, I just know whether I like a wine or not, and I can describe it as "heavy", "fruity", "dry" or "light". But the aroma wheel and the vocabulary helps when trying to taste lighter nuances. And sometimes you take a sip, and are instantly reminded of berries, or of oak wood :) Does it matter? I don't know. In the end, I either like a wine or not. But if you're interested in a topic it helps to share a vocabulary to describe your experiences.
- jartelt 8y ago
  I agree, it's not a good critique. I have definitely tasted wines where I felt like there was hint of chocolate in the background. It is also common for wines to have a hint of berry flavor. Grapes and yeast can make all kinds of flavor. Sure, a lot of wine descriptions are super douchey and go overboard on the descriptors. But yea, Belgian beers can taste can have esters than taste banana-like and NE IPAs can taste like orange juice, both with no fruit added.
- thatcat 8y ago
  This may be off topic, but I just brewed a batch that is sour and citrusy like grapefruit juice. After searching around I found the distinctive grapefruit flavor compared to other citrus is the result of a sulfur containing terpene, mercaptan. I've been trying to figure out what may have caused it to develop in this batch, but not others brewed with the same yeast. What source would you reccomend for trying to trace back flavors to the metabolic processes in the yeast?
  - jersully72 8y ago
    > What source would you reccomend for trying to trace back flavors to the metabolic processes in the yeast? A homebrew forum.
- rsync 8y ago
  "This, at least, is IMO not a valid criticism. I make beer, and two easy examples are cloves & banana." Agreed. In fact, I will go further and support the notion that red wines can give you "brick" and "chalk" tastes, etc., even though I have never actually tasted brick.
chrisseaton 8y ago
> they'll comment on different 'subtle notes of chocolate' in a product that is entirely made of grapes and yeast I think you're deliberately misunderstanding what is clearly just explaining aromas by saying they're similar to those you'd find in food that you'd be familiar with.
- gowld 8y ago
  Is there really a chocolately aroma, though?
  - skywhopper 8y ago
    Uh, yes. Or do you mean in wine? Probably not something everyone would agree was "chocolatey", but the point is that's the aroma or taste the reviewer identifies. If you or I can't detect it, that doesn't mean they were wrong. Maybe we would describe the same flavor or aroma differently. Or maybe our senses would not detect the same chemical they are detecting. Everyone's sense of taste and smell is different.
  - spookthesunset 8y ago
    Sometimes, yes. Wine can have a very complex flavor profile and at some point, you have to label what you taste and smell using words. Either we go with things we already have to describe odor and taste ("smells like chocolate", or "has a very buttery mouthfeel") or we have to invent new words...
  - peterwwillis 8y ago
    I once drank a bottle of some white wine from the central valley, I have no idea what it was, but I had several people taste it in case I was losing my marbles, and it tasted like chocolate. REALLY like chocolate. A white wine. It was not made with any chocolate. Aromas are just chemicals floating in the air, anyway.
    - DennisP 8y ago
      I just read (in a book about scotch) that alcohol can react with a component in European oak to make a chemical that tastes like chocolate. So I'm guessing your white wine was aged for a good while.
josefresco 8y ago
> But the culture around it is elitist and unscientific Maybe the culture on the lower levels, but certainly not at the top. > And they'll comment on different 'subtle notes of chocolate' in a product that is entirely made of grapes and yeast. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2204371/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2204371/
- aeternus 8y ago
  Do sommeliers ever have to retake the test? Creating a test with a low pass rate is not hard and doesn't really prove anything unless it delivers consistent results. Test could just be if (rand() < .0001)
  - cascom 8y ago
    Country x region x sub-region x grape variety x vintage? Obscenely hard randomly, multiple times? I believe there are multiple levels that get progressively harder so even more unlikely unlikely.
    - gowld 8y ago
      It depends on how accurate answers must be to be considered passing. (What's the curve?)
bitL 8y ago
I once did an experiment; I brought a 100EUR bottle of wine (probably $400 bottle in the US) to a party at my language school just for fun to see if people would notice. Except for one lady, nobody noticed anything (out of ~80 people) and those who drank it took it as a regular, uninteresting wine.
- always_good 8y ago
  You were able to serve 80 people from a bottle of wine? Did they drink from thimbles?
  - jandrese 8y ago
    Wine tastings will often give you just the barest splash of liquid. Even then, getting 80 servings out of a 750ml bottle is impressive. Roughly 9ml per serving, or 3/10 of an ounce for Americans. I really can't blame the guests for having trouble identifying it as a particularly superb wine when they don't get enough to coat their tongue.
    - jimnotgym 8y ago
      > Wine tastings will often give you just the barest splash of liquid. You need to find a better wine merchant. You need at least enough to fill your mouth twice over...
  - bitL 8y ago
    No, I said that the party was attended by ~80 people, some of them took my bottle of wine from among all available bottles and drank it (most people looked at what is available and then decided what to get). I saw only one lady that said "wow, this must be a very expensive wine!" and as she looked around excited to share the finding, nobody cared, and the ones who were drinking it seemed to drink it like a juice, completely uninterested.
- everdrive 8y ago
  Did you also serve 80 people a single loaf of bread?
dxhdr 8y ago
> I did a tasting with a few friends where I chilled red and white wines down to the same temperature, and had them try the wines blindfolded. No surprise, wines taste very differently when chilled. Reds in particular lose much of their flavor.
cortesoft 8y ago
This is true of everything, though; so much of our judgments about the quality of something has to do with our expectations and priming. It isn’t just wine, it is every non-commodity
swensel 8y ago
There are compounds in wine that resemble the aromas and flavors of other plants, foods, spices, etc. This is why there can be notes of 'chocolate' in a product made only from grapes. [1] [1] http://winefolly.com/review/where-wine-flavors-come-from/ http://winefolly.com/review/where-wine-flavors-come-from/
stouset 8y ago
This kind of comment comes along any time there's an article about wine on the Internet, and I feel like so many people want to backlash against wine elitism that they overshoot far, far in the other direction. The price thing happens for literally everything. People infer the value of things from the listed price, which is why everything in a department store is perpetually on sale and why you should set pricing expectations higher than reasonable when negotiating a sale or an hourly rate. This isn't a critique of wine, it's a critique of the human psyche using easily-manipulable signals as shortcuts for inferring value. I have yet to find a person who actually believes that a forty dollar bottle wine is likely to be better than a fifteen dollar bottle of the same varietal or anyone who would judge someone on the price of the wine they're drinking. "The Color of Odors" is pretty much just another issue with our brains synthesizing multiple signals to come to a conclusion. If you drink a wine that's colored red, you're going to start with the assumption that it's a red wine and work from there. This works as an exceedingly-reliable heuristic: the average number of times someone is trying to trick you about what type of wine you're drinking per drinking session is effectively zero (and the consequences thereof are roughly zero as well). You've ran your own experiment with N=6, but brown-bag tastings at wine shops aren't exactly rare and amateur enthusiasts are generally in the ballpark with many of their guesses. Different tasters will rate a given wine differently because taste isn't objective. But it's not subjective either. It's a composite of both. They'll comment on "subtle notes of chocolate" because wines—like beer, coffee, and everything else—have tons of flavor compounds. And they're made of more than just grapes or yeast; barrel aging imparts yet more flavor compounds, and the specifics (oak, steel, level of char, type of oak, if the barrels have been reused, etc.) add yet more variables. I'm not saying that some of it isn't bullshit (https://xkcd.com/915/ https://xkcd.com/915/), but it sounds like you're trying to make the point that all wine could just be replaced with Welch's and vodka and nobody would be able to tell the difference.
- SmirkingRevenge 8y ago
  > Different tasters will rate a given wine differently because taste isn't objective. But it's not subjective either. It's a composite of both. They'll comment on "subtle notes of chocolate" because wines—like beer, coffee, and everything else—have tons of flavor compounds. Not only will different tasters rate a given wine differently, a given taster will rate a given wine differently, most of the time. http://letastevin.org/Hodgson%202008%20Examination%20of%20judge%20reliability%20at%20major%20us%20wine%20competition.pdf http://letastevin.org/Hodgson%202008%20Examination%20of%20ju...
everdrive 8y ago
I agree with all of this, and would only add that it seems like the market has already handled this strange circumstance. I enjoy great wine and it seldom costs more than $8 a bottle. Some people really want to buy expensive things for the sake of luxury alone, and since wine is so easy to make (and apparently to project your tastes onto) we have amazing choices at nearly all price points. I'm not just being blue collar, either --- I'll readily admit that very expensive whiskey tastes VERY different from cheap whiskey, and much better too. There's no such thing as a $8 bottle of whiskey that tastes just as good as $90 bottle, but that's exactly how wine works. And, I suspect it's exactly why there's such price variation too. (I mean variation in the sense that a cheap bottle is as high quality as an expensive bottle. For whiskey, a cheap bottle is low quality, and an expensive bottle can be high quality.)
- groby_b 8y ago
  There is, however, a $15 bottle of Whiskey that beats Pappy every single time. (Well, used to be. They're not selling it any more.) And there are $80 bottles of wine that can't be approached by any of the $8 bottles. The thing is, both businesses are about both very subjective taste, and about marketing. You'll need to find what works for you, and roll with that. In both areas, spending more money makes it more likely you avoid the absolute disasters, but it doesn't guarantee you get something more than mediocre.
  - andperseand 8y ago
    What is this $15 bottle of whiskey? I'd love to know what cheap bourbons are good.
    - dhimes 8y ago
      Larceny is a little more but very nice; Buffalo Trace a bit more still but delicious. Disclaimer: I'm new to bourbon.
      - sulam 8y ago
CocaKoala 8y ago
> chilled red and white wines down to the same temperature What temperature did you serve them at? I'm not going to argue that your results aren't what they are, but white wines and red wines are served at different temperatures for a reason. Temperature definitely has a noticeable effect on taste, with colder things having more muted flavours than warmer things (this is why soda tastes acceptable when it's over ice, and unbearably sweet when it's warm) so really what you're establishing here isn't "white wines and red wines taste the same", but "when you serve a red wine at a non-recommended temperature, it doesn't taste like what people expect it to taste like" which seems reasonable but also not interesting. It would be more interesting if, in addition to serving chilled white wine alongside chilled red wine and daring people to tell the different, you also served recommended red-wine-temp red wine with recommended-red-wine-temp white wine, and see if you can tell the difference.
- nrclark 8y ago
  A valid consideration, and one that I didn't test. I'll have to try it out on people some time!
- poulsbohemian 8y ago
  Something else I would have never believed had I not experienced it -- the shape of the glass really does matter as well. Not perhaps significantly so that you need to have different glasses, but definitely noticeable when given the opportunity to test.
  - CocaKoala 8y ago
    Yep. It makes sense when you think about it; it's pretty intuitive that the shape of the glass would affect how you smell the wine as you drink, and nobody's really going to contest that scent is a large component in flavour. Like you've observed, it's not such a large deal that if somebody poured red wine in a white glass and handed it to me, I'd wave off (let alone burgundy in a pinot noir glass or something). But it turns out that stuff like that makes a difference if you look for it.
jimnotgym 8y ago
> Different professional wine tasters will rate a given wine extremely differently. My wife likes strawberries. I don't care for them. Professional wine tasters are just people with their own preferences. > aging a particular bottle actually makes it taste better in a measurable way. So Bordeaux 2017 is on sale now En Primuer, which means it is still in big casks in the vineyard. Buy it now and your wine merchant will ship it to you in 18 months when it is bottled. The wine experts have all been to Bordeaux and tasted those wines, and I can tell you you need to be an expert....because this young they are very tannic (like sucking a tea bag!). The skill they display in knowing how good a wine will be in a few years when it is ready is pretty impressive. These wines will all taste very tannic in 5 years time, but in 10 years may soften. So no they don't get better with age, it just takes years for them to be ready to drink. I guarantee you could tell the difference between a 2017 claret and a 2009 claret.... because one is ready, one is disgusting. So sorry I think you have missed the point of ageing.
- Baeocystin 8y ago
  I make a loquat seed liqueur that takes about two years to finish. The first several months are spent in contact with the seeds, citrus zest, vanilla bean, and other elements, then it is bottled and left to sit for at least another year. If you were to taste it right before bottling, you would think it less drinkable than pine-sol. After the appropriate amount of time, however, it becomes a delicious, amaretto-like dessert drink. It really is fascinating how much it changes over time.
- rdtsc 8y ago
  > but in 10 years may soften. So no they don't get better with age, it just takes years for them to be ready to drink. A relative of mine did some work for a winery. As part of the payment or as a gift for a job well done they got a bottle of wine from 1965. The bottle was covered and dust and grime, looked pretty gross. By that time we drank it it had aged for about 25-30 years. The taste though was amazing. Didn't even taste like wine, had a very smooth velvet-y taste. Almost no acidity, not tannic at all.
  - calt 8y ago
resu_nimda 8y ago
Whenever this comes up I bring up the documentary Somm. It follows a couple guys training for the master sommelier test. To me it hilariously shines a light on the farce of the whole thing. But people are often taken aback when I suggest that there might be a lot of bullshit in wine. Even generally rational/skeptical people that don't have that strong of an attachment to it. They all say, "yeah, but you can definitely tell, like when it's good wine or bad wine." And yet virtually any time a blind test is done the results say differently (precipitating some serious schadenfreude in the movie). It's the same thing with music. So many people think they need lossless quality when effectively zero people can successfully pick it out in an ABX test with an MP3 @ 320.
- cycrutchfield 8y ago
  What did you find farcical about sommelier training?
  - resu_nimda 8y ago
    Well they spent a ton of their time cramming flashcards of myriad regions and sub-regions and testing the wines, were then largely unable to identify which regions the wine came from, and a bunch of them still passed (I realize the test depicted was a practice but nowhere is this skill convincingly demonstrated by anyone). And the things they say about "notes of dead red rose petals" are taken to be mostly creative liberty and highly subjective so doing that well is more of being a showman than a technical expert. In general the type of people involved and their attitudes gave the impression that they just think it's cool to be "wine guys." In my opinion it didn't paint a picture of substance or rigor. Not saying that the entire wine industry is devoid of that, but this particular view into it validated some of the criticisms in my mind. Edit: one other thing I recall is that the results of the taste test portion of the actual exam are never released to anybody, which doesn't inspire much confidence.
    - cycrutchfield 8y ago
      If you're open to trying new experiences, go to a group blind wine tasting event with actual trained sommeliers (you can find such events on meetup or elsewhere). It's a very interesting learning experience and it teaches you a little bit about how trained professionals methodically determine by taste, smell, and sight how to identify what a wine is. Now, they are very unlikely to be perfect, given that our palates are very unreliable and noisy sensors, and a given bottle of wine is itself a very noisy expression of the grapes it was made from. But there is a process to it, and it's not just a made-up pseudoscience.
zby 8y ago
There is a paradox in it: if it was easy to tell them apart - there would be no place for the connoisseurs - but if you cannot tell the difference - then it does not matter which you are drinking.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
petre 8y ago
> Different professional wine tasters will rate a given wine extremely differently. In my country winetasters gather and rate wines individually. Then they reach a consensus. One of the wines gets an award. Of course the process is subjective, but then so are literature or film awards.
yawz 8y ago
> a Merlot from a Sauv Blanc Well... One doesn't need to be a wine enthusiast to tell a red wine from a white. And there is quite bit of a difference between their serving temperature.
- gowld 8y ago
  Of course you can taste temperature differences and see color differences. The question is whether you can taste wine differences without temperature differences and color diffefrences.
  - dxhdr 8y ago
    > The question is whether you can taste wine differences without temperature differences Temperature differences greatly affect the taste, so what's the purpose of that test?
    - caconym_ 8y ago
      Obviously, to determine whether there's an inherent taste difference between red and white wine when other variables are controlled for.
      - cycrutchfield 8y ago
        Which is meaningless, because nobody is trained to taste red wine when it's chilled to white wine temperatures. This is like saying that a classifier trained to distinguish between dogs and cats where the pictures are taken during the day should generalize to images of dogs and cats taken at night. If the classifier isn't able to distinguish between dog and cat images taken at night then it must be that there is no difference between dogs and cats.
        caconym_ 8y ago
        The analogy is not a good one because the human sense/perception of taste is not a narrow classifier trained on limited data. I can taste something I've never tasted before and still a) describe the flavor, b) determine that it is different from other flavors I've tasted before, and c) recognize the new flavor again in the future. If people with trained palates for wine cannot tell a chilled red apart from a white, or a room-temperature white apart from a red, it may not prove that the conventional wisdom around wine tasting is bullshit, but it sure suggests it strongly.
baxtr 8y ago
Is this really news? That’s the same with Pepsi and Coke and many other things. People don’t buy a drink. They buy an experience. A feeling. A story. Why do you criticize people for being human? We’re not scientists nor robots (most of us at least).
- gowld 8y ago
  Pepsi and Coke consistently taste different from each other and same as themselves.
  - baxtr 8y ago
    That’s what I thought. Go and do a blind test. Or read the papers https://daily.jstor.org/the-coca-cola-wars-can-anybody-really-tell-the-difference/ https://daily.jstor.org/the-coca-cola-wars-can-anybody-reall...
    - drblast 8y ago
      I've done the blind test between Coke and Pepsi with a third unnamed diet soda thrown in as a red herring. I can identify each just by the smell. It's not even close. I literally can't comprehend how blind people must be to tastes that they can't tell the difference. I also can't comprehend how people can eat anything with vinegar in it or drink IPAs, so maybe I'm just sensitive. Another anecdote...I know no French, but I had a French wine at a restaurant and commented it reminded me of the smell of the beach in the morning near where I grew up. A more thoroughly educated companion told me that the word Cotes (with some accent I don't know how to type) means "coast" in French, and that was in the name of the wine. I'm the first one to call BS on elitist snobs but the people who really know wine aren't BSing. I've found cheap wines to have a higher likelihood of tasting like vinegar Easter egg dye. After about $14 that quality is rare. That's not to say wine at $60 a bottle is "better." My personal favorite is $18 at Costco. But being able to tell the difference is not BS.
      - cs02rm0 8y ago
        A more thoroughly educated companion told me that the word Cotes (with some accent I don't know how to type) means "coast" in French, and that was in the name of the wine. Côtes. The circumflex, at least in French AIUI, often means there used to be an 's' after that letter, i.e. costes which gets you a little closer to coasts (and the Spanish costas).
wheels 8y ago
Being the sort of person who enjoys a regular tipple, when starting a startup (and conserving cash whereever possible), I got in the habit of blind testing wines and beers to find my favorite of the cheap ones. For beer, especially, the main distinction between basic German pilsners (I live in Berlin) was the social class that they're marketed to. Price is a pretty poor predictor of quality or taste, but you can choose to spend anywhere from about 50 cents to €1.20 to get almost indistinguishable beers. That doesn't mean to say that some aren't better than others, but that price isn't a good predictor of where they fit on the quality scale. (With craft beers things are pretty different, however.) There are very obviously working class beers, professional beers, etc. With wine, my impression that almost everything that was sold at a grocery store broadly fit into the category of generic cheap wine. There is a weak correlation between quality and price, but if you sampled a bunch of them, it wasn't hard to find bottles at €3 that were better than the average bottle at €6, and bottles at €6 that were as good as the average bottle at €12. (They don't get much more expensive than €12 in grocery stores here. Note, wine is about twice as expensive for the same quality in the US, in my experience.) Notably, none of those wines would be truly interesting, just better expressions of their archetype. The most interesting way to taste wine that I've found is at high-end restaurants that do pairings. Having a professional that just picks out interesting wines that they think fit with particularly quirky dishes has yielded more interesting results for me than the handful of wine tastings I've done. They'll bring out stuff that's truly weird and interesting if you're used to grocery store wine. And here at least, once you've, ahm, stomached, what you're paying for the meal, the glasses of wine aren't exorbitant -- about €8/glass, even at a place with a couple Michelin stars. Relative to the other categories of booze, the place where I have genuine expertise is whisky. I have a large collection that's, well, worth more than my car. The beautiful thing about whisky, however, is that you can keep bottles of different things open for years and compare them to each other. That makes it pretty easy to figure out where you get the best bang for your buck. Over about €35/bottle, there's not a particularly strong correlation between quality and price. There are even some fantastic whiskies below that that punch way above their price-class (e.g. Laphroiag Quarter Cask, or Rittenhouse Rye). While there are some particularly unique and great expensive whiskies, even for a trained tongue and nose, it's absolutely no guarantee that a €100 bottle will be better than a good €40 bottle. Often it will just be rarer, and stroke the whisky-nerd ego to a greater extent. ;-)
hndl 8y ago
Interesting link. I've also noticed, while wine shopping with friends, that people tend to prefer a bottle with a cork over a twisty even if the twisty was priced higher.
- goostavos 8y ago
  I like the ceremony involved with the cork : |
mratzloff 8y ago
> After all the uproar over Brochet's "The Color of Odors", I did a tasting with a few friends where I chilled red and white wines down to the same temperature, and had them try the wines blindfolded. > Maybe it was my just my lame friends Your friends were fine; it was your test that was lame. Why would you ever serve red wine chilled? That's not how it's consumed by most wine drinkers, so I'm not sure what you were trying to prove, other than trying to "tear down the culture a peg or two"—and by implication your friends who consider themselves wine enthusiasts. Chilling a wine slows the volatilization of the aromatic compounds and dramatically changes the flavor. As a result it can taste thin or tasteless. No wonder they couldn't tell the difference. It's great when you want to mask a cheap product, though. The same is true of beer. Think about the quality of a Coors Light and why their ad campaign is all about drinking it ice cold.
- astura 8y ago
  It's not just wine - different temperatures effect the taste of everything, it's why melted ice cream tastes much sweeter than frozen ice cream and warm cola tastes much sweeter than cold. It's also why I don't like my food piping hot - I strongly perfer luke warm, the hotter the food the less taste is perceived.
- SmirkingRevenge 8y ago
  There was at least one similar, and slightly more scientific test done on this. In this version, white wine was dyed red with food coloring. And nobody could tell. https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infamous_study_on_wine_tasting.html https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infam...
  - mratzloff 8y ago
    The differences are substantive. In the test you linked, expectation determines interpretation, similar to how people interpret cheap versus expensive bottles differently. In the latter, removing flavor means people can't judge flavor. In one, additional information yields a different, directed result; in the other, less information yields random results.
deleted 8y ago
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YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
>> After all the uproar over Brochet's "The Color of Odors", I did a tasting with a few friends where I chilled red and white wines down to the same temperature, and had them try the wines blindfolded. Across 6 people who all considered themselves wine enthusiasts, it was pretty dicey even being able to tell a Merlot from a Sauv Blanc. Maybe it was my just my lame friends, or maybe I chose bad wines. Or maybe not. I'd bet taht neither your friends are "lame" (tut-tut) neither the wines bad, but I think it's mostly an issue of what wines you happened to compare. In Greece where I'm from, I often drink house wines - I'll go to a taverna and they'll have a couple of barrels in the back, one red, one white. The white always has a distinct sweet twang, which is never there in the red that tends to be on the dry side (which I prefer for this reason). Both types of wine are often drinked chilled anyway (unless you go to some fancy place where they have ideas about the ideal temperature to drink their wine). And of course, there is no way in hell that anyone could mistake retsina for Merlot... :)
DennisP 8y ago
Any wine aged in wooden barrels is also made of wood. Alcohol reacts with various components of the wood to make all sorts of interesting flavor compounds.
brightball 8y ago
My favorite line from Ocean’s 13 is Matt Damon’s character in response to a question about a specific type of wine. “As long as it’s not ‘73...”
reubenswartz 8y ago
As someone who enjoys wine, but is not an expert, and thinks there's a lot of B.S. involved, I remember one Saturday I was making crepes for breakfast, and I needed to sauté some mushrooms, so I opened up an $8 bottle of Ménage à Trois. Sunday evening we had 2 other couples over for dinner, and I didn't want to serve them the rest of the MaT, so we opened a nice bottle of "90+ point" California Pinot Noir. Then I figured we should do a blind taste test. I recused myself. 4 of the 5 other people preferred the $8 bottle that I'd opened a day and a half before. The one guy in the group who is a real wine expert was having none of it. He knew which wine was "good" and which "wasn't", and why. Anecdotal, but I think it's a good illustration that there's a lot of B.S, but it's not all B.S. FWIW, I had a master sommelier on my Sales for Nerds podcast (June Rodil, who is not a stuffy wine snob at all, and is so much fun to drink with). (https://www.salesfornerds.io/episode-5-june-rodil-on-wine-customer-experience-delegation-and-more/ https://www.salesfornerds.io/episode-5-june-rodil-on-wine-cu...)
- yks 8y ago
  well, Ménage à Trois is a good wine
  - reubenswartz 8y ago
    I agree. ;-) But the other one was better. Or maybe I just thought that because I knew it was more expensive. More research required... ;-)
    - jknightco 8y ago
      Wines like MaT are designed to be people pleasers. They're full of easily accessible flavors. 4 out of 5 Americans would prefer Katy Perry to The Flaming Lips, that doesn't mean she's better (or worse), it just means she's more crowd friendly.
      - acct1771 8y ago
        What does mean she's better?
slim 8y ago
Wine taste heavily depends on the taste of your mouth before pouring wine in it. That's why the same wine could taste different on different occasions. Especially if you drink wine while eating
Iv 8y ago
I am not exactly a foodie but my (French) parents are wine enthusiast and I got to taste a lot of different things. I must say that cold red wine (down to the ideal temperature for white wine) is something most wine enthusiasts probably are not used to and indeed, you lose much of the flavors that way. > people perceive wine very differently depending on price Yes, and a surprising part of this is that the price factor in much more unconsciously than we think. People do actually feel the wine, at the neurological level, differently, as it has been shown in MRI. It looks like we prepare ourselves psychologically for a different experience when we know which wine is which.
plufz 8y ago
I often hear people who know little about wine (not saying that is true about you!) talk about 'emperor's new clothes' with wine. I'm not saying that people aren't affected by say price or status of a type of wine - of course we are. In the same way people probably like belugan caviar or some expensive types of meat more because of its high price. I also think the study that showed wine experts that couldn't tell which vintage of the same wine was better sort of spilled over to "all wine tastes alike". I'm very much an amateur and I can easily tell the difference between sauvignon blanc, riesling, chablis (chardonnay from burgundy) in a blind testing (we often do that). I can sometimes guess country, but that is more hit and miss. My girlfriend that is a more advanced amateur can pick region, country, type of grape, etc on lots of wines. The thing that I think people who aren't interested in wine don't understand is that taste and smell is something that can be trained. When I started hanging out with people that were more interested in wine I couldn't tell the difference either, most wines tasted, well, wine to me. And of course cheap wines for $3-9 are usually not that good or unique, even though there are good wines in that price segment too. Wine tasting also made food a lot better for me, since it trained my sense of taste and smell.
a_136_chiffa 8y ago
As a French - you can actually taste the difference between a 5$ and a 50$ wine, even despite the difference itaste. In France. Not in the US. For some weird reason, the US wine is 100% posing, and statement about your social position. Almost no attention is given to the actual quality of the wine and a crapton of of 5$ wines taste significantly better than 10$-20$ or even 50$ bottles. In the same spirit, the "sommeliers" and wine vendors are eager to sell you the most expensive wine in their stock, not in discovering underappreciated wines. Not surprising that no one develops a proper taste for wine here. PS: And yes, don't chill reds. Ever. They are to be served at ~18C or ~65F. Otherwise, you won't be able to taste anything in them, even if they are good.
massaman_yams 8y ago
Re: age, compare a beaujolais nouveaux to a 2-3 year old beaujolais. There's a reason very young wines aren't usually seen on shelves; they can taste overly "green", phenolic, and/or tannic. But once you're past about 4 or 5 years old, I think you're right - it becomes quite a bit more subjective.

gascan 8y ago

they'll comment on different 'subtle notes of chocolate' in a product that is entirely made of grapes and yeast. This, at least, is IMO not a valid criticism. I make beer, and two easy examples are cloves & banana. Fermenting beer too warm leads the yeast to overproduce esters, which taste like bananas. Too cold leads the yeast to overproduce phenols, which taste like cloves. It's very real & very obvious.

meddlepal 8y ago
And it's often done on purpose.
ravenstine 8y ago
Are there any studies that show how reliably people can perceive these subtle notes?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- amyjess 8y ago
  Go drink a Hefeweizen and tell me what you think. I recommend something by Ayinger. Though chances are most American supermarkets will just have Franziskaner, which is perfectly fine if you can't find Ayinger (note: avoid American examples, even if they call themselves "Hefeweizen". American wheat beers are a totally different style and lack the banana and clove notes of German Hefeweizen). It's not subtle. At all. Hefeweizen contains large amounts of both banana esters and clove phenols, and drinking one is like drinking spicy banana bread. The first time I had one, it was so different from everything I had before that that it was outright jarring (this was shortly after I turned 21, before I knew much about beer).
  - kawfey 8y ago
    This, except I first tried a hefe and noticed the banana bread flavor in Public House Brewery's Hefeweizen, which is a US brewery. Its a flavor present in every hefe I've drank and brewed myself, but I won't argue the fact German Hefe's are a whole nother level of flavor.
    - amyjess 8y ago
      The reason why I mentioned avoiding US breweries was because of the American Wheat Beer style [0], which is very different from an actual Hefe, and unfortunately some AWBs use "Hefeweizen" in the brand name (e.g. Widmer, and I think Pyramid too). Of course there are some US breweries who brew to the German style, and I'll take your word for it that Public House Brewery does, but my suggestion of avoiding US breweries was aimed at someone who isn't familiar with beer at all and probably wouldn't take nearly as well to "pull out your phone and Google every example you see in the supermarket to make sure it's a proper Hefe and not an AWB" as they would to "look at the label and see if the brewery is German". [0] http://www.bjcp.org/style/2015/1/1D/american-wheat-beer/ http://www.bjcp.org/style/2015/1/1D/american-wheat-beer/
amyjess 8y ago
And then on top of that you have strains of yeast that are specifically bred to produce large amounts of both, such as the yeast strains used in Hefeweizen (German-style wheat beer; specifically, the cloudy kind that still contains the yeast sediment) [yes, I know you know this, but I'm explaining for the wider audience]. In fact, the main difference between German-style and American-style wheat beers is that German-style examples have lots of banana esters and clove phenols, while American-style examples don't. The sole reason for the difference is the strain of yeast used. And it's not just a wheat beer thing: in general, American yeast strains are bred to produce cleaner fermentations than European strains. The distinct flavors of English and especially Belgian beers are due to the fermentation byproducts produced by the local yeast. I love beer chemistry.
- soundwave106 8y ago
  Homebrewer here as well. There's plenty of chemical compounds that yeast produce that give various notes that kind of resemble something else. For instance aldehydes (notably acetaldehyde) is a yeast byproduct that gives off a "green apple" flavor. Usually in beers this is considered a flaw, but I notice that some wines promote that aspect as positive if it's not overwhelming. Diacetyl is another one -- this has a "buttery" flavor. This is considered a flaw in some styles, but is naturally present in others (English ales notably often have a little bit of this in it). Some wines are very "buttery", I understand in particular those that use a process called malolactic fermentation (where diacetyl is a byproduct) are prone to it. From what I can Google you can get chocolate notes in wine either from the tannins in grapes, or the charring process used on barrels. However, I haven't been able to Google specific chemicals. In beer, "chocolate notes" can come from some of the toasted / roasted malts out there (IMHO more on the pale end of the "chocolate malt" spectrum -- darker "chocolate malts" taste more "coffee" like to me). A fair bit of places offer a "off flavor" kit for beers that allow you to train your tastebuds on at least the common "faults".
  - kawfey 8y ago
    On an extreme side of "off flavors," a friend of mine "scientifically" brewed a few 1gal batches to see what happens when you don't follow the rules: one fermented in the heat of the summer, one without proper sanitization (except for the bottles), one he spat in, and one he dropped a few dog hairs in. None of them were suitable for consumption.
jpk 8y ago
I tend to agree. I'll also point out that it's partly an issue of language. I feel like (at least in the case of English) the words for describing taste are less developed than, say, sights. So while I can describe a car finish as "matte black", or "iridescent blue-green" without resorting to simile, I can't describe flavors without saying something like, "it tastes like {another thing you may have also tasted}". So wine tasters end up leaning on seemingly wacky comparisons to communicate the subtleties they perceive (real or imagined).
- calt 8y ago
  I always thought that "notes of blank" was kind of silly until I saw this flavor wheel for coffee [0], and it clicked that tasters simply had a vocabulary that they tended to draw from because flavors are hard to describe. [0] https://counterculturecoffee.com/learn/resource-center/coffee-tasters-flavor-wheel https://counterculturecoffee.com/learn/resource-center/coffe... Edit: fixed link
  - sgc 8y ago
    They are blocking hotlinking on that image, do you have the page link?
    - gingericha 8y ago
      https://counterculturecoffee.com/learn/resource-center/coffee-tasters-flavor-wheel https://counterculturecoffee.com/learn/resource-center/coffe...
  - jobigoud 8y ago
    I like the body gradient indicating the viscosity. Except for the 2% milk, this looks like they couldn't find the right adjective.
  - dbrgn 8y ago
    I can totally relate. For me, it "clicked" when I saw a TV show where one of the moderators went to a tasting session and tried to learn how to taste wine. They showed an aroma wheel similar to this one: http://www.regalwineco.com/sites/all/themes/newregalwineco/education/AromaWheel.jpg http://www.regalwineco.com/sites/all/themes/newregalwineco/e... The aroma wheel helps to categorize the different tastes, and to give them names. It's really hard to describe what you're tasting if you're not experienced. I'm not experienced at all, I just know whether I like a wine or not, and I can describe it as "heavy", "fruity", "dry" or "light". But the aroma wheel and the vocabulary helps when trying to taste lighter nuances. And sometimes you take a sip, and are instantly reminded of berries, or of oak wood :) Does it matter? I don't know. In the end, I either like a wine or not. But if you're interested in a topic it helps to share a vocabulary to describe your experiences.
jartelt 8y ago
I agree, it's not a good critique. I have definitely tasted wines where I felt like there was hint of chocolate in the background. It is also common for wines to have a hint of berry flavor. Grapes and yeast can make all kinds of flavor. Sure, a lot of wine descriptions are super douchey and go overboard on the descriptors. But yea, Belgian beers can taste can have esters than taste banana-like and NE IPAs can taste like orange juice, both with no fruit added.
thatcat 8y ago
This may be off topic, but I just brewed a batch that is sour and citrusy like grapefruit juice. After searching around I found the distinctive grapefruit flavor compared to other citrus is the result of a sulfur containing terpene, mercaptan. I've been trying to figure out what may have caused it to develop in this batch, but not others brewed with the same yeast. What source would you reccomend for trying to trace back flavors to the metabolic processes in the yeast?
- jersully72 8y ago
  > What source would you reccomend for trying to trace back flavors to the metabolic processes in the yeast? A homebrew forum.
rsync 8y ago
"This, at least, is IMO not a valid criticism. I make beer, and two easy examples are cloves & banana." Agreed. In fact, I will go further and support the notion that red wines can give you "brick" and "chalk" tastes, etc., even though I have never actually tasted brick.

chrisseaton 8y ago

> they'll comment on different 'subtle notes of chocolate' in a product that is entirely made of grapes and yeast I think you're deliberately misunderstanding what is clearly just explaining aromas by saying they're similar to those you'd find in food that you'd be familiar with.

gowld 8y ago
Is there really a chocolately aroma, though?
- skywhopper 8y ago
  Uh, yes. Or do you mean in wine? Probably not something everyone would agree was "chocolatey", but the point is that's the aroma or taste the reviewer identifies. If you or I can't detect it, that doesn't mean they were wrong. Maybe we would describe the same flavor or aroma differently. Or maybe our senses would not detect the same chemical they are detecting. Everyone's sense of taste and smell is different.
- spookthesunset 8y ago
  Sometimes, yes. Wine can have a very complex flavor profile and at some point, you have to label what you taste and smell using words. Either we go with things we already have to describe odor and taste ("smells like chocolate", or "has a very buttery mouthfeel") or we have to invent new words...
- peterwwillis 8y ago
  I once drank a bottle of some white wine from the central valley, I have no idea what it was, but I had several people taste it in case I was losing my marbles, and it tasted like chocolate. REALLY like chocolate. A white wine. It was not made with any chocolate. Aromas are just chemicals floating in the air, anyway.
  - DennisP 8y ago
    I just read (in a book about scotch) that alcohol can react with a component in European oak to make a chemical that tastes like chocolate. So I'm guessing your white wine was aged for a good while.

josefresco 8y ago

> But the culture around it is elitist and unscientific Maybe the culture on the lower levels, but certainly not at the top. > And they'll comment on different 'subtle notes of chocolate' in a product that is entirely made of grapes and yeast. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2204371/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2204371/

aeternus 8y ago
Do sommeliers ever have to retake the test? Creating a test with a low pass rate is not hard and doesn't really prove anything unless it delivers consistent results. Test could just be if (rand() < .0001)
- cascom 8y ago
  Country x region x sub-region x grape variety x vintage? Obscenely hard randomly, multiple times? I believe there are multiple levels that get progressively harder so even more unlikely unlikely.
  - gowld 8y ago
    It depends on how accurate answers must be to be considered passing. (What's the curve?)

bitL 8y ago

I once did an experiment; I brought a 100EUR bottle of wine (probably $400 bottle in the US) to a party at my language school just for fun to see if people would notice. Except for one lady, nobody noticed anything (out of ~80 people) and those who drank it took it as a regular, uninteresting wine.

always_good 8y ago
You were able to serve 80 people from a bottle of wine? Did they drink from thimbles?
- jandrese 8y ago
  Wine tastings will often give you just the barest splash of liquid. Even then, getting 80 servings out of a 750ml bottle is impressive. Roughly 9ml per serving, or 3/10 of an ounce for Americans. I really can't blame the guests for having trouble identifying it as a particularly superb wine when they don't get enough to coat their tongue.
  - jimnotgym 8y ago
    > Wine tastings will often give you just the barest splash of liquid. You need to find a better wine merchant. You need at least enough to fill your mouth twice over...
- bitL 8y ago
  No, I said that the party was attended by ~80 people, some of them took my bottle of wine from among all available bottles and drank it (most people looked at what is available and then decided what to get). I saw only one lady that said "wow, this must be a very expensive wine!" and as she looked around excited to share the finding, nobody cared, and the ones who were drinking it seemed to drink it like a juice, completely uninterested.
everdrive 8y ago
Did you also serve 80 people a single loaf of bread?

dxhdr 8y ago

> I did a tasting with a few friends where I chilled red and white wines down to the same temperature, and had them try the wines blindfolded. No surprise, wines taste very differently when chilled. Reds in particular lose much of their flavor.

cortesoft 8y ago

This is true of everything, though; so much of our judgments about the quality of something has to do with our expectations and priming. It isn’t just wine, it is every non-commodity

swensel 8y ago

There are compounds in wine that resemble the aromas and flavors of other plants, foods, spices, etc. This is why there can be notes of 'chocolate' in a product made only from grapes. [1] [1] http://winefolly.com/review/where-wine-flavors-come-from/ http://winefolly.com/review/where-wine-flavors-come-from/

stouset 8y ago

This kind of comment comes along any time there's an article about wine on the Internet, and I feel like so many people want to backlash against wine elitism that they overshoot far, far in the other direction. The price thing happens for literally everything. People infer the value of things from the listed price, which is why everything in a department store is perpetually on sale and why you should set pricing expectations higher than reasonable when negotiating a sale or an hourly rate. This isn't a critique of wine, it's a critique of the human psyche using easily-manipulable signals as shortcuts for inferring value. I have yet to find a person who actually believes that a forty dollar bottle wine is likely to be better than a fifteen dollar bottle of the same varietal or anyone who would judge someone on the price of the wine they're drinking. "The Color of Odors" is pretty much just another issue with our brains synthesizing multiple signals to come to a conclusion. If you drink a wine that's colored red, you're going to start with the assumption that it's a red wine and work from there. This works as an exceedingly-reliable heuristic: the average number of times someone is trying to trick you about what type of wine you're drinking per drinking session is effectively zero (and the consequences thereof are roughly zero as well). You've ran your own experiment with N=6, but brown-bag tastings at wine shops aren't exactly rare and amateur enthusiasts are generally in the ballpark with many of their guesses. Different tasters will rate a given wine differently because taste isn't objective. But it's not subjective either. It's a composite of both. They'll comment on "subtle notes of chocolate" because wines—like beer, coffee, and everything else—have tons of flavor compounds. And they're made of more than just grapes or yeast; barrel aging imparts yet more flavor compounds, and the specifics (oak, steel, level of char, type of oak, if the barrels have been reused, etc.) add yet more variables. I'm not saying that some of it isn't bullshit (https://xkcd.com/915/ https://xkcd.com/915/), but it sounds like you're trying to make the point that all wine could just be replaced with Welch's and vodka and nobody would be able to tell the difference.

SmirkingRevenge 8y ago
> Different tasters will rate a given wine differently because taste isn't objective. But it's not subjective either. It's a composite of both. They'll comment on "subtle notes of chocolate" because wines—like beer, coffee, and everything else—have tons of flavor compounds. Not only will different tasters rate a given wine differently, a given taster will rate a given wine differently, most of the time. http://letastevin.org/Hodgson%202008%20Examination%20of%20judge%20reliability%20at%20major%20us%20wine%20competition.pdf http://letastevin.org/Hodgson%202008%20Examination%20of%20ju...

everdrive 8y ago

I agree with all of this, and would only add that it seems like the market has already handled this strange circumstance. I enjoy great wine and it seldom costs more than $8 a bottle. Some people really want to buy expensive things for the sake of luxury alone, and since wine is so easy to make (and apparently to project your tastes onto) we have amazing choices at nearly all price points. I'm not just being blue collar, either --- I'll readily admit that very expensive whiskey tastes VERY different from cheap whiskey, and much better too. There's no such thing as a $8 bottle of whiskey that tastes just as good as $90 bottle, but that's exactly how wine works. And, I suspect it's exactly why there's such price variation too. (I mean variation in the sense that a cheap bottle is as high quality as an expensive bottle. For whiskey, a cheap bottle is low quality, and an expensive bottle can be high quality.)

groby_b 8y ago
There is, however, a $15 bottle of Whiskey that beats Pappy every single time. (Well, used to be. They're not selling it any more.) And there are $80 bottles of wine that can't be approached by any of the $8 bottles. The thing is, both businesses are about both very subjective taste, and about marketing. You'll need to find what works for you, and roll with that. In both areas, spending more money makes it more likely you avoid the absolute disasters, but it doesn't guarantee you get something more than mediocre.
- andperseand 8y ago
  What is this $15 bottle of whiskey? I'd love to know what cheap bourbons are good.
  - dhimes 8y ago
    Larceny is a little more but very nice; Buffalo Trace a bit more still but delicious. Disclaimer: I'm new to bourbon.
    - sulam 8y ago

CocaKoala 8y ago

> chilled red and white wines down to the same temperature What temperature did you serve them at? I'm not going to argue that your results aren't what they are, but white wines and red wines are served at different temperatures for a reason. Temperature definitely has a noticeable effect on taste, with colder things having more muted flavours than warmer things (this is why soda tastes acceptable when it's over ice, and unbearably sweet when it's warm) so really what you're establishing here isn't "white wines and red wines taste the same", but "when you serve a red wine at a non-recommended temperature, it doesn't taste like what people expect it to taste like" which seems reasonable but also not interesting. It would be more interesting if, in addition to serving chilled white wine alongside chilled red wine and daring people to tell the different, you also served recommended red-wine-temp red wine with recommended-red-wine-temp white wine, and see if you can tell the difference.

nrclark 8y ago
A valid consideration, and one that I didn't test. I'll have to try it out on people some time!
poulsbohemian 8y ago
Something else I would have never believed had I not experienced it -- the shape of the glass really does matter as well. Not perhaps significantly so that you need to have different glasses, but definitely noticeable when given the opportunity to test.
- CocaKoala 8y ago
  Yep. It makes sense when you think about it; it's pretty intuitive that the shape of the glass would affect how you smell the wine as you drink, and nobody's really going to contest that scent is a large component in flavour. Like you've observed, it's not such a large deal that if somebody poured red wine in a white glass and handed it to me, I'd wave off (let alone burgundy in a pinot noir glass or something). But it turns out that stuff like that makes a difference if you look for it.

jimnotgym 8y ago

> Different professional wine tasters will rate a given wine extremely differently. My wife likes strawberries. I don't care for them. Professional wine tasters are just people with their own preferences. > aging a particular bottle actually makes it taste better in a measurable way. So Bordeaux 2017 is on sale now En Primuer, which means it is still in big casks in the vineyard. Buy it now and your wine merchant will ship it to you in 18 months when it is bottled. The wine experts have all been to Bordeaux and tasted those wines, and I can tell you you need to be an expert....because this young they are very tannic (like sucking a tea bag!). The skill they display in knowing how good a wine will be in a few years when it is ready is pretty impressive. These wines will all taste very tannic in 5 years time, but in 10 years may soften. So no they don't get better with age, it just takes years for them to be ready to drink. I guarantee you could tell the difference between a 2017 claret and a 2009 claret.... because one is ready, one is disgusting. So sorry I think you have missed the point of ageing.

Baeocystin 8y ago
I make a loquat seed liqueur that takes about two years to finish. The first several months are spent in contact with the seeds, citrus zest, vanilla bean, and other elements, then it is bottled and left to sit for at least another year. If you were to taste it right before bottling, you would think it less drinkable than pine-sol. After the appropriate amount of time, however, it becomes a delicious, amaretto-like dessert drink. It really is fascinating how much it changes over time.
rdtsc 8y ago
> but in 10 years may soften. So no they don't get better with age, it just takes years for them to be ready to drink. A relative of mine did some work for a winery. As part of the payment or as a gift for a job well done they got a bottle of wine from 1965. The bottle was covered and dust and grime, looked pretty gross. By that time we drank it it had aged for about 25-30 years. The taste though was amazing. Didn't even taste like wine, had a very smooth velvet-y taste. Almost no acidity, not tannic at all.
- calt 8y ago

resu_nimda 8y ago

Whenever this comes up I bring up the documentary Somm. It follows a couple guys training for the master sommelier test. To me it hilariously shines a light on the farce of the whole thing. But people are often taken aback when I suggest that there might be a lot of bullshit in wine. Even generally rational/skeptical people that don't have that strong of an attachment to it. They all say, "yeah, but you can definitely tell, like when it's good wine or bad wine." And yet virtually any time a blind test is done the results say differently (precipitating some serious schadenfreude in the movie). It's the same thing with music. So many people think they need lossless quality when effectively zero people can successfully pick it out in an ABX test with an MP3 @ 320.

cycrutchfield 8y ago
What did you find farcical about sommelier training?
- resu_nimda 8y ago
  Well they spent a ton of their time cramming flashcards of myriad regions and sub-regions and testing the wines, were then largely unable to identify which regions the wine came from, and a bunch of them still passed (I realize the test depicted was a practice but nowhere is this skill convincingly demonstrated by anyone). And the things they say about "notes of dead red rose petals" are taken to be mostly creative liberty and highly subjective so doing that well is more of being a showman than a technical expert. In general the type of people involved and their attitudes gave the impression that they just think it's cool to be "wine guys." In my opinion it didn't paint a picture of substance or rigor. Not saying that the entire wine industry is devoid of that, but this particular view into it validated some of the criticisms in my mind. Edit: one other thing I recall is that the results of the taste test portion of the actual exam are never released to anybody, which doesn't inspire much confidence.
  - cycrutchfield 8y ago
    If you're open to trying new experiences, go to a group blind wine tasting event with actual trained sommeliers (you can find such events on meetup or elsewhere). It's a very interesting learning experience and it teaches you a little bit about how trained professionals methodically determine by taste, smell, and sight how to identify what a wine is. Now, they are very unlikely to be perfect, given that our palates are very unreliable and noisy sensors, and a given bottle of wine is itself a very noisy expression of the grapes it was made from. But there is a process to it, and it's not just a made-up pseudoscience.

zby 8y ago

There is a paradox in it: if it was easy to tell them apart - there would be no place for the connoisseurs - but if you cannot tell the difference - then it does not matter which you are drinking.

deleted 8y ago
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petre 8y ago

> Different professional wine tasters will rate a given wine extremely differently. In my country winetasters gather and rate wines individually. Then they reach a consensus. One of the wines gets an award. Of course the process is subjective, but then so are literature or film awards.

yawz 8y ago

> a Merlot from a Sauv Blanc Well... One doesn't need to be a wine enthusiast to tell a red wine from a white. And there is quite bit of a difference between their serving temperature.

gowld 8y ago
Of course you can taste temperature differences and see color differences. The question is whether you can taste wine differences without temperature differences and color diffefrences.
- dxhdr 8y ago
  > The question is whether you can taste wine differences without temperature differences Temperature differences greatly affect the taste, so what's the purpose of that test?
  - caconym_ 8y ago
    Obviously, to determine whether there's an inherent taste difference between red and white wine when other variables are controlled for.
    - cycrutchfield 8y ago
      Which is meaningless, because nobody is trained to taste red wine when it's chilled to white wine temperatures. This is like saying that a classifier trained to distinguish between dogs and cats where the pictures are taken during the day should generalize to images of dogs and cats taken at night. If the classifier isn't able to distinguish between dog and cat images taken at night then it must be that there is no difference between dogs and cats.
      - caconym_ 8y ago
        The analogy is not a good one because the human sense/perception of taste is not a narrow classifier trained on limited data. I can taste something I've never tasted before and still a) describe the flavor, b) determine that it is different from other flavors I've tasted before, and c) recognize the new flavor again in the future. If people with trained palates for wine cannot tell a chilled red apart from a white, or a room-temperature white apart from a red, it may not prove that the conventional wisdom around wine tasting is bullshit, but it sure suggests it strongly.

baxtr 8y ago

Is this really news? That’s the same with Pepsi and Coke and many other things. People don’t buy a drink. They buy an experience. A feeling. A story. Why do you criticize people for being human? We’re not scientists nor robots (most of us at least).

gowld 8y ago
Pepsi and Coke consistently taste different from each other and same as themselves.
- baxtr 8y ago
  That’s what I thought. Go and do a blind test. Or read the papers https://daily.jstor.org/the-coca-cola-wars-can-anybody-really-tell-the-difference/ https://daily.jstor.org/the-coca-cola-wars-can-anybody-reall...
  - drblast 8y ago
    I've done the blind test between Coke and Pepsi with a third unnamed diet soda thrown in as a red herring. I can identify each just by the smell. It's not even close. I literally can't comprehend how blind people must be to tastes that they can't tell the difference. I also can't comprehend how people can eat anything with vinegar in it or drink IPAs, so maybe I'm just sensitive. Another anecdote...I know no French, but I had a French wine at a restaurant and commented it reminded me of the smell of the beach in the morning near where I grew up. A more thoroughly educated companion told me that the word Cotes (with some accent I don't know how to type) means "coast" in French, and that was in the name of the wine. I'm the first one to call BS on elitist snobs but the people who really know wine aren't BSing. I've found cheap wines to have a higher likelihood of tasting like vinegar Easter egg dye. After about $14 that quality is rare. That's not to say wine at $60 a bottle is "better." My personal favorite is $18 at Costco. But being able to tell the difference is not BS.
    - cs02rm0 8y ago
      A more thoroughly educated companion told me that the word Cotes (with some accent I don't know how to type) means "coast" in French, and that was in the name of the wine. Côtes. The circumflex, at least in French AIUI, often means there used to be an 's' after that letter, i.e. costes which gets you a little closer to coasts (and the Spanish costas).

wheels 8y ago

Being the sort of person who enjoys a regular tipple, when starting a startup (and conserving cash whereever possible), I got in the habit of blind testing wines and beers to find my favorite of the cheap ones. For beer, especially, the main distinction between basic German pilsners (I live in Berlin) was the social class that they're marketed to. Price is a pretty poor predictor of quality or taste, but you can choose to spend anywhere from about 50 cents to €1.20 to get almost indistinguishable beers. That doesn't mean to say that some aren't better than others, but that price isn't a good predictor of where they fit on the quality scale. (With craft beers things are pretty different, however.) There are very obviously working class beers, professional beers, etc. With wine, my impression that almost everything that was sold at a grocery store broadly fit into the category of generic cheap wine. There is a weak correlation between quality and price, but if you sampled a bunch of them, it wasn't hard to find bottles at €3 that were better than the average bottle at €6, and bottles at €6 that were as good as the average bottle at €12. (They don't get much more expensive than €12 in grocery stores here. Note, wine is about twice as expensive for the same quality in the US, in my experience.) Notably, none of those wines would be truly interesting, just better expressions of their archetype. The most interesting way to taste wine that I've found is at high-end restaurants that do pairings. Having a professional that just picks out interesting wines that they think fit with particularly quirky dishes has yielded more interesting results for me than the handful of wine tastings I've done. They'll bring out stuff that's truly weird and interesting if you're used to grocery store wine. And here at least, once you've, ahm, stomached, what you're paying for the meal, the glasses of wine aren't exorbitant -- about €8/glass, even at a place with a couple Michelin stars. Relative to the other categories of booze, the place where I have genuine expertise is whisky. I have a large collection that's, well, worth more than my car. The beautiful thing about whisky, however, is that you can keep bottles of different things open for years and compare them to each other. That makes it pretty easy to figure out where you get the best bang for your buck. Over about €35/bottle, there's not a particularly strong correlation between quality and price. There are even some fantastic whiskies below that that punch way above their price-class (e.g. Laphroiag Quarter Cask, or Rittenhouse Rye). While there are some particularly unique and great expensive whiskies, even for a trained tongue and nose, it's absolutely no guarantee that a €100 bottle will be better than a good €40 bottle. Often it will just be rarer, and stroke the whisky-nerd ego to a greater extent. ;-)

hndl 8y ago

Interesting link. I've also noticed, while wine shopping with friends, that people tend to prefer a bottle with a cork over a twisty even if the twisty was priced higher.

goostavos 8y ago
I like the ceremony involved with the cork : |

mratzloff 8y ago

> After all the uproar over Brochet's "The Color of Odors", I did a tasting with a few friends where I chilled red and white wines down to the same temperature, and had them try the wines blindfolded. > Maybe it was my just my lame friends Your friends were fine; it was your test that was lame. Why would you ever serve red wine chilled? That's not how it's consumed by most wine drinkers, so I'm not sure what you were trying to prove, other than trying to "tear down the culture a peg or two"—and by implication your friends who consider themselves wine enthusiasts. Chilling a wine slows the volatilization of the aromatic compounds and dramatically changes the flavor. As a result it can taste thin or tasteless. No wonder they couldn't tell the difference. It's great when you want to mask a cheap product, though. The same is true of beer. Think about the quality of a Coors Light and why their ad campaign is all about drinking it ice cold.

astura 8y ago
It's not just wine - different temperatures effect the taste of everything, it's why melted ice cream tastes much sweeter than frozen ice cream and warm cola tastes much sweeter than cold. It's also why I don't like my food piping hot - I strongly perfer luke warm, the hotter the food the less taste is perceived.
SmirkingRevenge 8y ago
There was at least one similar, and slightly more scientific test done on this. In this version, white wine was dyed red with food coloring. And nobody could tell. https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infamous_study_on_wine_tasting.html https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infam...
- mratzloff 8y ago
  The differences are substantive. In the test you linked, expectation determines interpretation, similar to how people interpret cheap versus expensive bottles differently. In the latter, removing flavor means people can't judge flavor. In one, additional information yields a different, directed result; in the other, less information yields random results.

deleted 8y ago

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YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

>> After all the uproar over Brochet's "The Color of Odors", I did a tasting with a few friends where I chilled red and white wines down to the same temperature, and had them try the wines blindfolded. Across 6 people who all considered themselves wine enthusiasts, it was pretty dicey even being able to tell a Merlot from a Sauv Blanc. Maybe it was my just my lame friends, or maybe I chose bad wines. Or maybe not. I'd bet taht neither your friends are "lame" (tut-tut) neither the wines bad, but I think it's mostly an issue of what wines you happened to compare. In Greece where I'm from, I often drink house wines - I'll go to a taverna and they'll have a couple of barrels in the back, one red, one white. The white always has a distinct sweet twang, which is never there in the red that tends to be on the dry side (which I prefer for this reason). Both types of wine are often drinked chilled anyway (unless you go to some fancy place where they have ideas about the ideal temperature to drink their wine). And of course, there is no way in hell that anyone could mistake retsina for Merlot... :)

DennisP 8y ago

Any wine aged in wooden barrels is also made of wood. Alcohol reacts with various components of the wood to make all sorts of interesting flavor compounds.

brightball 8y ago

My favorite line from Ocean’s 13 is Matt Damon’s character in response to a question about a specific type of wine. “As long as it’s not ‘73...”

reubenswartz 8y ago

As someone who enjoys wine, but is not an expert, and thinks there's a lot of B.S. involved, I remember one Saturday I was making crepes for breakfast, and I needed to sauté some mushrooms, so I opened up an $8 bottle of Ménage à Trois. Sunday evening we had 2 other couples over for dinner, and I didn't want to serve them the rest of the MaT, so we opened a nice bottle of "90+ point" California Pinot Noir. Then I figured we should do a blind taste test. I recused myself. 4 of the 5 other people preferred the $8 bottle that I'd opened a day and a half before. The one guy in the group who is a real wine expert was having none of it. He knew which wine was "good" and which "wasn't", and why. Anecdotal, but I think it's a good illustration that there's a lot of B.S, but it's not all B.S. FWIW, I had a master sommelier on my Sales for Nerds podcast (June Rodil, who is not a stuffy wine snob at all, and is so much fun to drink with). (https://www.salesfornerds.io/episode-5-june-rodil-on-wine-customer-experience-delegation-and-more/ https://www.salesfornerds.io/episode-5-june-rodil-on-wine-cu...)

yks 8y ago
well, Ménage à Trois is a good wine
- reubenswartz 8y ago
  I agree. ;-) But the other one was better. Or maybe I just thought that because I knew it was more expensive. More research required... ;-)
  - jknightco 8y ago
    Wines like MaT are designed to be people pleasers. They're full of easily accessible flavors. 4 out of 5 Americans would prefer Katy Perry to The Flaming Lips, that doesn't mean she's better (or worse), it just means she's more crowd friendly.
    - acct1771 8y ago
      What does mean she's better?

slim 8y ago

Wine taste heavily depends on the taste of your mouth before pouring wine in it. That's why the same wine could taste different on different occasions. Especially if you drink wine while eating

Iv 8y ago

I am not exactly a foodie but my (French) parents are wine enthusiast and I got to taste a lot of different things. I must say that cold red wine (down to the ideal temperature for white wine) is something most wine enthusiasts probably are not used to and indeed, you lose much of the flavors that way. > people perceive wine very differently depending on price Yes, and a surprising part of this is that the price factor in much more unconsciously than we think. People do actually feel the wine, at the neurological level, differently, as it has been shown in MRI. It looks like we prepare ourselves psychologically for a different experience when we know which wine is which.

plufz 8y ago

I often hear people who know little about wine (not saying that is true about you!) talk about 'emperor's new clothes' with wine. I'm not saying that people aren't affected by say price or status of a type of wine - of course we are. In the same way people probably like belugan caviar or some expensive types of meat more because of its high price. I also think the study that showed wine experts that couldn't tell which vintage of the same wine was better sort of spilled over to "all wine tastes alike". I'm very much an amateur and I can easily tell the difference between sauvignon blanc, riesling, chablis (chardonnay from burgundy) in a blind testing (we often do that). I can sometimes guess country, but that is more hit and miss. My girlfriend that is a more advanced amateur can pick region, country, type of grape, etc on lots of wines. The thing that I think people who aren't interested in wine don't understand is that taste and smell is something that can be trained. When I started hanging out with people that were more interested in wine I couldn't tell the difference either, most wines tasted, well, wine to me. And of course cheap wines for $3-9 are usually not that good or unique, even though there are good wines in that price segment too. Wine tasting also made food a lot better for me, since it trained my sense of taste and smell.

a_136_chiffa 8y ago

As a French - you can actually taste the difference between a 5$ and a 50$ wine, even despite the difference itaste. In France. Not in the US. For some weird reason, the US wine is 100% posing, and statement about your social position. Almost no attention is given to the actual quality of the wine and a crapton of of 5$ wines taste significantly better than 10$-20$ or even 50$ bottles. In the same spirit, the "sommeliers" and wine vendors are eager to sell you the most expensive wine in their stock, not in discovering underappreciated wines. Not surprising that no one develops a proper taste for wine here. PS: And yes, don't chill reds. Ever. They are to be served at ~18C or ~65F. Otherwise, you won't be able to taste anything in them, even if they are good.

massaman_yams 8y ago

Re: age, compare a beaujolais nouveaux to a 2-3 year old beaujolais. There's a reason very young wines aren't usually seen on shelves; they can taste overly "green", phenolic, and/or tannic. But once you're past about 4 or 5 years old, I think you're right - it becomes quite a bit more subjective.