Comment by fbelzile | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fbelzile | Hacker News Reader

Wine tasting is an art of deduction. The first step of any wine tasting is to look at the color, rim variation, legs, etc. From there, you take account the smell and taste. At a professional level, this is always done in a particular order to help narrow down possible characteristics for the next step. If you change the color of the wine, you'll send the wine taster down a completely different mental flow chart.

The tasters assumed the wine didn't have food coloring and correctly used all senses available to them to do the tasting. It's very disingenuous to point out that they should have used more white wine descriptors. The wine was red, so they used that information to further deduct characteristics of red wine.

I also find it peculiar that they don't mention the variety used for this study [1]. The color of the wine comes from how long skins are left with the must (skin contact) while making the wine. There are many wine varieties (white and red) that taste very similar. In some cases, you can have both a white and red coming from the exact same grapes (Pinor Noir, for example).

[1] I did Ctrl+F for "variety" on the study: https://web.archive.org/web/20070928231853/http://www.academ...

Reading that, I'm confused about the conclusion. The wine tasters were looking for flavors, and said they found them. If they weren't there, they should have said so.

The inescapable conclusion is, the supposed differences between white and red wine are imaginary. They are not in the wine, but in the taster's head. In the 'mental flow chart', the chart they use to make up words about what they're tasting.

I might get down-voted more, but I'm going to dig in because I don't think you know what you're talking about.

I'm not sure of the qualifications held by the tasters in the study and the quality of the descriptors used, but I've spent quite a bit of time with people training for the advanced level of The Court of Master Sommeliers. At first, I was a skeptic of wine tasting but they completely changed my mind after doing a number of blind tastings with them. They would usually be able to pick out the variety of grape(s) used along with a rough part of the world the wine came from during blind tastings.

> differences between white and red wine are imaginary

In most cases, they're not. There are some exceptions such as light bodied reds that can be very similar in taste to some orange or white wines, but largely, each wine has different chemical composition (different polyphenolic profiles) and a good sommelier can tell the difference. Here's the deductive tasting format used by 'the court' if you interested in all the different things you can look for in a wine: https://www.mastersommeliers.org/sites/default/files/ES%20Ta...

> The inescapable conclusion is, the supposed differences between white and red wine are imaginary.

You could conclude that only after blind test.

That trial was essentially blind? You couldn't tell which was the white, and which the red. Because they were both the same color.

> The inescapable conclusion is, the supposed differences between white and red wine are imaginary.

The problem is that white/red is a very large grouping of wine. There are very light reds with low tannins that could be hard to tell particularly if served at room temp. There are some robust white wines that fall into this same overlap. In general, red vs. white is normally pretty easy assuming typical red and white wine.

Within these large groupings of white/red there are also other trick wines. Reds where the grape seems like a different grape due the region or wine process. Dry Rieslings are often tricky because most people assume sweet. So non-expert tasters being tricked by trick wines is not really an interesting find.

The problem for most people with wine tasting is it's hard to do it in a way to learn. It's not enough to buy a bottle once/week. In one trip to France, I tasted 100+ wines over a 2 week period. Only when you have wines side by side, day after day do you really start to learn. Sommeliers taste 1000s of wines over many years, taking notes and actively working to learn the flavors.

If you were asked to identify a mystery wine, color would certainly be an important piece of information.

If you, as a wine taster, were asked to describe the taste of a mystery wine, I think it's somewhat disappointing if the color of the wine affects your perception.

Isn't taste supposed to be a first-order sensory experience?

I can't think of a more charitable interpretation of these results than "we have different vocabularies for red and white wines, even to describe the same tastes".

Wine tasters are taught to use color and other visual properties.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com