The Legendary Study That Embarrassed Wine Experts (2014)

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 get better with experience—but ultimately one cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear no matter how good the training.

I claim no great expertise in the wine-tasting/oenology game and I'm sure that I'd likely have been fooled by the dyed 'red' wine as described in the article (if I were to be so fooled then I would have had a certain class of red wines in mind when doing the comparison).

Nevertheless, I do have little wine experience and I have found that it is often just sufficient to catch out the true BS artists. One only has to be marginally better at discriminating which wine is better than they are then their BS status becomes pretty obvious.

I recall a couple of decades ago attending a rather expensive black-tie blind tasting of about 25 so-called experts with an engineering colleague of mine (he too had had some experience in tasting reasonable-to-good wines). As techies, we were the odd ones out, as we didn't work in the wine industry and most of the others did. Moreover, the master of ceremonies was a long-time well-known wine writer for a large newspaper and had a number of wine books to his name.

As I mentioned, it was a blind tasting and the wines were the then newest (just released) first and second class Bordeaux growths with the exception of the Mouton Rothschild (it was either unavailable or too expensive to include). This much we all knew before the tasting. The aim of the exercise was to determine the best wines then rank them in order using the 3-7-10 scoring system.

Anyway, like many blind tasting, it turned out to be pretty much of a shambles. The so-called experts including the wine writer were all over the place, mistaking first growths for second and vice versa. A final exercise for everyone was to guess the Lafite Rothschild, for without the presence of the Mouton, it was the most expensive wine there. (BTW, it's not the first time I've seen our wine writer in action and he was again true to form on this night.)

The only ones to get the Lafite correct were my colleague and I (I nearly made myself sick from trying to hide my smirks it was so damn funny)! Incidentally, the Lafite wasn't all that hard to guess, as it was true to form and it was also the best wine of the night.

Now back down to earth. Every winter I used to attend a different group for food and wine dinners. They too were black-tie events and were held approximately a month apart. It was organized by a guy who owned a wine cellar/emporium and the dinners/tastings were held at the cellar. This guy was truly one of the best and up there with the likes of Hugh Johnson and Michael Broadbent—he was certainly the best I've ever come across. Most of us were awestruck by his ability.

Incidentally, all four of these guys are in the Wiki List of wine personalities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wine_personalities. Thus is goes to show that sometimes BS can get one almost everywhere.

Incidentally, with respect to being fooled by the dyed white wine. It seems to me that if these oenology student were actually fooled then they must have been familiar with lighter style reds à la Provence or similar and comparing the wine with those reds. For I fail to see how any robust red—Bordeaux first growths, Californian (Stags' Leap Cabernet, etc.) or Australian Reds (Grange or similar) could ever be mistaken for a white or vice versa, irrespective of color or in a blind tasting, for these big red styles are just too distinctive to be mistaken for whites in any circumstances. Even neophytes should be able to tell the difference.

which is what everyone means by "red" and "white" wine. when you process your data points you're supposed to remove the outliers.

If it seems that wine chatter can be explained entirely by the power of suggestion, then Occam's razor suggests that's all there is to it. There's no need to invent magical barely-detectable subtle flavor attributes to fermented grape juice.

* 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?