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> 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 t

by 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.
        cycrutchfield 8y ago
        A chilled red wine tastes and smells completely different from a non-chilled red wine. Go ahead and try it yourself. Also, wine tasting is absolutely a narrow classifier trained on limited data (in this case, tasters are not trained to classify red wine that is chilled). It's not surprising that wine tasters have overfit their classifier to the types and conditions of wine that they have been trained and tested on.
        caconym_ 8y ago
        > A chilled red wine tastes and smells completely different from a non-chilled red wine. Go ahead and try it yourself I believe this, but it's not what I said. I also assume a room temperature white smells and tastes completely different from a chilled one. If there is nobody in the world who can, with significant accuracy, sort a set of reds and whites held at the same temperature into a set of reds and a set of whites, then it is reasonable to say that a lot of the conventional wisdom around wine tasting is probably wrong. If wine tasters are too far up their own butts, use regular people instead, or people with more generally refined palates (e.g. chefs). Train somebody specifically for this task, even. At this point it's a hypothetical exercise. Claiming e.g. "only trained wine tasters are qualified to make this distinction, and serving wines at 'incorrect' temperatures makes it impossible for trained wine tasters to tell the difference because they've 'overfit their classifiers'" is absolute hogwash.
        cycrutchfield 8y ago
- oliv__ 8y ago
  Oh come on. I'm no wine enthusiast but the difference between a white and red wine is like apples to oranges.
  - nrclark 8y ago
    Try it blindfolded some time, with both wines at the same temperature. Unless one of them is a super-sweet wine (moscato, gewurztraminer etc), you might be surprised at the result.
  - moehm 8y ago
    As my sibling said, try it out (with different whines)! I remember some red wines which tasted like whites and vice versa. Blind tastings teach humility.
  - bjoli 8y ago
    I have done the same experiment. Only 2 out of 10 wine enthusiasts could with statistical certainty tell the difference between a rather big collection of white and red wines served at the same temperature.
    - cycrutchfield 8y ago
      And this is a meaningless experiment because all it demonstrates is that temperature (and the aromas and tastes produced at a given temperature) is an important feature for classifying wine, not that the wines are indistinguishable. If these wine enthusiasts trained to drink all wine at the same temperature they would eventually learn to pick up the differences between red and white wines. But they did not train, so their classification error is high.
      - bjoli 8y ago
        I dont know about that. Then they should have at least been able to correctly identify the wines served at optimal temperature (the red ones), but I can't say they did. I didn't serve any spritzig white wines though. Then it would have been very obvious.
- peterwwillis 8y ago
  This is a bit like having a taste test of frozen vegetables. But, yes, you can taste differences, and often those differences correlate to a certain "kind" of wine. If you give me a wine to taste, I may tell you "this tastes like a zinfandel". And maybe it's not a zin. Maybe it's a pinot that was grown and processed in a way that ended up tasting like zin. Of course I can tell when intense blackberry/blueberry fruit flavors are flooding my mouth, and all the dissolved solids fill the crevices of my mouth and weigh down my palette, just like you can tell the difference between strawberry jam and raspberry jam. The question is not can you taste a difference. The question is, can you guess what it was supposed to be? Hell no. Grapes with red skin can be used to make white wine. Of course I may be wrong about what grape it was, or what percentages of which varietals, or from what region, or year, etc. But I know when something tastes strongly of blackberries and when it doesn't.
  - fenomas 8y ago
    > But, yes, you can taste differences, and often those differences correlate to a certain "kind" of wine. Is there any evidence for this? Whenever I've read looked into studies on wine tasting, they invariably find that people can't reliably distinguish what they think they can.
    - peterwwillis 8y ago
      Almost all the studies I saw were about price or quality, and I'm not saying I can discern either. If the wines are similar, I won't be able to tell them apart. But if one tastes like blackberry, one like honey, one like coffee, one is sweet, and one is sour or acidic, those are clearly different qualities and easy to discern.
      - fenomas 8y ago
        Sure, but that amounts to saying "if a difference can be discerned then there's a discernible difference". I'm saying if there's anything really to wine tasting, there's got to be something that can be reliably shown in experiments - e.g. that sommeliers were found to reliably determine a wine's X, for some value of X. I've poked around for evidence like that, and there doesn't seem to be any.
fenomas 8y ago
> One doesn't need to be a wine enthusiast to tell a red wine from a white. Ever tried? A study famously found that tasters don't notice the difference - when given a white wine with red food coloring, their evaluations were typical of evaluations of red wines. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0093934X01924939 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0093934X0...
- andperseand 8y ago
  Can you tell the difference between someone saying 'faa' and 'baa'? I feel like that study is probably an example of the McGurk effect.
  - fenomas 8y ago
    Yeah - there's another study I recall reading about that measured people's reactions to smelling a given chemical, either from a bottle labeled "cheese" or a bottle labeled "vomit". IIRC they found that not only were people's reactions different, but different parts of their brain were used while forming the reactions. I suspect that the truth is, humans simply aren't capable of filtering out our expectations in judgments like this. Seeing color is part of how we "taste" wine, the same way that looking at someone's lips is part of how we "hear" the difference between certain sounds.

by 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.
      - cycrutchfield 8y ago
        A chilled red wine tastes and smells completely different from a non-chilled red wine. Go ahead and try it yourself. Also, wine tasting is absolutely a narrow classifier trained on limited data (in this case, tasters are not trained to classify red wine that is chilled). It's not surprising that wine tasters have overfit their classifier to the types and conditions of wine that they have been trained and tested on.
        caconym_ 8y ago
        > A chilled red wine tastes and smells completely different from a non-chilled red wine. Go ahead and try it yourself I believe this, but it's not what I said. I also assume a room temperature white smells and tastes completely different from a chilled one. If there is nobody in the world who can, with significant accuracy, sort a set of reds and whites held at the same temperature into a set of reds and a set of whites, then it is reasonable to say that a lot of the conventional wisdom around wine tasting is probably wrong. If wine tasters are too far up their own butts, use regular people instead, or people with more generally refined palates (e.g. chefs). Train somebody specifically for this task, even. At this point it's a hypothetical exercise. Claiming e.g. "only trained wine tasters are qualified to make this distinction, and serving wines at 'incorrect' temperatures makes it impossible for trained wine tasters to tell the difference because they've 'overfit their classifiers'" is absolute hogwash.
        cycrutchfield 8y ago
oliv__ 8y ago
Oh come on. I'm no wine enthusiast but the difference between a white and red wine is like apples to oranges.
- nrclark 8y ago
  Try it blindfolded some time, with both wines at the same temperature. Unless one of them is a super-sweet wine (moscato, gewurztraminer etc), you might be surprised at the result.
- moehm 8y ago
  As my sibling said, try it out (with different whines)! I remember some red wines which tasted like whites and vice versa. Blind tastings teach humility.
- bjoli 8y ago
  I have done the same experiment. Only 2 out of 10 wine enthusiasts could with statistical certainty tell the difference between a rather big collection of white and red wines served at the same temperature.
  - cycrutchfield 8y ago
    And this is a meaningless experiment because all it demonstrates is that temperature (and the aromas and tastes produced at a given temperature) is an important feature for classifying wine, not that the wines are indistinguishable. If these wine enthusiasts trained to drink all wine at the same temperature they would eventually learn to pick up the differences between red and white wines. But they did not train, so their classification error is high.
    - bjoli 8y ago
      I dont know about that. Then they should have at least been able to correctly identify the wines served at optimal temperature (the red ones), but I can't say they did. I didn't serve any spritzig white wines though. Then it would have been very obvious.
peterwwillis 8y ago
This is a bit like having a taste test of frozen vegetables. But, yes, you can taste differences, and often those differences correlate to a certain "kind" of wine. If you give me a wine to taste, I may tell you "this tastes like a zinfandel". And maybe it's not a zin. Maybe it's a pinot that was grown and processed in a way that ended up tasting like zin. Of course I can tell when intense blackberry/blueberry fruit flavors are flooding my mouth, and all the dissolved solids fill the crevices of my mouth and weigh down my palette, just like you can tell the difference between strawberry jam and raspberry jam. The question is not can you taste a difference. The question is, can you guess what it was supposed to be? Hell no. Grapes with red skin can be used to make white wine. Of course I may be wrong about what grape it was, or what percentages of which varietals, or from what region, or year, etc. But I know when something tastes strongly of blackberries and when it doesn't.
- fenomas 8y ago
  > But, yes, you can taste differences, and often those differences correlate to a certain "kind" of wine. Is there any evidence for this? Whenever I've read looked into studies on wine tasting, they invariably find that people can't reliably distinguish what they think they can.
  - peterwwillis 8y ago
    Almost all the studies I saw were about price or quality, and I'm not saying I can discern either. If the wines are similar, I won't be able to tell them apart. But if one tastes like blackberry, one like honey, one like coffee, one is sweet, and one is sour or acidic, those are clearly different qualities and easy to discern.
    - fenomas 8y ago
      Sure, but that amounts to saying "if a difference can be discerned then there's a discernible difference". I'm saying if there's anything really to wine tasting, there's got to be something that can be reliably shown in experiments - e.g. that sommeliers were found to reliably determine a wine's X, for some value of X. I've poked around for evidence like that, and there doesn't seem to be any.

fenomas 8y ago

> One doesn't need to be a wine enthusiast to tell a red wine from a white. Ever tried? A study famously found that tasters don't notice the difference - when given a white wine with red food coloring, their evaluations were typical of evaluations of red wines. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0093934X01924939 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0093934X0...

andperseand 8y ago
Can you tell the difference between someone saying 'faa' and 'baa'? I feel like that study is probably an example of the McGurk effect.
- fenomas 8y ago
  Yeah - there's another study I recall reading about that measured people's reactions to smelling a given chemical, either from a bottle labeled "cheese" or a bottle labeled "vomit". IIRC they found that not only were people's reactions different, but different parts of their brain were used while forming the reactions. I suspect that the truth is, humans simply aren't capable of filtering out our expectations in judgments like this. Seeing color is part of how we "taste" wine, the same way that looking at someone's lips is part of how we "hear" the difference between certain sounds.