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The Legendary Study That Embarrassed Wine Experts (2014)

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Re: The Legendary Study That Embarrassed Wine Experts (2014)

#61

Post by analog31 »

optimalsolver wrote: post #4

Now do one for Stradivarius violins.

Most musicians recognize that the subjective assessment of instruments is deeply problematic. We have not been offered a good alternative.

I'm not a violinist, but a double bassist. The process of choosing an instrument is nothing short of nerve wracking. My last bass shopping episode took me more than a year. I'd love to be able to know with certainty that the sound I'm hearing is real and not biased by my expectations. With some of the instruments, I had to make minor changes to my technique, to accommodate physical differences in their geometry and setup. In one case, I asked the dealer to install a different type of strings, which he was glad to do.

Now, do we know that different basses sound different? That would at least be a safe guess, given that they are deliberately made to sound different for specific uses and player preferences, and there are radical differences in construction and dimensions. One of my basses is carved from solid chunks of wood, the other is made of plywood that is formed to shape in a mold.

Re: The Legendary Study That Embarrassed Wine Experts (2014)

#62

Post by rleigh »

robertlagrant wrote: post #29
thinkingkong wrote: post #3

Another somewhat famous study involved taking a cheap wine and an expensive wine and swapping the bottles. When people tasted the wines and the bottles were hidden, people accurately scored the wines. When the bottles were visible, people preferred the wine in the expensive bottle. All but the experts were susceptible to this effect.

Which asks the question: if no one else can tell the difference, are experts just able to detect what expensive wine tastes like, as opposed to what nice-tasting wine tastes like?

That's not what they are concluding. If they are tasting it blind (with no preconception), their taste is accurate. It becomes inaccurate when there is external bias (like cost or a particular label). Note that the actual article was based on the assessments of students. I wouldn't classify them as trained experts, as I'll detail below.

I used to work in a brewery, and part of my job was beer tasting. We used the same nomenclature and tasting training as the wine industry. It's a qualitative assessment, but there is a lot of science behind it, and the training is actually quite difficult. You actually train on specific samples with a single taste, initially very unsubtle and clearly labelled. Then to pass certification you have to do it completely blind. Next level up you progress to subtler tastes and repeat. The really advanced people are genuinely capable of discerning very specific chemical compounds with a very high degree of accuracy.

The point I want to make here is that this is an actual discipline in its own right, and the people practicing it in industry aren't quacks. They have to pass examinations which test their skills empirically and objectively against blinded reference samples. You can't get certified without it, and no one can pass without spending some serious effort getting the training. I didn't stay in the industry long enough to become an expert, but I have done the basics.

We used to do assessment sessions where you would rank 40 unlabelled samples lined up on a bench. Each one would be scored between 1 and 10 on a defined scale for several criteria. Both experts and novices like myself would do it, and then they would do stats on the results of 20 or so people to see how everyone in the expert group compared, and how the novices did compared to the collective expert assessment. So in industry, it is used in a semi-quantitative way. (We have stuff like GC and GC-MS for more exact quantitative measurements.)

Re: The Legendary Study That Embarrassed Wine Experts (2014)

#63

Post by pcrh »

touggourt wrote: post #27

As a professional cooker, I can confirm that vision is the most important part in tasting. I've read other studies that shows that taste is a brain build which include senses and feelings. Everyone has done a dinner with good friends, eating pasta with butter and drinking some basical wine — do you remember how it was delicious ?

As they say: "On mange d'abord avec les yeux".

Re: The Legendary Study That Embarrassed Wine Experts (2014)

#64

Post by ericbarrett »

ta988 wrote: post #45

You cannot say a whole field is fake because of a single experiments on students of that field. Neither can you by looking at people using their diploma but lacking the real expertise. I know chemistry PhDs I would never let run even the simplest experiment... They still boast on social media that they are experts, same with people selling wine and lying to clients to make them believe the wine is good or taste like…

I have witnessed with my own two eyes an experienced wine aficionado call the grape type, terroir (micro-region) and year of a brown-bagged wine, based on a single tasting. They were off by one year, but otherwise correct. There’s a ton of BS in the wine world, but it’s not all fake.

Re: The Legendary Study That Embarrassed Wine Experts (2014)

#66

Post by quercusa »

ndnfjttkrk wrote: post #37

To me red wine tastes very differently from white wine. Am I fooling myself? Are they really indistinguishable? Is it possible that the experts were afraid of using white attributes for a red wine, like in social consensus experiments? Did anybody ran a test in the dark, where you cant see the wine at all?

Color definitely sets expectations. But I assume the red-tinted white wine was served at red wine temperature, which would give it a very different set of flavors.

Re: The Legendary Study That Embarrassed Wine Experts (2014)

#67

Post by edmundsauto »

rleigh wrote: post #62
robertlagrant wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which asks the question: if no one else can tell the difference, are experts just able to detect what expensive wine tastes like, as opposed to what nice-tasting wine tastes like?

That's not what they are concluding. If they are tasting it blind (with no preconception), their taste is accurate. It becomes inaccurate when there is external bias (like cost or a particular label). Note that the actual article was based on the assessments of students. I wouldn't classify them as trained experts, as I'll detail below. I used to work in a brewery, and part of my job was beer tasting. We used the sam…

I want to push back on one of your central tenets.

> f they are tasting it blind ... their taste is accurate

It would be more accurate to say the tasting would be less subjective. I don’t think “accurate” is a good word - people all taste things differently due to different taste buds and psychological wirings.

But even then, removing the label doesn’t mean people taste anything objectively. They are bringing in their own biases - maybe they are tired, hungry, or stressed.

Finally, (and this is my primary point), to taste is not just to detect the presence of certain molecules. That may be (part of) the objective experience, but is only part of the puzzle. To taste something is to subjectively interpret my enjoyment and experience of something edible. Adding the label and cost can be part of that experience.

Further, the effect of showing the label has a pretty consistent directional impact on ratings. What makes that any different than, say, blocking a specific taste bud receptor and changing what molecules are perceived? I suggest the only difference is the abstraction layer at which the influence occurs.

Taste is inherently subjective. Removing a label does not make it more accurate. I argue further that labels/prices add no more subjectivity than a persons particular configuration of taste buds and neural wiring.

Re: The Legendary Study That Embarrassed Wine Experts (2014)

#68

Post by wizzwizz4 »

esperent wrote: post #26
thinkingkong wrote: post #3

Another somewhat famous study involved taking a cheap wine and an expensive wine and swapping the bottles. When people tasted the wines and the bottles were hidden, people accurately scored the wines. When the bottles were visible, people preferred the wine in the expensive bottle. All but the experts were susceptible to this effect.

> All but the experts were susceptible to this effect. Even the experts, according to some studies, like the one described in the title article, or here: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-ta...

The one described in the title article was on students.

Re: The Legendary Study That Embarrassed Wine Experts (2014)

#69

Post by tzs »

touggourt wrote: post #27

As a professional cooker, I can confirm that vision is the most important part in tasting. I've read other studies that shows that taste is a brain build which include senses and feelings. Everyone has done a dinner with good friends, eating pasta with butter and drinking some basical wine — do you remember how it was delicious ?

You can see this on nearly every season of "Hell's Kitchen", where they have a taste test challenge. Pairs from the two teams go head to head having to taste and identify things while blindfolded and with their hearing blocked.

Here's the one from season 12 [1] where of the 16 items they were asked to identify, one team got 6 right and one team got 4 right.

[1] https://youtu.be/b-YwHQh6RaM?t=398

Re: The Legendary Study That Embarrassed Wine Experts (2014)

#70

Post by lisper »

robertlagrant wrote: post #29
thinkingkong wrote: post #3

Another somewhat famous study involved taking a cheap wine and an expensive wine and swapping the bottles. When people tasted the wines and the bottles were hidden, people accurately scored the wines. When the bottles were visible, people preferred the wine in the expensive bottle. All but the experts were susceptible to this effect.

Which asks the question: if no one else can tell the difference, are experts just able to detect what expensive wine tastes like, as opposed to what nice-tasting wine tastes like?

> are experts just able to detect what expensive wine tastes like, as opposed to what nice-tasting wine tastes like?

A real expert can do both. The problem is that "nice-tasting" means different things to different people, and "nice tasting" may or may not have any correlation or even overlap with "expensive". The most expensive wines I've ever had have tasted horrible, borderline undrinkable, because they have all been very old wines, which I personally don't like. But some people (apparently) like the taste of very old wines, which are rare, and expensive to produce because they (obviously) have to be stored for a very long time.

The main skill of a true wine expert is to be able to listen to someone else describe what they like and then pick a wine that matches that description or, even better, takes them just a little bit outside of their usual comfort zone.

Wines don't become expensive because they are good. They become expensive for the same reason any other commodity does; the demand, for whatever reason, exceeds the supply. There are really good wines that are cheap because they are mass-produced, and really bad wines that are expensive because they are rare, but have just enough people with more money than sense willing to buy them for whatever reason.

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