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The wine tasting event: Distinguishing reds from whites (2014)

34 points by monort 5y ago

np_tedious 5y ago
I'm no wine expert but I bet I could reliably tell red from white in a blind tasting
- dbish 5y ago
  I thought that as well but my friends and I have done this a few times and most people can’t once you standardize temperature and move away from any desert wines (not a large sample size of course). Try it yourself and make sure not to let anything else get in the way (double blind where possible, all other factors exactly the same). I’ll also note that I’m not a complete noob, the group was in Napa on a wine tasting when we did this and most of us like wine and have done enough tasting and touring to know a little, maybe our pallets aren’t great, none of us are sommeliers or anywhere close :)
  - calchris42 5y ago
    Was wondering how much temperature matters, and thinking probably a lot. Do I even know what room temperature white wine tastes like? Not really.
    - niek_pas 5y ago
      Usually, it tastes pretty bad. Oh, and I’d recommend chilling your reds in the fridge for about 10-15 minutes before drinking. I often find true room-temperature reds to be on the warm side. I had a particularly bad experience with a “room-temperature” wine at a restaurant in Turin that had been sitting in the 35C heat…
      - dbish 5y ago
        Room temperature in wine is cellar temperature generally. That’s why you put reds in a wine fridge as well in many cases, just not as cold as white.
- kcl 5y ago
  I've run this experiment with friends and it was trivial to distinguish reds from whites with table wines. Whatever wines they use in these studies to stump experts must be more close in flavor.
- lupire 5y ago
  There are certainly different kinds of wine flavor (dry and sweet are the most obvious), and some are red and some are white. But one could make a wine flavor of the opposite color of its usual genre, and you probably wouldn't detect that blind.
- CharlesW 5y ago
  > I'm no wine expert but I bet I could reliably tell red from white in a blind tasting This response is intended a joke, gently poking fun at the HN cliché response of "SMEs can't reliably do a thing, but I could if I wanted to". (Right?)
  - np_tedious 5y ago
    The trick is to dribble some on your shirt and discreetly look
- ArnoVW 5y ago
  That's what I thought. But then I started thinking. OK, if it's some amzingly tannine-rich, oakey whine.. sure, Bordeaux. And if it's something really 'juicey', acid whine, sure.. Beaujolais nouveau. Etc. But those are the classics, and they are extremes. What if I present you some obscure Bourgogne with a subtle honey/peach taste. I can assure you won't be able to say off-hand if it's a red or white.
cafard 5y ago
Back about twenty years ago, Calvin Trillin's amusing essay "The Red and the White" appeared in the New Yorker. He later collected it in Feeding a Yen. But I imagine one can find it on-line at the New Yorker's site.
- CharlesW 5y ago
  Link for convenience: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/08/19/the-red-and-the-white https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/08/19/the-red-and-th...
ryansouza 5y ago
My understanding is that wines rated 92/93 really aren’t that good, that scoring is heavily weighted
- CharlesW 5y ago
  Also, it's not as if wine connoisseurship lacks informed criticism from people who are not beer-swilling ignoramuses. Marc Dornan, of the Beverage Testing Institute, for instance, says to anyone who asks him that rating wines on a hundred-point scale, which is now common practice, is "utterly pseudoscientific." https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/08/19/the-red-and-the-white https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/08/19/the-red-and-th...
bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
Can’t wait to see similar testing in the cannabis world. How many people can differentiate between the fruitiness of a Myrcene dominant cannabis cultivar vs an Ocimene dominant cannabis cultivar? As Mr. PB would say: Let’s find out.
tsimionescu 5y ago
Having once tasted a Barolo a friend was enjoying and feeling like I had sucked on a piece of cotton, I am very curious how it was confused for a light wine.
stickfigure 5y ago
My palate immediately picks up two things in wine: 1) Oak in red wine, which I like very much 2) Malolactic fermentation in white wine, which I dislike Putting wine in new oak costs money, so it tends to be more expensive wines that have the flavor profile I like. One thing I love about Spanish wine is that if it has 'crianza' or 'reserva' on the label, there's a legal minimum amount of time spent in oak. And they're relatively cheap (especially in Spain!) Of white wines, it's generally only expensive chardonnays that get malolactic fermentation (which gives it the "buttery" taste, yuck), so it's a win-win for me. There's no reason to spend a lot for white wine.
- telesilla 5y ago
  I'm the complete opposite, oak doesn't suit me except with whisky. I can happily drink any cheap (or expensive) red, but the average white, especially chardonnay, is unpleasant. A dry sauvignon blanc or gewürztraminer or reisling please!
  - Wistar 5y ago
    Although I am not a wine-drinker, in the opinions of my wine-loving friends, one of the consistently best sauvignon blancs for the money is the Costco Kirkland Marlborough Ti Point at $7/bottle.
    - kijin 5y ago
      Kirkland Signature is good value for the money in pretty much any category it's available in, whether it's wine, whiskey, olive oil, nacho chips, toilet paper, batteries, or whatever. If you have a Costco membership it's the obvious default choice unless you have a strong preference for some other brand.
    - telesilla 5y ago
      New Zealand sauvignon is certainly best in class on price point.
- xico 5y ago
  This tannic “oak” taste is very often made from small pieces of wood added to the wine. This has been allowed in France for more than 15 years for several wines, is common across EU, and is the norm outside Europe.
sva_ 5y ago
I've heard this study quoted before and found it fairly unbelievable. I can't imagine most experienced wine tasters would find tannins in white wines. It seems like this study had only 8 participants. That about explains it to me. In particular, take note of the fact that in the 10th tasting, people had big reds with heavy tannins. Assuming the 11th tasting happened shortly thereafter, those tannins won't magically disappear from your mouth in a short time. Hence, I'd wonder if there was perhaps some kind of cross-contamination caused by this. Edit: Although it does say "In the last 23 months, the Club conducted 11 blind tastings.". Perhaps these were on separate days. But still, just 8 participants. I'm confident some people bullshit about their "ability to taste/differentiate wine".
- mft_ 5y ago
  Tangential, I remember seeing a program a few years ago in which ice creams were made with colours which didn’t match the colour typically associated with the flavour. Purple lemon, and green orange, and so on. What was interesting was this one change completely destroyed people’s ability to sense and understand what they were tasting: they could believe they were eating the flavour which was associated with the colour, even when the flavour was utterly different.
paxys 5y ago
I have a fancy wine store near my place, and sometimes have friends over to sip from $50-80 bottles. They are always met with universal praise for being "worth the price". One time one of my friends instead opened a $7.99 bottle I had picked up from the grocery store without knowing it, and the group reaction was exactly the same. I had always believed all of the studies like the ones the author mentions, but this experience firmly solidified my view that the wine business is 90% marketing, 10% everything else.
- enkid 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure this is true for the vast majority of consumer products.
  - mikkergp 5y ago
    I don't know, have you ever used cheap industrial toilet paper?
  - kleiba 5y ago
    And for art.
  - NordSteve 5y ago
    While often true, not even sure I agree it's true for a majority. For example: Dishwasher detergent Laundry detergent Toilet paper Paper towels Pens Many packaged foods
    - 0_____0 5y ago
      I buy the cheapest granular dishwasher detergent they sell at the drugstore. There's an upsell on the packaging for the same company's detergent pods. If they wanted me to buy a fancier detergent they shouldn't have made the cheap kind work so well, my dishes are spotless already!
- karmakaze 5y ago
  I know very little about wine, and only have some general and vague preferences. Knowledge is important. I learned that by asking for and going with a recommendation to go with the meal I ordered. It cost more that I would normally pay since I don't feel like I know enough to choose well. That meal was mind-blowing. It was like the difference between watching a video on your phone and being in a theatre with full visual and auditory immersion. Same flavours but on an entirely different level. Judging wines in isolation is merely a game of 'can you discern what I can discern' and nothing more--could play the same game with sounds or colour bands.
neonate 5y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20220219155339/http://www.morssglobalfinance.com/the-ultimate-wine-tasting-event-distinguishing-reds-from-whites/ http://web.archive.org/web/20220219155339/http://www.morssgl...
j0057 5y ago
We did a blind test with friends, and couldn't tell Coca-Cola from 7-Up and Fanta.
- melissalobos 5y ago
  Is this a joke, or an actual experience? I could kind of believe that if they were unfamiliar with the products they might confuse them, but 7-Up has a distinct lemon-lime flavor, and Fanta is, well, a WWII poverty drink.
  - j0057 5y ago
    An actual experience. There were many more wrong guesses than you would think, which isn't that surprising given the insane quantity of sugar in all three of them. Your eyes do a lot of work when tasting food and drink, so when you see yellow bubbly sugar-water you assign a much poorer experience to it than the brownish bubbly sugar-water.
- 55555 5y ago
- continuational 5y ago
  I did a blind test of 6 brands of cola with a friend who claimed you couldn't taste the difference, and got them all right. In fairness, 3 of them were with artificial sweeteners, which is very easy to identify.
mikkergp 5y ago
I always thought of wine as less of a scale of good vs bad, and more about the individuality of the experience, kind of the way one baseball card is more expensive than another, which is not about quality -- though I also think that wine culture doesn't necessarily think of it that way. But you don't spend $100 on a bottle of wine because it's better than a $10. You spend $100 on a bottle of wine to be able to appreciate the unique experience of what wine on a 150 year old Vineyard in a specific part of France made by a specific person tastes like, or for a newer bottle of wine, to taste some celebrity vineyard. More like appreciating art than a strict ranking. That being said I also wonder if enjoying wine is really about maximizing the placebo effect, which may be why wine connoisseur so object to the economists view of wine, because it can spoil the illusion. I.E. part of the enjoyment of the wine is the story you tell yourself. Blindfolding removes an essential part of the enjoyment of the wine. Seeing the bottle, seeing the color of the wine, looking at the legs flow down the glass. I'm not sure if these two kinds of people - i.e. the objectivist who would rather know objectively if there's differences in the quality of wine, and the subjectivist - the person who wants to be taken up by the illusion of the wine can ever really get eachother. But often I think the subjectivist is happier (in the vein of the 'depressive realist' https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201206/depressive-realism https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201206...) and as someone who is more of the objectivist or realist I wonder if there are ways to leverage the other.
- wrs 5y ago
  Those aren’t really two kinds of people. You can be both (as I and the author are). Drink box wine day-to-day because it’s tasty, but still enjoy the subjective qualities of bottles with more of a story to them. And I totally agree with your first paragraph. Expensive overengineered wine seems pointless to me. Terroir is the interesting part.
gswdh 5y ago
dukeofdoom 5y ago
I'm not sure if you can distinguish really good wines. But you can definitely tell when a wine is bad.
zabzonk 5y ago
Both served at the same temperature?
ckemere 5y ago
I'm curious about whether cheaper wines use additives to achieve the taste more expensive wines achieve without them. Any knowledgeable info about this?
- guilhas 5y ago
  Additives, preservatives and sugar. Although you can find cheap wine without them you just have to look. I have some local "home" made wine and it is the best I have ever had
fumeux_fume 5y ago
Reports like these are very silly. Telling you how unrefined most palates are instead of any fundamental truth about wine.
phoenixy1 5y ago
I have a friend who works at a science museum. He tried to reproduce this at their cocktail hour -- he had wines dyed black and asked visitors to rate their wine knowledge on a scale of 1-5 and then identify the wines as red or white. According to him, most visitors were able to get it right, and 100% of visitors who self-identified at 4/5 or 5/5 wine knowledge were able to do so correctly. I keep telling him he should re-do this study and publish it!
LesZedCB 5y ago
most people aren't trained tasters. you can do a lot of training to remove the subject aspect of taste preference where you taste a lot of individual compounds in isolation so you learn to pick them out. this is very important for wine processor to be able to pick out defects in the fermentation by flavor. a similar phenomenon happens in coffee. the average taste preference is not aligned with high quality coffee, but simply doesn't know what to look for. most of their experience is with over roasted coffee that is picked whenever and processed as cost effectively as possible with no care for the innate flavors of the varietal.
- anthomtb 5y ago
  Agreed. The article takes a bunch of wine drinkers and tries to turn them into wine tasters. Those are two different circles with a very small amount of overlap. I found just keeping wine in my mouth for 20-30 seconds before swallowing (or spitting in some cases) drove home the difference between a $90 bottle and a $15 bottle. You won’t appreciate the $90 bottle if you’re taking half second swigs.
martinpw 5y ago
I bought a $2 bottle of Shiraz from Aldi and thought it was pretty bad. Then I had someone do a blind taste test on me with that bottle against a much more expensive Shiraz that I knew I liked. I picked the Aldi bottle as my preference.
- antisthenes 5y ago
  The only thing to be gathered from this test is that you're probably not a big fan of Shiraz in general. It's ok to not like certain kinds of wine. Personally, I prefer dessert wines, Moscato, Riesling and the like, and can't stand most dry reds.
patricktlo 5y ago
Most people prefer cheaper (in this case box wine) because it's often sweeter and it's supposed to be consumed right away. I do agree with him on the '(most) wines nowadays are pretty good' but I disagree on the 'so there is no reason to pay more than $10 for a bottle of wine' part. Once you get to maybe 30-40$ it can plateau but you can get some amazing wines for 20. Also the sample size is only of 8, and even if they are 'veterans', some couldn't discern a white from a red...
- matthewaveryusa 5y ago
  I find the white vs. red results shocking, I’ll need reproduce the same wine tasting at home. Having said that they used botabox for all their white vs red, and bota box indexes on the sweeter side + normalizes flavors —- I can see how that blurs the lines. I can also see how choosing oddball wines would make it difficult for example: Willamette valley pinot noirs don’t register for me as a pinot. Go ahead and try for yourself: buy the willamette vs. sonoma pinot noir from la crema: the sonoma oozes pinot while the willamette I would categorize as a cab.
  - patricktlo 5y ago
    Yeah I'll try too out of curiosity, I could see how one could mistake a pinot for a cab or really any one grape for another, since winemaking/climate/soil can make a lot of difference. I would try that but I'm in Europe so I don't have easy access to American wines, but I think I know what tou mean!
kentonv 5y ago
Cheap wines are harvested by machines, which just pull up everything and grind it together. So you get some amount of stem, dirt, field mouse*, etc. in there. I find when I drink a cheap wine I taste something distinctly like green plant matter, and I don't like it at all. But maybe I'm just fooling myself because I know it's cheap. Haven't tried it blind. * Strictly FDA-approved quantities of field mouse, of course. Think of it like the radiation dose from eating a banana. Nothing to worry about, really!
pea 5y ago
Regarding the inability to detect red/white, this study is brought up quite a bit and I find it hard to believe it's anything but an anomaly. I blind-tasted wine competitively at a national level, and it is pretty commonplace to identify region/sub-region/year/grape across 10 wines blind with ~80% accuracy. Many tastings go further than this and people are identifying chateau/year from 10 wines from the same region. It's relatively simple to train yourself to do this. Not saying you couldn't find some reds and whites which, if tasted without seeing the colour, would be challenging to tell apart; but I cannot really see this holding up if reproduced in better settings (perhaps my bias though). No qualms re people's preferences, which is of course subjective; lots of cheaper wines are may be more enjoyable, which is great. IMO wine flavour profiles are often full of weird signalling about what 'good' is, i.e. "taste x is considered desirable/refined/distinguished, ergo it tastes better", which is nonsense and snobbery.
whycombagator 5y ago
As someone who drinks a decent amount of red wine, always trying new ones & properly decanting. This makes me curious how I would fare on a similar taste test. I wonder if many casual wine drinkers just pour straight from the bottle? If so, it would lead to me believe they would have a hard time appreciating more expensive/better wines. Starting out I had a decoy red followed by a duckhorn red. I disliked the latter, but now I’m less of a noob I prefer the latter (if decanted) Personally, I find there are several wines around $10 that I enjoy (J lohr merlot is one) but around ~$20-60 is the sweet spot for my fav wines (E.g juggernaut Cabernet,pahlmeyer Jayson, caymus, etc). I have tried stuff in the hundreds & have enjoyed some but not all, and none yet have solidly eclipsed the previously mentioned to make it $ for $ worth it. I can’t imagine drinking Austin Hope and a box red, then rating the latter as better ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

34 points by monort 5y ago

np_tedious 5y ago

I'm no wine expert but I bet I could reliably tell red from white in a blind tasting

dbish 5y ago
I thought that as well but my friends and I have done this a few times and most people can’t once you standardize temperature and move away from any desert wines (not a large sample size of course). Try it yourself and make sure not to let anything else get in the way (double blind where possible, all other factors exactly the same). I’ll also note that I’m not a complete noob, the group was in Napa on a wine tasting when we did this and most of us like wine and have done enough tasting and touring to know a little, maybe our pallets aren’t great, none of us are sommeliers or anywhere close :)
- calchris42 5y ago
  Was wondering how much temperature matters, and thinking probably a lot. Do I even know what room temperature white wine tastes like? Not really.
  - niek_pas 5y ago
    Usually, it tastes pretty bad. Oh, and I’d recommend chilling your reds in the fridge for about 10-15 minutes before drinking. I often find true room-temperature reds to be on the warm side. I had a particularly bad experience with a “room-temperature” wine at a restaurant in Turin that had been sitting in the 35C heat…
    - dbish 5y ago
      Room temperature in wine is cellar temperature generally. That’s why you put reds in a wine fridge as well in many cases, just not as cold as white.
kcl 5y ago
I've run this experiment with friends and it was trivial to distinguish reds from whites with table wines. Whatever wines they use in these studies to stump experts must be more close in flavor.
lupire 5y ago
There are certainly different kinds of wine flavor (dry and sweet are the most obvious), and some are red and some are white. But one could make a wine flavor of the opposite color of its usual genre, and you probably wouldn't detect that blind.
CharlesW 5y ago
> I'm no wine expert but I bet I could reliably tell red from white in a blind tasting This response is intended a joke, gently poking fun at the HN cliché response of "SMEs can't reliably do a thing, but I could if I wanted to". (Right?)
- np_tedious 5y ago
  The trick is to dribble some on your shirt and discreetly look
ArnoVW 5y ago
That's what I thought. But then I started thinking. OK, if it's some amzingly tannine-rich, oakey whine.. sure, Bordeaux. And if it's something really 'juicey', acid whine, sure.. Beaujolais nouveau. Etc. But those are the classics, and they are extremes. What if I present you some obscure Bourgogne with a subtle honey/peach taste. I can assure you won't be able to say off-hand if it's a red or white.

cafard 5y ago

Back about twenty years ago, Calvin Trillin's amusing essay "The Red and the White" appeared in the New Yorker. He later collected it in Feeding a Yen. But I imagine one can find it on-line at the New Yorker's site.

CharlesW 5y ago
Link for convenience: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/08/19/the-red-and-the-white https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/08/19/the-red-and-th...

ryansouza 5y ago

My understanding is that wines rated 92/93 really aren’t that good, that scoring is heavily weighted

CharlesW 5y ago
Also, it's not as if wine connoisseurship lacks informed criticism from people who are not beer-swilling ignoramuses. Marc Dornan, of the Beverage Testing Institute, for instance, says to anyone who asks him that rating wines on a hundred-point scale, which is now common practice, is "utterly pseudoscientific." https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/08/19/the-red-and-the-white https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/08/19/the-red-and-th...

bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago

Can’t wait to see similar testing in the cannabis world. How many people can differentiate between the fruitiness of a Myrcene dominant cannabis cultivar vs an Ocimene dominant cannabis cultivar? As Mr. PB would say: Let’s find out.

tsimionescu 5y ago

Having once tasted a Barolo a friend was enjoying and feeling like I had sucked on a piece of cotton, I am very curious how it was confused for a light wine.

stickfigure 5y ago

My palate immediately picks up two things in wine: 1) Oak in red wine, which I like very much 2) Malolactic fermentation in white wine, which I dislike Putting wine in new oak costs money, so it tends to be more expensive wines that have the flavor profile I like. One thing I love about Spanish wine is that if it has 'crianza' or 'reserva' on the label, there's a legal minimum amount of time spent in oak. And they're relatively cheap (especially in Spain!) Of white wines, it's generally only expensive chardonnays that get malolactic fermentation (which gives it the "buttery" taste, yuck), so it's a win-win for me. There's no reason to spend a lot for white wine.

telesilla 5y ago
I'm the complete opposite, oak doesn't suit me except with whisky. I can happily drink any cheap (or expensive) red, but the average white, especially chardonnay, is unpleasant. A dry sauvignon blanc or gewürztraminer or reisling please!
- Wistar 5y ago
  Although I am not a wine-drinker, in the opinions of my wine-loving friends, one of the consistently best sauvignon blancs for the money is the Costco Kirkland Marlborough Ti Point at $7/bottle.
  - kijin 5y ago
    Kirkland Signature is good value for the money in pretty much any category it's available in, whether it's wine, whiskey, olive oil, nacho chips, toilet paper, batteries, or whatever. If you have a Costco membership it's the obvious default choice unless you have a strong preference for some other brand.
  - telesilla 5y ago
    New Zealand sauvignon is certainly best in class on price point.
xico 5y ago
This tannic “oak” taste is very often made from small pieces of wood added to the wine. This has been allowed in France for more than 15 years for several wines, is common across EU, and is the norm outside Europe.

sva_ 5y ago

I've heard this study quoted before and found it fairly unbelievable. I can't imagine most experienced wine tasters would find tannins in white wines. It seems like this study had only 8 participants. That about explains it to me. In particular, take note of the fact that in the 10th tasting, people had big reds with heavy tannins. Assuming the 11th tasting happened shortly thereafter, those tannins won't magically disappear from your mouth in a short time. Hence, I'd wonder if there was perhaps some kind of cross-contamination caused by this. Edit: Although it does say "In the last 23 months, the Club conducted 11 blind tastings.". Perhaps these were on separate days. But still, just 8 participants. I'm confident some people bullshit about their "ability to taste/differentiate wine".

mft_ 5y ago
Tangential, I remember seeing a program a few years ago in which ice creams were made with colours which didn’t match the colour typically associated with the flavour. Purple lemon, and green orange, and so on. What was interesting was this one change completely destroyed people’s ability to sense and understand what they were tasting: they could believe they were eating the flavour which was associated with the colour, even when the flavour was utterly different.

paxys 5y ago

I have a fancy wine store near my place, and sometimes have friends over to sip from $50-80 bottles. They are always met with universal praise for being "worth the price". One time one of my friends instead opened a $7.99 bottle I had picked up from the grocery store without knowing it, and the group reaction was exactly the same. I had always believed all of the studies like the ones the author mentions, but this experience firmly solidified my view that the wine business is 90% marketing, 10% everything else.

enkid 5y ago
I'm pretty sure this is true for the vast majority of consumer products.
- mikkergp 5y ago
  I don't know, have you ever used cheap industrial toilet paper?
- kleiba 5y ago
  And for art.
- NordSteve 5y ago
  While often true, not even sure I agree it's true for a majority. For example: Dishwasher detergent Laundry detergent Toilet paper Paper towels Pens Many packaged foods
  - 0_____0 5y ago
    I buy the cheapest granular dishwasher detergent they sell at the drugstore. There's an upsell on the packaging for the same company's detergent pods. If they wanted me to buy a fancier detergent they shouldn't have made the cheap kind work so well, my dishes are spotless already!
karmakaze 5y ago
I know very little about wine, and only have some general and vague preferences. Knowledge is important. I learned that by asking for and going with a recommendation to go with the meal I ordered. It cost more that I would normally pay since I don't feel like I know enough to choose well. That meal was mind-blowing. It was like the difference between watching a video on your phone and being in a theatre with full visual and auditory immersion. Same flavours but on an entirely different level. Judging wines in isolation is merely a game of 'can you discern what I can discern' and nothing more--could play the same game with sounds or colour bands.

neonate 5y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20220219155339/http://www.morssglobalfinance.com/the-ultimate-wine-tasting-event-distinguishing-reds-from-whites/ http://web.archive.org/web/20220219155339/http://www.morssgl...

j0057 5y ago

We did a blind test with friends, and couldn't tell Coca-Cola from 7-Up and Fanta.

melissalobos 5y ago
Is this a joke, or an actual experience? I could kind of believe that if they were unfamiliar with the products they might confuse them, but 7-Up has a distinct lemon-lime flavor, and Fanta is, well, a WWII poverty drink.
- j0057 5y ago
  An actual experience. There were many more wrong guesses than you would think, which isn't that surprising given the insane quantity of sugar in all three of them. Your eyes do a lot of work when tasting food and drink, so when you see yellow bubbly sugar-water you assign a much poorer experience to it than the brownish bubbly sugar-water.
55555 5y ago
continuational 5y ago
I did a blind test of 6 brands of cola with a friend who claimed you couldn't taste the difference, and got them all right. In fairness, 3 of them were with artificial sweeteners, which is very easy to identify.

mikkergp 5y ago

I always thought of wine as less of a scale of good vs bad, and more about the individuality of the experience, kind of the way one baseball card is more expensive than another, which is not about quality -- though I also think that wine culture doesn't necessarily think of it that way. But you don't spend $100 on a bottle of wine because it's better than a $10. You spend $100 on a bottle of wine to be able to appreciate the unique experience of what wine on a 150 year old Vineyard in a specific part of France made by a specific person tastes like, or for a newer bottle of wine, to taste some celebrity vineyard. More like appreciating art than a strict ranking. That being said I also wonder if enjoying wine is really about maximizing the placebo effect, which may be why wine connoisseur so object to the economists view of wine, because it can spoil the illusion. I.E. part of the enjoyment of the wine is the story you tell yourself. Blindfolding removes an essential part of the enjoyment of the wine. Seeing the bottle, seeing the color of the wine, looking at the legs flow down the glass. I'm not sure if these two kinds of people - i.e. the objectivist who would rather know objectively if there's differences in the quality of wine, and the subjectivist - the person who wants to be taken up by the illusion of the wine can ever really get eachother. But often I think the subjectivist is happier (in the vein of the 'depressive realist' https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201206/depressive-realism https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201206...) and as someone who is more of the objectivist or realist I wonder if there are ways to leverage the other.

wrs 5y ago
Those aren’t really two kinds of people. You can be both (as I and the author are). Drink box wine day-to-day because it’s tasty, but still enjoy the subjective qualities of bottles with more of a story to them. And I totally agree with your first paragraph. Expensive overengineered wine seems pointless to me. Terroir is the interesting part.

gswdh 5y ago

dukeofdoom 5y ago

I'm not sure if you can distinguish really good wines. But you can definitely tell when a wine is bad.

zabzonk 5y ago

Both served at the same temperature?

ckemere 5y ago

I'm curious about whether cheaper wines use additives to achieve the taste more expensive wines achieve without them. Any knowledgeable info about this?

guilhas 5y ago
Additives, preservatives and sugar. Although you can find cheap wine without them you just have to look. I have some local "home" made wine and it is the best I have ever had

fumeux_fume 5y ago

Reports like these are very silly. Telling you how unrefined most palates are instead of any fundamental truth about wine.

phoenixy1 5y ago

I have a friend who works at a science museum. He tried to reproduce this at their cocktail hour -- he had wines dyed black and asked visitors to rate their wine knowledge on a scale of 1-5 and then identify the wines as red or white. According to him, most visitors were able to get it right, and 100% of visitors who self-identified at 4/5 or 5/5 wine knowledge were able to do so correctly. I keep telling him he should re-do this study and publish it!

LesZedCB 5y ago

most people aren't trained tasters. you can do a lot of training to remove the subject aspect of taste preference where you taste a lot of individual compounds in isolation so you learn to pick them out. this is very important for wine processor to be able to pick out defects in the fermentation by flavor. a similar phenomenon happens in coffee. the average taste preference is not aligned with high quality coffee, but simply doesn't know what to look for. most of their experience is with over roasted coffee that is picked whenever and processed as cost effectively as possible with no care for the innate flavors of the varietal.

anthomtb 5y ago
Agreed. The article takes a bunch of wine drinkers and tries to turn them into wine tasters. Those are two different circles with a very small amount of overlap. I found just keeping wine in my mouth for 20-30 seconds before swallowing (or spitting in some cases) drove home the difference between a $90 bottle and a $15 bottle. You won’t appreciate the $90 bottle if you’re taking half second swigs.

martinpw 5y ago

I bought a $2 bottle of Shiraz from Aldi and thought it was pretty bad. Then I had someone do a blind taste test on me with that bottle against a much more expensive Shiraz that I knew I liked. I picked the Aldi bottle as my preference.

antisthenes 5y ago
The only thing to be gathered from this test is that you're probably not a big fan of Shiraz in general. It's ok to not like certain kinds of wine. Personally, I prefer dessert wines, Moscato, Riesling and the like, and can't stand most dry reds.

patricktlo 5y ago

Most people prefer cheaper (in this case box wine) because it's often sweeter and it's supposed to be consumed right away. I do agree with him on the '(most) wines nowadays are pretty good' but I disagree on the 'so there is no reason to pay more than $10 for a bottle of wine' part. Once you get to maybe 30-40$ it can plateau but you can get some amazing wines for 20. Also the sample size is only of 8, and even if they are 'veterans', some couldn't discern a white from a red...

matthewaveryusa 5y ago
I find the white vs. red results shocking, I’ll need reproduce the same wine tasting at home. Having said that they used botabox for all their white vs red, and bota box indexes on the sweeter side + normalizes flavors —- I can see how that blurs the lines. I can also see how choosing oddball wines would make it difficult for example: Willamette valley pinot noirs don’t register for me as a pinot. Go ahead and try for yourself: buy the willamette vs. sonoma pinot noir from la crema: the sonoma oozes pinot while the willamette I would categorize as a cab.
- patricktlo 5y ago
  Yeah I'll try too out of curiosity, I could see how one could mistake a pinot for a cab or really any one grape for another, since winemaking/climate/soil can make a lot of difference. I would try that but I'm in Europe so I don't have easy access to American wines, but I think I know what tou mean!

kentonv 5y ago

Cheap wines are harvested by machines, which just pull up everything and grind it together. So you get some amount of stem, dirt, field mouse*, etc. in there. I find when I drink a cheap wine I taste something distinctly like green plant matter, and I don't like it at all. But maybe I'm just fooling myself because I know it's cheap. Haven't tried it blind. * Strictly FDA-approved quantities of field mouse, of course. Think of it like the radiation dose from eating a banana. Nothing to worry about, really!

pea 5y ago

Regarding the inability to detect red/white, this study is brought up quite a bit and I find it hard to believe it's anything but an anomaly. I blind-tasted wine competitively at a national level, and it is pretty commonplace to identify region/sub-region/year/grape across 10 wines blind with ~80% accuracy. Many tastings go further than this and people are identifying chateau/year from 10 wines from the same region. It's relatively simple to train yourself to do this. Not saying you couldn't find some reds and whites which, if tasted without seeing the colour, would be challenging to tell apart; but I cannot really see this holding up if reproduced in better settings (perhaps my bias though). No qualms re people's preferences, which is of course subjective; lots of cheaper wines are may be more enjoyable, which is great. IMO wine flavour profiles are often full of weird signalling about what 'good' is, i.e. "taste x is considered desirable/refined/distinguished, ergo it tastes better", which is nonsense and snobbery.

whycombagator 5y ago

As someone who drinks a decent amount of red wine, always trying new ones & properly decanting. This makes me curious how I would fare on a similar taste test. I wonder if many casual wine drinkers just pour straight from the bottle? If so, it would lead to me believe they would have a hard time appreciating more expensive/better wines. Starting out I had a decoy red followed by a duckhorn red. I disliked the latter, but now I’m less of a noob I prefer the latter (if decanted) Personally, I find there are several wines around $10 that I enjoy (J lohr merlot is one) but around ~$20-60 is the sweet spot for my fav wines (E.g juggernaut Cabernet,pahlmeyer Jayson, caymus, etc). I have tried stuff in the hundreds & have enjoyed some but not all, and none yet have solidly eclipsed the previously mentioned to make it $ for $ worth it. I can’t imagine drinking Austin Hope and a box red, then rating the latter as better ¯\_(ツ)_/¯