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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 Bar

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.
        lemming 4y ago
        No worries, and no shitting-on intended. It's a super interesting subject though, lots of issues around perception and psychological suggestibility which I find fascinating. When we ate out, it wasn't just the wine that was difficult to describe, almost no-one could identify reliably if we were e.g. eating pork or chicken. It really made me think about how sure I was about what I was tasting, or even like to eat. I'm also totally willing to believe that, for example, wine pairing recommendations might affect the flavour of what I'm eating, even if I couldn't reliably describe why that is. I'm sure the same is why food from a good restaurant is better than what I cook at home, even if I couldn't separate out the flavours well enough to tell you why. I'll try those recommendations just for my own curiosity too, thanks. That said, I was curious whether there was research around this, and found this article: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-tasting-junk-science-analysis https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-ta.... It doesn't paint the wine awards very well, although there's a big "it's complicated" caveat around it too. Googling for Robert Hodgson leads to a lot of interesting articles and interviews with him. It was really interesting how much variability there was across the judges - I could totally believe that, say, 10% of the population is predisposed for whatever reason to be much better at distinguishing subtleties. I remember an article written by a woman whose dad was really into wine and kept trying to get her into it too, but she hated it. At some point she had some sensory tests done and IIRC she was really sensitive to bitterness, which made basically all wine taste terrible to her - just a biological difference. At the end of the day, even if there is a lot of suggestibility involved, I really don't have a problem with that. If wine is a hobby for a lot of people and they get pleasure out of it, that's fine by me even if it does turn out to be largely placebo - it's not like we're talking about homeopathy for your healthcare or something. I thought this guy was refreshingly down-to-earth about it all: https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2016/october/karl-storchmann-on-wine-economics.html https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2016/octobe.... Basically - find something you like, and drink that, and don't worry about what anyone else thinks. Probably easier said than done, though.

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.
      - lemming 4y ago
        No worries, and no shitting-on intended. It's a super interesting subject though, lots of issues around perception and psychological suggestibility which I find fascinating. When we ate out, it wasn't just the wine that was difficult to describe, almost no-one could identify reliably if we were e.g. eating pork or chicken. It really made me think about how sure I was about what I was tasting, or even like to eat. I'm also totally willing to believe that, for example, wine pairing recommendations might affect the flavour of what I'm eating, even if I couldn't reliably describe why that is. I'm sure the same is why food from a good restaurant is better than what I cook at home, even if I couldn't separate out the flavours well enough to tell you why. I'll try those recommendations just for my own curiosity too, thanks. That said, I was curious whether there was research around this, and found this article: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-tasting-junk-science-analysis https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-ta.... It doesn't paint the wine awards very well, although there's a big "it's complicated" caveat around it too. Googling for Robert Hodgson leads to a lot of interesting articles and interviews with him. It was really interesting how much variability there was across the judges - I could totally believe that, say, 10% of the population is predisposed for whatever reason to be much better at distinguishing subtleties. I remember an article written by a woman whose dad was really into wine and kept trying to get her into it too, but she hated it. At some point she had some sensory tests done and IIRC she was really sensitive to bitterness, which made basically all wine taste terrible to her - just a biological difference. At the end of the day, even if there is a lot of suggestibility involved, I really don't have a problem with that. If wine is a hobby for a lot of people and they get pleasure out of it, that's fine by me even if it does turn out to be largely placebo - it's not like we're talking about homeopathy for your healthcare or something. I thought this guy was refreshingly down-to-earth about it all: https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2016/october/karl-storchmann-on-wine-economics.html https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2016/octobe.... Basically - find something you like, and drink that, and don't worry about what anyone else thinks. Probably easier said than done, though.