I'd be surprised if there was ever a period where blind testers could tell the difference. This stuff is right up there with wine tasting.
With wine tasting I agree that 90%+ can't detect most differences, but there are plenty of people who could accurately guess varietals, often regions (because they grow their grapes and make their wine differently), and certainly age (because oak and oxidation have very obvious effects).
Whenever I hear that someone couldn't tell the difference between red wine and died white wine I have to laugh... it's not that I could really tell you what exact type of white some thing was, but that the wine making styles (even fermentation yeast) are so different along with the use of oak and lack of tannins that it's hilarious to make the mistake. On the other hand, cheap bad wine could taste like any damn thing other than (probably) good wine.
Have I blind tasted? Yes, and I couldn't tell you the dollar value of wine between $10-100 because people will charge what the market will bear. However, if you can't taste the difference between a decent Red Burgundy, California Zinfandel, and a Merlot-Cab or between a decent Chablis and a Sav Blanc then you probably just don't care. They smell very different, have different acidity and sugar levels, bitterness, oak vanillins... In a blind test I've seen 8/10 amateurs get every one of 4 wine varietals correct (the others were 2/4) based on a short description, which is well beyond chance.
I'm not sure about a $50 and a $150.
There are also some pretty big differences in agricultural techniques applied to different wineries. The first growth Bordeaux guys are employing experienced growers at the top of their fields to consider things like harvest time, planting conditions, soil maintenance, etc., these costs do get passed along.
Various research seems to have been done on wine tasting, but I don't think I've ever heard of a study that wound up supporting this. They always seem to find that experienced, respected tasters can't tell a red from a white, or rate the same wine differently depending on where they're told its from, and so forth.
Is there any persuasive evidence around that wine tasting isn't more or less bunk?
This is ridiculous. There is no way this is true. I'm an idiot and I can tell the difference blindly between a red and a white.
Give people green lollipops and a substantial percentage will describe the flavor as "lime", even if it's actually cherry.
Give people red lollipops and a substantial percentage will describe the flavor as "cherry", even if it's actually lime.
But that doesn't mean that lime and cherry actually taste the same.
> A white wine artificially colored red with an odorless dye was olfactory described as a red wine by a panel of 54 tasters. Hence, because of the visual information, the tasters discounted the olfactory information..
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0093934X0...
To be clear I didn't mean to expressly claim that "experts cannot tell a red from a white", for any particular interpretation of those words. I mean generally that every time I've ever heard of a study examining whether wine-tasters consistently discern what they think they're discerning, the result is always that they don't.
That deserves that the upper post of yours should turn gray, imho.
Moreover, I don’t understand why you can’t accept that not everybody has the same sense of smell just like not everybody sees the same: notice people wear glases? Or people color blind? Can’t you accept to be “smell blind” if you are untrained or physically less capable?
The staring point must be that not every person is identical to you in any way.
Buy a bag of cheap gummy candies, with multiple colors of candy. Separate the colors. Taste each color in turn, and write a description of the flavor that matches that color.
Now put on a blindfold, and have a confederate hand you randomly selected candies. For each sample, describe the flavor.
For certain brands (or lack thereof), it is readily apparent that all colors are actually the same flavor, and any distinctions that may occur in the initial descriptions are all illusionary. Some brands actually do have distinct flavors. At some point, someone figured out "hey, we could save money by not using 5 different flavoring blends, and most people wouldn't even notice."
And it's not the smelling or tasting part that changes. It happens when you try to describe it. That's why "blue raspberry" is so wrong on your shaved ice. Raspberry is not a "blue" flavor. It's "red". But on the shelf, the red spectrum is already cluttered with cherry, strawberry, and watermelon. Apple has to be green, and raspberry has to be blue, so the ice jerk doesn't have to read labels. And you then have to close your eyes to make it taste more correct--or at least as correct as the artificial flavorings can get.
Is there anyone who can distinguish between any two wines? No. Are there wines that anyone can distinguish between? Yes. Are there some people who can distinguish between a greater set of wines than other people? Yes.
Probably most people who are inexperienced with wine would be surprised at how many wines they could identify with a little bit of practice. Probably most people who are experienced with wine would be surprised at how many wines they fail to identify despite their considerable practice. But failing to identify a wine when you are sure you got it right is at least half of the fun.
Do you know of research to that effect?
It's a competition rather than research, but is consistent with both some people being better than others and some wines being more distinctive than others.
The dissenting view, from what I guess is one of the most famous studies:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-econ...
(That said, it sounds like he chose his definition of "consistent" after gathering the data, so it doesn't sound like it was a very rigorous process. One could say he found 10% of the judges were consistent, or one could say that he defined "consistent" to mean "within the top 10%".)
The competition the economist article was about was judged (by them) purely in correctly identifying the grape and country of origin of the wine.
This is more resistant against noise, but only supports the idea that people can reliably identify wines — not that they can be graded independently. It certainly challenges the “wine judges can’t tell the difference between red and white” narrative.
I mean, it may not all be bunk, but at any rate it seems fairly non-obvious which bits aren't. It seems like every study that asks "are wine tasters biased by X?" finds that they are.
If your goal is to identify a particular wine, it's always going to be an educated guess. You'll be wrong a lot, but you can also be right a fair number of times. Generall, red wine is dramatically easier than white wine -- as you will understand later.
It's important to understand that the visual aspect of the wine is incredibly important, so it's not just the taste that helps you. First you need to figure out the varietal (or blend). If the wine is well known, then the varietal (along with a couple of other factors) will tell you where the wine is from: because in traditional wine growing countries, the varietals you are allowed to use are governed by the "appellation". For example, if you are going to make a "Burgundy" in the "Burgundy" region, you must use pinot noir. You have no other choice. If you choose to make a different variety, then you are spending millions on the land and making 1/10th the amount of money because you can't use the "Burgundy" name.
So, right from the get go, it seems like a bit of a cheat. Again, though, this is part of the game. Your host gives you a famous wine that you have a chance of identifying. If your host tries to deceive you (by intentionally picking a wine that has a surprising profile, for instance), they will succeed. A good example of this might be to find a particularly good pinot noir from the US and watch as the expert mistakenly identifies it as a Burgundy. Sometimes that's fun and helps people remember that, yes, less famous regions make good wine too.
Anyway, different varietals have different colours and different smells and different mouth feels. Sometimes you can tell the varietal just by looking at it. Merlot is often down right purple, for example. Same with taste. For me young cabernet sauvignon has a flavour of leather. No other grape I've ever tasted has that flavour. Different grapes have different amounts of tannins and it's relatively easy to tell them apart.
It's not just the variety, but also to the wine making parameters. Most famous regions also specify how the wine is made. So if you figure out the varietal, you can then tell the difference between the regions just by how much oak flavour there is, etc.
Once you've figured out the variety and have an idea about the region, you need to look at the colour again. Wine oxidises over time. Natural corks allow a certain amount of air in the bottle. Even plastic corks have been developed to allow air into the bottle. Over time the wine turns brown. At the same time alcohol oxidises into esters, which usually have ripe fruit smells and flavours.
This will give you an idea of the age. Wine is interesting because high quality producers pride themselves on producing a variable product -- they make no attempt to homogenise their flavour profile from year to year (as opposed to low quality producers, which spend a lot of effort doing that). If the weather is hot and dry, then the wine will be dark, heavy and tannic. If the weather is cool and rainy, then the wine will be light in colour and the flavour correspondingly light.
Once you know the varietal, and have a guess on the region and age, it's a matter of knowing what the weather was like in each region. You search until you find a region/variety/year that is likely to match the wine. Again, I have to stress that if your host is intentionally trying to throw you a curve ball, they will almost certainly succeed in confusing you. It's not difficult to find a wine that tastes like it might be from a region at a specific time, but isn't.
Finally, there are some famous years in particular regions where the weather was awful, but that a handful of producers happened to escape the weather. In that case, if you have a nice example of a wine and you feel confident about the age, you might be able to identify the exact producer. There are other events like that, where an expert will be able to identify a producer. Again, it's really important to understand that this requires you to be super lucky, or more likely that your host is deliberately handing you the answer on a silver plate. They expect you to figure it out, and it's lots of fun for everyone if you do.
So that's it. Tasting food and drink is fun. Playing trivia games is fun. Playing trivia games in the form of tasting food and drink is fun. Don't try to find more than that, because there isn't any more. IMHO, anyway...
Most wine isn't that good actually. There is wide range of price / marketing / effort where the chances of getting a really enjoyable bottle of wine is more luck than anything.
But if you go towards the top of the market, there is a profound difference in quality.
If you ever want to know the truth, go buy a bottle of JL Chave Hermitage (the Syrah). There are some truly legendary vintages of this wine but in my experience you can pick any vintage and be blown away.
You can probably find it for as low as $2XX. I don't want to dox myself here, otherwise I'd offer to pick up the bill if the experience didn't change your mind.
Taste that wine and you'll know. It's an expensive habit and I rarely indulge myself, but "fine wine" is a real, if very rare, thing.
Define "quality".
Wine taste, like most food, is both very subjective and very personalized.
I dislike most wines. Price doesn't matter. However, there are specific wines that I like very very much--if you put a right-bank wine in front of me, I'm probably going to like it--price also doesn't seem to matter unless it's very cheap.
What I would suggest to the original poster is that if you don't like a lot of wines, find a high-end wine tasting and go--the goal is simply to try to decrease your probability of encountering an actually bad wine. Try the different wines, and try to isolate which ones you like more and which ones you like less even if you dislike them all. Then you can go talk to the sommelier/buyer and give him some parameters in which to help you search.
Otherwise, "Find me a wine I like" is much like "My computer is broken. Fix it."--if you don't give someone any information to work with, they can't do anything to help you.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-ta...
What's a "92 rating" even supposed mean? From food: What good is a "92 rating" on a Peking Duck dish, for example, if you don't like duck?
The big problem is that "wine rating" has no relevance to me, the buyer, as to whether or not I'm going to like a wine. It took me years to figure out what the commonality was between wines I liked. If the wine industry figure out how to fix that, they'd probably sell a lot more wine.
Or, maybe they wouldn't, lots of areas already seem to produce wines that lots of people like for very reasonable prices.
And while I am not a wine aficionado, I say this as someone who spends substantial amounts of money on up-market chocolates, port etc. which are not exceptions to this either.
If you read the study which OP summarizes, it claims to show that blind testers NOW definitely CAN tell the difference.
The best "new" violins of today are better than old strads, where "better" is defined as any of:
(1) objectively produces more sound volume for a given level of bow pressure as measured via a db meter at a specific location
(2) subjectively "projects better" (either alone or against an orchestra) as judged by listeners
(3) "is preferred" as judged by listeners.
The people judging in the tests for (2) and (3) have included the performers themselves, skilled listeners, and unskilled interested observers. The results seem to be really consistent - most listeners unambiguously judge the newer instruments better.
So no, it's not like wine tasting. At least, not anymore.
Relying on data like that lead to one of the greatest follys in business history: New Coke. Many people when put on the spot get it wrong what they like, as they often focus on something very trivial. In coke, it was sweetness, and in these violins, loudness.
To me, its evidence the new ones sound better, but its not definitive.