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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)

#121

Post by twangist »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #97
ogre_codes wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Enjoy wine, or that Stradivarius recording, accepting that you might be fooling yourself. Yes, but it's also good to be aware that there are limits to your perception and take advantage. The 80% rule definitely works here. I don't drink wine, but at least with beer, tequila, and coffee, there is a pretty obvious gap between the cheap/ low end stuff and the good stuff, but paying significantly more for higher end br…

What I’ve found is that the difference between an $30 bottle of wine and a $8 bottle isn’t necessarily quality, it’s consistency: buying the same $8 bottle of wine 10 times can result in five great bottles and five so-so bottles, with a $30+ bottle, it’s more like 1% of the time you get a bad bottle. So, when I’m giving a present or planning a party, I tend to gravitate to the more expensive bottles because it makes…

This seems like a flawed approach. These days, $8 bottles are a mass-produced affairs, generally full of additives for body, color, 'legs', and other attributes. They're very consistent affairs, as consistent as Bic pens or Cheetos. They are not charmingly rustic bottles from small struggling vintners.

(Not sure where you live, but in major US cities $8 will get you only the most mass-market stuff - Frontera, Yellow Tail, etc.)

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

#122

Post by camjohnson26 »

xirbeosbwo1234 wrote: post #108
rectang wrote: post #44

I used to make a living as a mastering engineer, where the job description is to make many tiny changes near or even beyond the threshold of perception, which when summed may add up to a perceptible whole. How to do this? It's simple: isolate and magnify. Zoom in to where your senses become reliable, make a change informed by your knowledge and experience which you predict will be beneficial, then zoom out. You don't…

>Even if you might be wrong about the wine or the Strad, you know for absolute certain whether it is making you happy! I also know for absolute certain that I can't afford expensive wine and that there are people who look down at me because the wine I drink shows I have an "unrefined palate". Normally the concept of "elitism" is hogwash, but this is a pretty clear-cut example. Expensive wine serves to make one seem r…

Sour Grapes is a documentary about someone who sold a bunch of counterfeit wine to elites that couldn’t tell the difference, worth a watch.

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

#123

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

twangist wrote: post #121
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I’ve found is that the difference between an $30 bottle of wine and a $8 bottle isn’t necessarily quality, it’s consistency: buying the same $8 bottle of wine 10 times can result in five great bottles and five so-so bottles, with a $30+ bottle, it’s more like 1% of the time you get a bad bottle. So, when I’m giving a present or planning a party, I tend to gravitate to the more expensive bottles because it makes…

This seems like a flawed approach. These days, $8 bottles are a mass-produced affairs, generally full of additives for body, color, 'legs', and other attributes. They're very consistent affairs, as consistent as Bic pens or Cheetos. They are not charmingly rustic bottles from small struggling vintners. (Not sure where you live, but in major US cities $8 will get you only the most mass-market stuff - Frontera, Yellow…

This just isn’t true: I’m in SoCal, and you can get a very good bottle of wine at Trader Joe’s for $8 (TJ store label), but there’s no guarantee that buying another bottle with the same label tastes as good.

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

#124

Post by gwynplaine »

whiddershins wrote: post #59
rectang wrote: post #44

I used to make a living as a mastering engineer, where the job description is to make many tiny changes near or even beyond the threshold of perception, which when summed may add up to a perceptible whole. How to do this? It's simple: isolate and magnify. Zoom in to where your senses become reliable, make a change informed by your knowledge and experience which you predict will be beneficial, then zoom out. You don't…

On this topic, what resource do you think is a really good one for learning mastering?

The book Mastering Audio by Bob Katz covers a lot of ground.

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

#125

Post by ogre_codes »

turndown wrote: post #110
ogre_codes wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buying into the mid-range is fine. It's what I do with beer a tequila. Buying the $200 bottles is where I question the logic. Even the expert tasters struggle to differentiate between a good $20-30 bottle and a $400 bottle in double blind tests. I don't drink Sanka or Coors, I just use good coffee beans and drink good local beer. I don't spend $200 on exotic coffee beans feral cats have shit out. The only reason I pu…

I don't drink coffee, and probably never will, but I remember listening to a podcast once where two coffee drinkers who derided the whole "eat coffee beans shit out by a civet" idea tried it and said it was the best coffee they had ever had. YMMV

With wine, lots of people claim to be able to taste the difference between an expensive wine and a cheap one, but as soon as you did a double-blind test, they couldn't tell them apart.

I would be extremely curious to see if the civet coffee was still there if there was double-blind taste test.

And sure enough, someone has done it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDXWgVr_z30

The civet coffee doesn't even come in second place out of 5. Obviously not scientific.

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

#126

Post by ogre_codes »

rectang wrote: post #119
turndown wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't drink coffee, and probably never will, but I remember listening to a podcast once where two coffee drinkers who derided the whole "eat coffee beans shit out by a civet" idea tried it and said it was the best coffee they had ever had. YMMV

Being an ordinary human, I will never know how trolls trolling trolls had a hand in bringing us this tale of Kopi Luwak. * you * the two Kopi Luwak drinkers * the merchant who sold them the Kopi Luwak * the modern day manufacturers and wholesalers of Kopi Luwak * the genius who came up with Kopi Luwak * the civet How many are civet shit true believers? How many are trolls — some, none, all?

There is also a lot of unethical/ inhumane sourcing on civet coffee at this point.

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

#127

Post by ogre_codes »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #123
twangist wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a flawed approach. These days, $8 bottles are a mass-produced affairs, generally full of additives for body, color, 'legs', and other attributes. They're very consistent affairs, as consistent as Bic pens or Cheetos. They are not charmingly rustic bottles from small struggling vintners. (Not sure where you live, but in major US cities $8 will get you only the most mass-market stuff - Frontera, Yellow…

This just isn’t true: I’m in SoCal, and you can get a very good bottle of wine at Trader Joe’s for $8 (TJ store label), but there’s no guarantee that buying another bottle with the same label tastes as good.

So you buy the $8 wine and the $30 wine. Since it's almost certain all the wine from the same batch is going to be similar quality. If you get a good $8 bottle you go back the next day and buy a couple cases of the good/ cheap stuff. If the cheap stuff is not-so-good, drink the $30 wine and use the cheap stuff to cook with.

This way you are guaranteed good wine.

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

#128

Post by ogre_codes »

nojokes wrote: post #116
keiferski wrote: post #96

This has been debunked repeatedly, but since "we showed those snobs!" makes for good clickbait, it inevitably returns. The studies listed never quite make it clear how "wine expert" is being defined. The one in this article says it used students, who clearly are not experts in any sense of the word. Other studies just handwave away the question and say, "We asked wine experts." If you dig into some of them, it turns…

Here's how the research went down. First, Brochet gave 27 male and 27 female oenology students a glass of red and a glass of white wine and asked them to describe the flavor of each. The students described the white with terms like "floral," "honey," "peach," and "lemon." The red elicited descriptions of "raspberry," "cherry," "cedar," and "chicory." I think what this study showed is that oenology try to fit the wine…

> As a person who likes wine, I simply like to enjoy wine and not to describe it and try to figure out what that smell or taste resembles.

I feel similarly about beer and coffee. I hear people talk about fruity flavors in coffee or other similarly weird descriptions of beer and I taste it and just taste the coffee. I can definitely taste the difference between fairly distinct varieties of coffee (or beer). But when people talk about getting cherry overtones in their coffee, I just shrug and enjoy it.

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

#129

Post by pyramidal »

gameswithgo wrote: post #106
mkl95 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any Spanish person who claims they cannot tell red from white wine is probably a teetotaller. However you can buy extremely good wine for a few € here, which leads me to think these people may have been served some watered down stuff for budget reasons.

Until you do a blind taste test on yourself, you don't know that you can tell.

Gwern is that you?

(Just kidding. I know he doesn't have a monopoly over blind/randomized self-tests.)

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

#130

Post by ogre_codes »

keiferski wrote: post #115
graton wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This has been debunked repeatedly Any sources to support that statement?

https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2019/07/can-profess...

Hmm. Maybe you read a different article from what you linked.

"Our results indicate that both the prices of wines and wine recommendations by experts may be poor guides for non-expert wine consumers."

"Much to my mortification I was dead wrong, as was everyone else in the room. The proprietor chuckled and informed his room… that the wines were actually the same wine; one was just warmer than the other."

If anything, this article confirms the conclusions of the original. Again from your article:

"Rather, this test simply showed how easily our perception of things is influenced by suggestion."

This doesn't contradict the original conclusion, it confirms it.

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