[BITList] Wine tasting

[FS]

Thought you might enjoy this extract
frank

"Because it's hard for people to gauge quality by flavor, they tend to 
gauge it by price. That's a mistake. [Industry consultant Sue] Langstaff 
has evaluated wine professionally for twenty years. In her opinion, the 
difference between a $500 bottle of wine and one that costs $30 is 
largely hype. 'Wineries that sell their wines for $500 a bottle have the 
same problems as wineries that sell their wine for $10 a bottle. You 
can't make the statement that if it's low-cost it's not well made.' Most 
of the time, people don't even prefer the expensive bottle -- provided 
they can't see the label. Paul Wagner, a top wine judge and founding 
contributor to the industry blog Through the Bung-hole, plays a game 
with his wine-marketing classes at Napa Valley College. The students, 
most of whom have several years' experi­ence in the industry, are asked 
to rank six wines, their labels hid­den by -- a nice touch here -- brown 
paper bags. All are wines Wagner himself enjoys. At least one is under 
$10 and two are over $50. 'Over the past eighteen years, every time,' he 
told me, 'the least expensive wine averages the highest ranking, and the 
most expensive two finish at the bottom.' In 2011, a Gallo cabernet 
scored the highest average rating, and a Chateau Gruaud Larose (which 
retails from between $60 and $70) took the bottom slot.

"Unscrupulous vendors turn the situation to their advantage. In China, 
nouveau-riche status-seekers are spending small for­tunes on counterfeit 
Bordeaux. (from Mary Roach)

"Marc Dornan, of the Beverage Testing Institute, for instance, says to 
anyone who asks him that rating wines on a hundred-point scale, which is 
now common practice, is 'utterly pseudoscientific.' Tim Hanni, a Master 
of Wine, believes that most commentary about wines fails to take into 
account the biological individuality of consumers; he claims that he can 
predict what sort of wine appeals to you according to such factors as 
how heavily you salt your food and whether your mother suffered a lot 
from morning sickness while carrying you. Hanni has said for years that 
the matching of a particular wine with a particular food is a scam, 
there being 'absolutely no premise historically, culturally, or 
biologically for drinking red wine with meat.' As a way of illustrating 
the role played by anticipation in taste, Frédéric Brochet, who is a 
researcher with the enology faculty of the University of Bordeaux, 
recently asked some experts to describe two wines that appeared by their 
labels to be a distinguished /grand-cru classe/ and a cheap table wine 
-- actually, Brochet had refilled both bottles with a third, mid-level 
wine -- and found his subjects mightily impressed by the supposed /grand 
cru/ and dismissive of the same wine when it was in the /vin ordinaire/ 
bottle.



"An urge to refute the notion of expertise certainly seemed to be 
reflected in the headline of an article from the /Times/of London about 
the research Brochet has been carrying on -- 'CHEEKY LITTLE TEST EXPOSES 
WINE 'EXPERTS' AS WEAK AND FLAT.' The headline caught the tone of the 
article, by Adam Sage, which began, 'Drinkers have long suspected it, 
but now French researchers have finally proved it: wine 'experts' know 
no more than the rest of us.' The test of Brochet's that caught my eye 
consisted partly of asking wine drinkers to describe what appeared to be 
a white wine and a red wine. They were in fact two glasses of the same 
white wine, one of which had been colored red with flavorless and 
odorless dye. The comments about the 'red' wine used what people in the 
trade call red-wine descriptors. 'It is a well known psychological 
phenomenon -- you taste what you're expecting to taste,' Brochet said in 
the /Times/. 'They were expecting to taste a red wine and so they did. . 
. . About two or three per cent of people detect the white wine flavour, 
but invariably they have little experience of wine culture. Connoisseurs 
tend to fail to do so. The more training they have, the more mistakes 
they make because they are influenced by the color of the wine.' " (from 
Calvin Trillin)
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