9 ms·

I love wine. I am skeptical about the same things the article is skeptical about. I don't put much stock in price. One thing I know, though, is that I am get

by rsync 13y ago

I love wine. I am skeptical about the same things the article is skeptical about. I don't put much stock in price. One thing I know, though, is that I am getting sick and tired of the "tinted the white wine red and fooled them all" anecdote as it has very little substance. Any wine, white or red, can express a huge range of flavor and texture, etc., and there is absolutely no reason to suspect a "red" wine is actually a white wine. You'll note that the study does not indicate the testers thought it was a great red wine, or any particular red wine - just that they did not question it was red. That's not nearly the indictment it's made out to be. In fact, it's not an indictment at all. Assigning too much value, or "enjoyment" to price ? Fair critique. Describing wines with bizarre descriptors like "asphalt" ? Fair critique. Dubious claims of "terroir" ? Fair critique. But the "fooled them with white wine" test is meaningless.

dgunn 13y ago
I agree strongly about coloring whites red and calling foul on well-meaning participants. Sure a lot of these guys might be pretentious, smarmy jerks but that's no excuse to act like this is any sort of meaningful exercise. This could just as easily lead to the conclusion that humans taste, to some extent, based on what they're expecting. For example, if I was told I was drinking milk from a glass but it was actually filled with beer, I would probably not take more than the first drink even though I really like beer. This example is a bit far but I'm just saying expectation means a lot.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  > if I was told I was drinking milk from a glass but it was actually filled with beer, I would probably not take more than the first drink even though I really like beer. I had a similar mishap once with orange juice. It caused me to vomit, even though the orange juice was perfectly fine. I don't even like milk.
  - lostlogin 13y ago
    My father was making dinner and got the cheese sauce confused with the dessert custard. We ate cauliflower custard. The custard wasn't sweet as not much sugar had been added. I realised about 75% the way through that something was wrong, the other 2 finished, but were slightly confused by the taste and discussed it at the end, after the big reveal. Context is very important. And every so often I still ponder how the hell I ate it with cauliflower.
soofaloofa 13y ago
It is not meaningless if you are using the exact same wine in both tests as the author points out.
- loup-vaillant 13y ago
  Knowing that the liquid in front of you is wine, and seeing that it looks red, what is your probability that it is really red wine? Unless you have specific reasons to suspect foul play, your probability would be very very near 1 (certainty). Now, overcoming this near-certainty with our poorest senses of all, taste and smell, is quite difficult.
  - fastball 13y ago
    Exactly? The point is that the taste is all in your head. The point is that the quality of the wine does not seem to be objective, and neither are the descriptors used (oaky flavour, etc.)
    - ryanmcbride 13y ago
      You mean to say that taste is subjective? What's next? Music and Cinema?
    - sp332 13y ago
      The taste isn't all in your head. You're going to tell the difference between grape juice and 15% ABV wine! And over-oaked wine has a vanilla-like flavor that is pretty apparent. Some people like it and some don't, but that's a different question!
    - barrkel 13y ago
      The taste is not all in your head. I mean, it is subjective in the same sense that the sky being blue is a subjective thing. In other words, a philosophical debate over qualia. But if you ever had a wine-tasting dinner with a large company of people, with a ranked progression of wines, you would not doubt that certain qualities of wine are absolutely shared amongst almost everyone who drinks them.
foobarbazqux 13y ago
I thought the conclusion was that using different language to describe wines according to color is unnecessary. Seems like a pretty good hypothesis for further testing to me. > They described the red in language typical of reds and the white in language typical of whites.
- mtts 13y ago
  I call bullshit. There are some red wines that can work where you'd normally go for a white, such as Pinot Noir. I'm willing to accept someone can mistake a full bodied white for a thin Pinot Noir if food coloring was involved. Mistaking a thick red Sicilian wine for a bone dry Chablis? Not going to happen. Unless you're running into the effect where test subjects are trying to please the researchers and they're ignoring the fact that the "red" wine tastes somewhat unusual.
  - fastball 13y ago
    They were probably using a white wine that was in the middle of the spectrum. But since you have not tested this hypothesis at all, and have no evidence to back up your claims (like they do), I'm not sure why you think your opinion of bullshit is relevant.
    - mtts 13y ago
      Actually, what I think they've tested is wine snobbery, not whether there's a difference between red and white wine. That's what I meant by "bullshit". Look at the setup of their experiment. They made people say stuff about the wine they were drinking. Unsurprisingly, they found people used "red" words for wine dyed red and "white" words for un-dyed wine. This is not a surprising result. The effect is called "priming" and it has been known for a long time. It doesn't say anything about being able to taste the difference between red wine and white wine. If you do a blind folded taste test, I can guarantee you you can tell the difference. And if you happen to know red wine tends to be less acidic and more astringent than white wine, I can also guarantee you will be able to pick out which is which.
rohunati 13y ago
There is a link to http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/frontal-cortex/2012/06/wine-taste.html http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/frontal-cortex/2012/06... "But that didn’t stop the experts from describing the “red” wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert said that it was “jammy,” while another enjoyed its “crushed red fruit."
- akavlie 13y ago
  Food for thought: What is the flavor of "crushed red fruit" anyway? Cherries, strawberries, raspberries, cranberries, and tomatoes are all red. Oh, and watermelon (unless you count the outside). They don't taste very much alike.
  - seszett 13y ago
    "Fruits rouges" in French (the test was done in France, so most probably in French) has a rather specific meaning, it refers to a mix of strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, blackcurrant and redcurrant, basically. It's often used to describe this particular flavour in yogourts or other things like that, in France. I can imagine the exact taste just fine.
singular 13y ago
Very good point. The studies that conclude that tasters are no good at differentiating wine seem to presuppose that price is a good indication of quality to begin with, and when an expert picks a cheaper wine over a more expensive one they fail to consider the possibility that the problem is with that assumption rather than the expert's tasting ability. Edit: TFA (which I didn't R :) makes the point that there seems to be little correlation between price/qual. But it's worth emphasising this point anyway, I think.
the_cat_kittles 13y ago
One question that might sound silly, but i've grown to think isn't: Why shouldn't the color affect the drinker's perception? Presentation matters, why do we think it's dumb when we are swayed by it?
- adamio 13y ago
  Color may be a poor indicator of taste but it's a good indicator of nutrition. Orange/Yellow/Red Carrots. Maybe its just a mis-applied bias in this wine case. As in Crystal Pepsi.
ollysb 13y ago
They also didn't mention at what temperature the wines were served at. I'd expect a wine to taste markedly different when served chilled or at room temperature.
andolanra 13y ago
Has anybody actually read the original study?[1] Brochet did not serve the wines to "wine experts". From the study, emphasis mine: "The wine comparison test was carried out by 54 undergraduates from the Faculty of Oenology of the University of Bordeaux. The sex ratio was 1:1." Somehow, the results were transformed into, "Wine experts cannot tell the difference between red and white wine!" but that's not a thesis supported by the original paper. What we can conclude is that French undergrads sometimes use similar words to describe both red wines and red-tinted white wines... and that's about it. [1]: http://www.stanford.edu/class/linguist62n/morrot01colorofodors.pdf http://www.stanford.edu/class/linguist62n/morrot01colorofodo...
- rpedroso 13y ago
  They're not just any undergrad students, they were Oenology students -- they might not be experts, but they certainly know more about classifying wines by scent, flavor profile, etc than a layperson.
  - contingencies 13y ago
    More to the point, they were French!
  - toyg 13y ago
    Undergraduates in most settings will still be extremely prone to conform to recently-acquired knowledge as dogma, probably even more likely than a layperson. "Uh, they said data must be normalized, so here's 15 db tables to represent an employee..." maps the same as "Uh, they told me to use this and this word for red wines, so here's this and this word..." The paper implies that they sampled "experts", when they really just sampled "students" or "disciples". Quite the difference. (Besides, it's dramatic how scientific research keeps oversampling university undergraduates to such a large extent, purely out of practicality.)
- Zimahl 13y ago
  The sex ratio was 1:1. Whenever I drink, that's the ratio I'm targeting as well :)
qdog 13y ago
I am(maybe was Haven't worked on it in a bit) working a wine-tasting app, because paper and pencil can get a bit tedious to look up previous tastes. I use a 3 star method, 1 star= Don't like, 2 star = Will drink/buy if nothing else available, 3 = Will buy given the opportunity. Generally all the 'dark cherry'/'tobacco'/'plum' etc. flavors are kind of meaningless to me. I rarely detect anything I think I can pick out, I just tend to decide if I like the taste or not. Usually the nicer the wine smells, the better it tastes, sometimes its 'fruit forward' (sweet), sometimes it's 'tannic' (bitter acid) and sometimes it just burns (alcohol content). What I believe is bullshit is the people trying to describe flavors in a wine and extrapolate quality from that. If you like a wine, buy it, if you don't, don't. I enjoy some cheaper wines (Chariot Red at Trader Joe's is a fine value for about $5 imho), but my own tasting notes do indicate some $60 bottles of Pinot Noir taste way better to me than average. However, there are also some $60 and $150 bottles I don't think are very good. As for wines tasting alike, if you can't taste a difference between grape varieties, I guess stick to Charles Shaw and enjoy. I wouldn't be surprised that the experts have a hard time with multiple tastings, as the wine taste changes with exposure to oxygen, on top of the tiring palate.
- h4pless 13y ago
  Your app idea is a method I have used in the past. I started a note in Evernote and when I tried a new bottle of wine, I would take a picture of the bottle, write a comment of it's quality [Avoid, Okay, Pretty Good, Fantastic], write down it's basic characteristics, and then write what food I thought it would pair well with. One thing I have noticed about wine though is that even with a bottle of wine that I really like, the next bottle I get of the same vintage might be terrible. What the article does not mention is how important environmental conditions are for storing wine and how a case of wine can sometimes get ruined in shipping, sitting on a store shelf or not allowed to breathe properly. Because of the amount of variation in wine quality I have adopted the habit of just buying $6 - $15 bottles and when I find something I like, I stick with it until I stop liking it. If it's a special occasion, I will put my faith in a nicer brand that I have tried and liked before that I believe will pair well with whatever food is being served but for the most part, buying expensive wines is too much of a gamble for me. Especially considering that my wine palate is not much more complex than your 3-star system.
HeyLaughingBoy 13y ago
Describing wines with bizarre descriptors like "asphalt" ? Fair critique I confess to having not RTFM'd, but when I made my first (and to date, only) batch of Barolo and tasted it way too early, my comment to a friend was "I don't think it should taste like asphalt." His reply was a link to the review of an expensive Barolo that contained the phrase "has notes of tar."

by rsync 13y ago

dgunn 13y ago

I agree strongly about coloring whites red and calling foul on well-meaning participants. Sure a lot of these guys might be pretentious, smarmy jerks but that's no excuse to act like this is any sort of meaningful exercise. This could just as easily lead to the conclusion that humans taste, to some extent, based on what they're expecting. For example, if I was told I was drinking milk from a glass but it was actually filled with beer, I would probably not take more than the first drink even though I really like beer. This example is a bit far but I'm just saying expectation means a lot.

jlgreco 13y ago
> if I was told I was drinking milk from a glass but it was actually filled with beer, I would probably not take more than the first drink even though I really like beer. I had a similar mishap once with orange juice. It caused me to vomit, even though the orange juice was perfectly fine. I don't even like milk.
- lostlogin 13y ago
  My father was making dinner and got the cheese sauce confused with the dessert custard. We ate cauliflower custard. The custard wasn't sweet as not much sugar had been added. I realised about 75% the way through that something was wrong, the other 2 finished, but were slightly confused by the taste and discussed it at the end, after the big reveal. Context is very important. And every so often I still ponder how the hell I ate it with cauliflower.

soofaloofa 13y ago

It is not meaningless if you are using the exact same wine in both tests as the author points out.

loup-vaillant 13y ago
Knowing that the liquid in front of you is wine, and seeing that it looks red, what is your probability that it is really red wine? Unless you have specific reasons to suspect foul play, your probability would be very very near 1 (certainty). Now, overcoming this near-certainty with our poorest senses of all, taste and smell, is quite difficult.
- fastball 13y ago
  Exactly? The point is that the taste is all in your head. The point is that the quality of the wine does not seem to be objective, and neither are the descriptors used (oaky flavour, etc.)
  - ryanmcbride 13y ago
    You mean to say that taste is subjective? What's next? Music and Cinema?
  - sp332 13y ago
    The taste isn't all in your head. You're going to tell the difference between grape juice and 15% ABV wine! And over-oaked wine has a vanilla-like flavor that is pretty apparent. Some people like it and some don't, but that's a different question!
  - barrkel 13y ago
    The taste is not all in your head. I mean, it is subjective in the same sense that the sky being blue is a subjective thing. In other words, a philosophical debate over qualia. But if you ever had a wine-tasting dinner with a large company of people, with a ranked progression of wines, you would not doubt that certain qualities of wine are absolutely shared amongst almost everyone who drinks them.

foobarbazqux 13y ago

I thought the conclusion was that using different language to describe wines according to color is unnecessary. Seems like a pretty good hypothesis for further testing to me. > They described the red in language typical of reds and the white in language typical of whites.

mtts 13y ago
I call bullshit. There are some red wines that can work where you'd normally go for a white, such as Pinot Noir. I'm willing to accept someone can mistake a full bodied white for a thin Pinot Noir if food coloring was involved. Mistaking a thick red Sicilian wine for a bone dry Chablis? Not going to happen. Unless you're running into the effect where test subjects are trying to please the researchers and they're ignoring the fact that the "red" wine tastes somewhat unusual.
- fastball 13y ago
  They were probably using a white wine that was in the middle of the spectrum. But since you have not tested this hypothesis at all, and have no evidence to back up your claims (like they do), I'm not sure why you think your opinion of bullshit is relevant.
  - mtts 13y ago
    Actually, what I think they've tested is wine snobbery, not whether there's a difference between red and white wine. That's what I meant by "bullshit". Look at the setup of their experiment. They made people say stuff about the wine they were drinking. Unsurprisingly, they found people used "red" words for wine dyed red and "white" words for un-dyed wine. This is not a surprising result. The effect is called "priming" and it has been known for a long time. It doesn't say anything about being able to taste the difference between red wine and white wine. If you do a blind folded taste test, I can guarantee you you can tell the difference. And if you happen to know red wine tends to be less acidic and more astringent than white wine, I can also guarantee you will be able to pick out which is which.

rohunati 13y ago

There is a link to http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/frontal-cortex/2012/06/wine-taste.html http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/frontal-cortex/2012/06... "But that didn’t stop the experts from describing the “red” wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert said that it was “jammy,” while another enjoyed its “crushed red fruit."

akavlie 13y ago
Food for thought: What is the flavor of "crushed red fruit" anyway? Cherries, strawberries, raspberries, cranberries, and tomatoes are all red. Oh, and watermelon (unless you count the outside). They don't taste very much alike.
- seszett 13y ago
  "Fruits rouges" in French (the test was done in France, so most probably in French) has a rather specific meaning, it refers to a mix of strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, blackcurrant and redcurrant, basically. It's often used to describe this particular flavour in yogourts or other things like that, in France. I can imagine the exact taste just fine.

singular 13y ago

Very good point. The studies that conclude that tasters are no good at differentiating wine seem to presuppose that price is a good indication of quality to begin with, and when an expert picks a cheaper wine over a more expensive one they fail to consider the possibility that the problem is with that assumption rather than the expert's tasting ability. Edit: TFA (which I didn't R :) makes the point that there seems to be little correlation between price/qual. But it's worth emphasising this point anyway, I think.

the_cat_kittles 13y ago

One question that might sound silly, but i've grown to think isn't: Why shouldn't the color affect the drinker's perception? Presentation matters, why do we think it's dumb when we are swayed by it?

adamio 13y ago
Color may be a poor indicator of taste but it's a good indicator of nutrition. Orange/Yellow/Red Carrots. Maybe its just a mis-applied bias in this wine case. As in Crystal Pepsi.

ollysb 13y ago

They also didn't mention at what temperature the wines were served at. I'd expect a wine to taste markedly different when served chilled or at room temperature.

andolanra 13y ago

Has anybody actually read the original study?[1] Brochet did not serve the wines to "wine experts". From the study, emphasis mine: "The wine comparison test was carried out by 54 undergraduates from the Faculty of Oenology of the University of Bordeaux. The sex ratio was 1:1." Somehow, the results were transformed into, "Wine experts cannot tell the difference between red and white wine!" but that's not a thesis supported by the original paper. What we can conclude is that French undergrads sometimes use similar words to describe both red wines and red-tinted white wines... and that's about it. [1]: http://www.stanford.edu/class/linguist62n/morrot01colorofodors.pdf http://www.stanford.edu/class/linguist62n/morrot01colorofodo...

rpedroso 13y ago
They're not just any undergrad students, they were Oenology students -- they might not be experts, but they certainly know more about classifying wines by scent, flavor profile, etc than a layperson.
- contingencies 13y ago
  More to the point, they were French!
- toyg 13y ago
  Undergraduates in most settings will still be extremely prone to conform to recently-acquired knowledge as dogma, probably even more likely than a layperson. "Uh, they said data must be normalized, so here's 15 db tables to represent an employee..." maps the same as "Uh, they told me to use this and this word for red wines, so here's this and this word..." The paper implies that they sampled "experts", when they really just sampled "students" or "disciples". Quite the difference. (Besides, it's dramatic how scientific research keeps oversampling university undergraduates to such a large extent, purely out of practicality.)
Zimahl 13y ago
The sex ratio was 1:1. Whenever I drink, that's the ratio I'm targeting as well :)

qdog 13y ago

I am(maybe was Haven't worked on it in a bit) working a wine-tasting app, because paper and pencil can get a bit tedious to look up previous tastes. I use a 3 star method, 1 star= Don't like, 2 star = Will drink/buy if nothing else available, 3 = Will buy given the opportunity. Generally all the 'dark cherry'/'tobacco'/'plum' etc. flavors are kind of meaningless to me. I rarely detect anything I think I can pick out, I just tend to decide if I like the taste or not. Usually the nicer the wine smells, the better it tastes, sometimes its 'fruit forward' (sweet), sometimes it's 'tannic' (bitter acid) and sometimes it just burns (alcohol content). What I believe is bullshit is the people trying to describe flavors in a wine and extrapolate quality from that. If you like a wine, buy it, if you don't, don't. I enjoy some cheaper wines (Chariot Red at Trader Joe's is a fine value for about $5 imho), but my own tasting notes do indicate some $60 bottles of Pinot Noir taste way better to me than average. However, there are also some $60 and $150 bottles I don't think are very good. As for wines tasting alike, if you can't taste a difference between grape varieties, I guess stick to Charles Shaw and enjoy. I wouldn't be surprised that the experts have a hard time with multiple tastings, as the wine taste changes with exposure to oxygen, on top of the tiring palate.

h4pless 13y ago
Your app idea is a method I have used in the past. I started a note in Evernote and when I tried a new bottle of wine, I would take a picture of the bottle, write a comment of it's quality [Avoid, Okay, Pretty Good, Fantastic], write down it's basic characteristics, and then write what food I thought it would pair well with. One thing I have noticed about wine though is that even with a bottle of wine that I really like, the next bottle I get of the same vintage might be terrible. What the article does not mention is how important environmental conditions are for storing wine and how a case of wine can sometimes get ruined in shipping, sitting on a store shelf or not allowed to breathe properly. Because of the amount of variation in wine quality I have adopted the habit of just buying $6 - $15 bottles and when I find something I like, I stick with it until I stop liking it. If it's a special occasion, I will put my faith in a nicer brand that I have tried and liked before that I believe will pair well with whatever food is being served but for the most part, buying expensive wines is too much of a gamble for me. Especially considering that my wine palate is not much more complex than your 3-star system.

HeyLaughingBoy 13y ago

Describing wines with bizarre descriptors like "asphalt" ? Fair critique I confess to having not RTFM'd, but when I made my first (and to date, only) batch of Barolo and tasted it way too early, my comment to a friend was "I don't think it should taste like asphalt." His reply was a link to the review of an expensive Barolo that contained the phrase "has notes of tar."