Blind wine tasting

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Blinded wine tasting is

aroma. Similarly, economists testing hypotheses relating to the wine market have used the technique in their research.[1] Some blinded trials among wine consumers have indicated that people can find nothing in a wine's aroma or taste to distinguish between ordinary and pricey brands.[2] Academic research on blinded wine tastings have also cast doubt on the ability of professional tasters to judge wines consistently.[3]

Technique

Blind tasting, at a minimum, involves denying taster(s) the ability to see the wine label or wine bottle shape. Informal tastings may simply conceal the bottles in a plain paper bag. More exacting competitions or evaluations utilize more stringent procedures, including safeguards against cheating. For example, the wine may be tasted from a black wine glass to mask the color [citation needed].

Biases

A taster's judgment can be prejudiced by knowing details of a wine, such as geographic origin, price, reputation, color, or other considerations.

Scientific research has long demonstrated the power of suggestion in perception as well as the strong effects of expectancies. For example, people expect more expensive wine to have more desirable characteristics than less expensive wine. When given wine that they are falsely told is expensive they virtually always report it as tasting better than the very same wine when they are told that it is inexpensive.[4] French researcher Frédéric Brochet "submitted a mid-range Bordeaux in two different bottles, one labeled as a cheap table wine, the other bearing a grand cru etiquette." Tasters described the supposed grand cru as "woody, complex, and round" and the supposed cheap wine as "short, light, and faulty."[5]

Similarly, people have expectations about wines because of their

geographic origin, producer, vintage, color, and many other factors. For example, when Brochet served a white wine he received all the usual descriptions: "fresh, dry, honeyed, lively." Later he served the same wine dyed red and received the usual red terms: "intense, spicy, supple, deep."[5]

Historical results

Professional tasting judges

Perhaps the most famous instance of blind testing of professional wine tasters was the so-called

French wines according to the judges, a result which would have been unlikely in a non-blind contest. These results were both highly controversial and influential. The event had a revolutionary impact on expanding the production and prestige of wine in the New World.[6] They also "gave the French a valuable incentive to review traditions that were sometimes more accumulations of habit and expediency, and to reexamine convictions that were little more than myths taken on trust."[7] (The Judgment of Paris was described in the 2005 book Judgment of Paris by George M. Taber and depicted in the 2008 movie Bottle Shock
.)

In 1999, Richard E. Quandt and Orley Ashenfelter published a paper in the journal Chance that questioned the statistical interpretation of the results of the 1976 Judgment of Paris. The authors noted that a "side-by-side chart of best-to-worst rankings of 18 wines by a roster of experienced tasters showed about as much consistency as a table of random numbers," and reinterpreted the data, altering the results slightly, using a formula that they argued was more statistically valid (and less conclusive).[8] Quandt’s later paper "On Wine Bullshit" poked fun at the seemingly random strings of adjectives that often accompanied experts' published wine ratings.[9] More recent work by Robin Goldstein, Hilke Plassmann, Robert Hodgson, and other economists and behavioral scientists has shown high variability and inconsistency both within and between blind tasters; and little correlation has been found between price and preference, even among wine experts, in tasting settings in which labels and prices have been concealed.[10][11]

Robert Hodgson, a California vintner and retired

Journal of Wine Economics[12][13][14] in 2008 and '09. Hodgson continued to analyze the results of wine competitions across the state and found that the medals awarded for wine excellence "were distributed at random". Although he concedes that "there are individual expert tasters with exceptional abilities", the objective evaluation of large numbers of wines as currently attempted at wine competitions is, he asserts, "beyond human ability".[3]

Non-professionals/consumers

Color bias

In 2001, researchers from the University of Bordeaux asked 54 undergraduate oenology students to test two glasses of wine: one red, one white. The participants described the red as "jammy" and commented on its crushed red fruit. The participants failed to recognize that both wines were from the same bottle. The only difference was that one had been colored red with a flavorless dye.[3][15]

Geographic origin bias

For six years (1999-2005), Texas A&M University invited people to taste wines labeled "France", "California", "Texas", and while nearly all ranked the French as best, in fact, all three were the same Texas wine. The contest is built on the simple theory that if people don't know what they are drinking, they award points differently than if they do know what they are drinking.[16]

Price bias

Another well-publicized

double-blind, but not peer reviewed, taste test was conducted in 2011 by Prof. Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire.[17][18] In a wine tasting experiment using 400 participants, Wiseman found that general members of the public were unable to distinguish expensive wines from inexpensive ones.[19] "People just could not tell the difference between cheap and expensive wine."[20]

Expensive wines are an example of a Veblen good, a luxury good for which the demand increases as the price increases. Unlike with common goods, where demand goes up when the price goes down, Veblen goods, such as diamonds, mechanical watches, perfume and wines are more desirable for consumers when the price is higher. Consumer perceive Veblen goods as better quality, exclusive and associate them with status or special occasions.

See also

References

  1. doi:10.1080/09332480.1999.10542152
    .
  2. PhysOrg.com
    (April 15, 2011).
  3. ^ a b c Derbyshire, David (22 June 2013). "Wine-tasting: it's junk science". The Guardian. Retrieved 5 February 2020.
  4. ^ Chemical Object Representation in the Field of Consciousness – Frédéric Brochet
  5. ^ a b Downey, Roger (9 October 2006). "Wine snob scandal". Seattle Weekly. Retrieved 5 February 2020.
  6. Business Week
    , 8 May 2001.
  7. ISBN 978-0-7432-4751-1
    .
  8. ^ Ashenfelter and Quandt, Op. cit.
  9. S2CID 170562491. Archived from the original
    (PDF) on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 5 August 2016.
  10. S2CID 2491510
    .
  11. ISBN 978-1-6081-6007-5
    .
  12. ^ Hodgson, Robert T. "An Examination of Judge Reliability at a major U.S. Wine Competition", Journal of Wine Economics, Vol. 3; Issue 02 (Winter 2008), pp 105-113
  13. ^ Hodgson, Robert T., "An Analysis of the Concordance Among 13 U.S. Wine Competitions", Journal of Wine Economics, Vol. 4; Issue 01 (Spring 2009), pp 1-9
  14. ^ Hodgson, Robert T., "How Expert are "Expert" Wine Judges?", Journal of Wine Economics, Vol. 4; Issue 02 (Winter 2009), pp 233-241.
  15. S2CID 10002492
    .
  16. Austin Chronicle
    , April 8, 2005.
  17. ^ Expensive and inexpensive wines taste the same, research shows Maroulla Georgiou, phys.org April 15, 2011
  18. ^ 5 Research-Backed Reasons Expensive Wine Isn't Always Better Libby Kane, Business Insider, July 2, 2014
  19. ^ The Wiseman ‘Study’ – cheap versus expensive wine Jamie Goode, April 27, 2011
  20. ^ Sample, Ian (14 April 2011). "Expensive wine and cheap plonk taste the same to most people". The Guardian.
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