4 ms·

It bears pointing out that all such studies that have been conducted have super questionable methodologies and therefore questionable conclusions. There is a st

It bears pointing out that all such studies that have been conducted have super questionable methodologies and therefore questionable conclusions. There is a strong publication bias for surprising conclusions like “all wine experts are frauds” and essentially no bias for publishing something mundane like “people who train explicitly for blind tasting are… actually good at blind tasting”. My suggestion is go and participate in a blind tasting with an actual expert (a MW or Master Somm), and draw your own conclusions about whether it is a parlor trick or not.

lemming 4y ago
I (sort of) did this - about 10 years ago or so we ate at Dans Le Noir (https://www.danslenoir.com/en/ https://www.danslenoir.com/en/, we went to the one in Barcelona), a restaurant which serves everything in pitch darkness. The waiters were all blind. It was a really interesting experience in many ways. Everyone sits at communal tables, so you get to chat to everyone around you. There was a guy at our table who worked in the Spanish wine industry - I can't recall if he was a sommelier or waiter, but his knowledge of wine was clearly much better than anyone else at the table. When they served the wines with the different courses they didn't tell us anything about them. No-one at the table, including him, did better than chance at even just guessing whether the wines were red or white. It's possible they deliberately chose ambiguous wines to make it more difficult, but it was really amazing how hard it was to tell what you were eating or drinking when you couldn't see it. I didn't draw conclusions about whether anything was a parlour trick, but it was an illuminating illustration of how much we kid ourselves if we think our senses are really communicating accurately with us.
- cycrutchfield 4y ago
  This is the difference between “person who knows stuff about wine” and “person who trains blind tasting”. The former can rattle off obscure facts but can’t tell the difference between a red and white wine without seeing it. The latter knows how to detect the level of tannins in a wine and is able to deduce that the wine without tannins is a white wine. I suspect your acquaintance may have been in the former camp.
  - lemming 4y ago
    If you have to explicitly train to be able to tell the difference between a red and a white without seeing it, surely that does mean that 99.99% of what is written about wine is bullshit? It's really hard not to come to an emperor-has-no-clothes conclusion here.
    - cycrutchfield 4y ago
      I bet you’re also the kind of person that says modern art is roughly equivalent to children’s fingerpainting, therefore the “emperor has no clothes”. Just because you don’t understand why two things are different doesn’t mean that there is no difference. It just means you are uneducated.
      - lemming 4y ago
        Nice ad hominem you have there. What I mean is that there is a huge amount written about, for example, pairing particular wines with particular foods. Most of this is aimed at people with far less wine knowledge than my dinner companion, who couldn't tell a white from a red if he couldn't see it. How useful do you think all that writing is, if only highly trained professionals have any chance of even noticing?
        cycrutchfield 4y ago
        Sorry, this is a touchy topic since everybody likes to shit on so-called wine snobs. With respect to food pairings, thankfully this is easy enough for you to try out yourself. Get some spicy Thai food and try it (blind) with a German Riesling versus a CA Cabernet, see if you prefer one over the other. By the way, you will probably be able to tell the difference between those two wines blind. I think most writing about wine is probably pretty useless, but when it comes to pairing food and wine there are some useful heuristics. Just like you probably wouldn’t like mustard on your ice cream, you probably wouldn’t like a big CA cab with spicy Thai food.
        4y ago

lemming 4y ago

I (sort of) did this - about 10 years ago or so we ate at Dans Le Noir (https://www.danslenoir.com/en/ https://www.danslenoir.com/en/, we went to the one in Barcelona), a restaurant which serves everything in pitch darkness. The waiters were all blind. It was a really interesting experience in many ways. Everyone sits at communal tables, so you get to chat to everyone around you. There was a guy at our table who worked in the Spanish wine industry - I can't recall if he was a sommelier or waiter, but his knowledge of wine was clearly much better than anyone else at the table. When they served the wines with the different courses they didn't tell us anything about them. No-one at the table, including him, did better than chance at even just guessing whether the wines were red or white. It's possible they deliberately chose ambiguous wines to make it more difficult, but it was really amazing how hard it was to tell what you were eating or drinking when you couldn't see it. I didn't draw conclusions about whether anything was a parlour trick, but it was an illuminating illustration of how much we kid ourselves if we think our senses are really communicating accurately with us.

cycrutchfield 4y ago
This is the difference between “person who knows stuff about wine” and “person who trains blind tasting”. The former can rattle off obscure facts but can’t tell the difference between a red and white wine without seeing it. The latter knows how to detect the level of tannins in a wine and is able to deduce that the wine without tannins is a white wine. I suspect your acquaintance may have been in the former camp.
- lemming 4y ago
  If you have to explicitly train to be able to tell the difference between a red and a white without seeing it, surely that does mean that 99.99% of what is written about wine is bullshit? It's really hard not to come to an emperor-has-no-clothes conclusion here.
  - cycrutchfield 4y ago
    I bet you’re also the kind of person that says modern art is roughly equivalent to children’s fingerpainting, therefore the “emperor has no clothes”. Just because you don’t understand why two things are different doesn’t mean that there is no difference. It just means you are uneducated.
    - lemming 4y ago
      Nice ad hominem you have there. What I mean is that there is a huge amount written about, for example, pairing particular wines with particular foods. Most of this is aimed at people with far less wine knowledge than my dinner companion, who couldn't tell a white from a red if he couldn't see it. How useful do you think all that writing is, if only highly trained professionals have any chance of even noticing?
      - cycrutchfield 4y ago
        Sorry, this is a touchy topic since everybody likes to shit on so-called wine snobs. With respect to food pairings, thankfully this is easy enough for you to try out yourself. Get some spicy Thai food and try it (blind) with a German Riesling versus a CA Cabernet, see if you prefer one over the other. By the way, you will probably be able to tell the difference between those two wines blind. I think most writing about wine is probably pretty useless, but when it comes to pairing food and wine there are some useful heuristics. Just like you probably wouldn’t like mustard on your ice cream, you probably wouldn’t like a big CA cab with spicy Thai food.
        4y ago