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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)

#131

Post by rleigh »

hilbert42 wrote: post #111
edmundsauto wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thei…

"If they are tasting it blind (with no preconception), their taste is accurate." Very true, however there's a great deal of pretentious BS in the wine-tasting game. No matter how long one has been tasting wine, ultimately one has to have some degree of competence to analyze and then describe what one is actually tasting. That said, I'm sure people can be trained to develop wine-tasting skills and that they actually g…

> Very true, however there's a great deal of pretentious BS in the wine-tasting game.

Absolutely agreed 100%. I've been to a few organised tasting events, and I think at that level it's pretty much all pretension and style over substance. It's for the experience and the entertainment, and at that level I have no problem with it.

I just wanted to provide a perspective about how it's used industrially for wholly serious purposes, where people train to objective standards, and have to pass formal examinations to demonstrate their skill. You can't pass them with pretension, they are the real deal. The simple examination was tough enough for me, and that only increased my respect for the really skilled people.

At the industrial level, the tasting is also done alongside and correlated with quantitative scientific analysis. The lab I worked in ran each batch through GC-FID (basic stuff), headspace-sampling GC-FID (volatile aromatics), alongside a battery of additional physical and chemical analyses (too many to list here, there are at least 20, the big brewers take product quality and safety really seriously). And we had GCMS and LCMS systems and other more detailed tests as options on demand to test more obscure stuff like metal content (for making Marmite yeast extract where iron levels are important, apparently).

One of the key roles of the tasters isn't just at production, it's to assess how the character changes over time when assessing shelf-life, where there may be negative things like oxidation, bacterial contamination, lightstruck reactions, and other factors which influence the taste change over time. All very rare. Saw one example of oxidation in my entire time there, in a small batch for export. We would taste every batch once a month over the course of its entire shelf life. Bottles, cans, kegs, everything. That's where we would do group assessments where the qualified tasters and ourselves would taste everything blind.

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

#132

Post by milesvor66 »

I'm quite skeptic. As a person that rarely drink wine, I can recognize if a wine is red or white blinded, as other friends of mine. Also white wine hurts my stomach. Hovewer all the different flavours discussions regarding red wine are out of my discernment.

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

#133

Post by stickfigure »

camjohnson26 wrote: post #122
xirbeosbwo1234 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

That's probably not a wholly fair characterization. Part of the takeaway is that the perpetrator had a sophisticated palate and spent a lot of time mixing already high-end (but not $thousands/bottle) wine to work out the recipes.

I'm as skeptical as anyone that someone can distinguish between a $2k and $200 wine. But to someone that drinks wine daily, the difference between $6 and $60 wine (red, of similar varietal and style) is pretty dramatic. Yeah, some rich guys got suckered, but I don't think they were chumps.

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

#134

Post by DonaldFisk »

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...

That article doesn't debunk Brochet's experiment. Here's what it says: "That said, important to note here is that while Brochet’s studies are often cited as definitively showing how bad wine experts are at judging wines, in this case that they can’t even tell the difference between red and white wines, that’s not what that study actually showed at all."

Brochet proved that most people who are reasonably knowledgeable about wine can be fooled into thinking that a white wine which has been dyed red is a red wine, as shown by their describing it in terms normally used to describe a red wine, because their senses of taste and smell were fooled by what they saw.

It was not a blind taste test.

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

#135

Post by hilbert42 »

rleigh wrote: post #131
hilbert42 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If they are tasting it blind (with no preconception), their taste is accurate." Very true, however there's a great deal of pretentious BS in the wine-tasting game. No matter how long one has been tasting wine, ultimately one has to have some degree of competence to analyze and then describe what one is actually tasting. That said, I'm sure people can be trained to develop wine-tasting skills and that they actually g…

> Very true, however there's a great deal of pretentious BS in the wine-tasting game. Absolutely agreed 100%. I've been to a few organised tasting events, and I think at that level it's pretty much all pretension and style over substance. It's for the experience and the entertainment, and at that level I have no problem with it. I just wanted to provide a perspective about how it's used industrially for wholly seriou…

Right, there's many issues here and I'll comment about them in a later post (I've run out of time).

However one comment before I go, what you're describing seems not that dissimilar to the perfumery business. Training for that is intense and takes years.

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

#136

Post by ZoomZoomZoom »

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?

I don't think there are. Lots of resources on technicalities of the craft, but I'm not sure you can effectively teach mastering skills without hands-on approach. Some subtle nuances of the sound are just very hard to describe and be sure the reader really hears it properly.

Mastering engineer needs to develop sharp focus, integrate themselves deeply into their listening environment and setup to understand how their decisions will translate in the wild. It's also important to know what the author/producer and the listener expects from the music, so you can, fortunately, make both sides happier. This implies listening a lot of different music with a critical ear.

I mostly do mixing, but do mastering as well and I enjoy the process a lot. It's not easy but can be extremely rewarding.

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

#137

Post by teruakohatu »

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…

> generally full of additives for body, color, 'legs', and other attributes

Is this true? Here in New Zealand a NZ$10 (US$7) bottle will be just wine unless it is sparkling. The difference between cheap and expensive is that cheap wine is usually a blend of different wines to achieve some specific flavour profile which theoretically means a more generic flavour since it will average out the specific regional and micro-regional flavours.

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

#138

Post by edmundsauto »

barrkel wrote: post #87
edmundsauto wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thei…

I think you're muddling two meanings of the word taste: the aesthetic sense, vs the chemical detection system of your mouth and nose. The latter is not subjective. The experience might be, the qualia might be, and it will change with training and priming, but the raw detection is what the parent is talking about and that is objective.

I don't agree. Yes, the qualia is different, but there is no tasting without the taster, who introduces divergence between two individuals. Two different people are going to have different taste buds and different wiring. You might have a stronger signal from tannins than I do. Maybe I lack the receptors for specific molecules. Your psychology might prefer tannins more than I do.

If we're talking about an objective assessment of the molecules in the bottle, then I agree there is an absolute and correct answer. But in order to taste something, there has to be a taster, and that will vary between individuals.

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

#139

Post by edmundsauto »

rleigh wrote: post #103
barrkel wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're muddling two meanings of the word taste: the aesthetic sense, vs the chemical detection system of your mouth and nose. The latter is not subjective. The experience might be, the qualia might be, and it will change with training and priming, but the raw detection is what the parent is talking about and that is objective.

The first part of my reply could have been better. I should have said "unbiased" rather than "accurate". The training part is very much about learning to identify specific chemicals, or groups of chemicals. That absolutely is raw detection, as you say. Let me provide some examples. For the "level 1" training, the most basic stuff, samples would be things like: plain water, acid (very dilute sulphuric acid), alkali (v…

Would you compromise and agree with the phrase "less biased" or "removed of one specific kind of bias"? It is impossible to be objective when we're talking about people's experiences. And I don't think "taste" can be defined without including the taster - the objective measurement of molecular concentrations is doing a mass spec on something, not tasting it.

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

#140

Post by foobarian »

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…

I've been drinking wine for a while, in the range from $4-$100 and even though I wanted to say that the expensive stuff was better, I cannot tell the difference at all. It all tastes like wine. Every now and then my wife will say that a bottle is "bad" and "vinegar-like" but I still can't tell. I just don't get it. The only thing I can tell is whether a wine is sweet or not - but that only has to do with fermentation not necessarily quality.
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