The wine tasting event: Distinguishing reds from whites (2014)

I have a fancy wine store near my place, and sometimes have friends over to sip from $50-80 bottles. They are always met with universal praise for being "worth the price".

One time one of my friends instead opened a $7.99 bottle I had picked up from the grocery store without knowing it, and the group reaction was exactly the same.

I had always believed all of the studies like the ones the author mentions, but this experience firmly solidified my view that the wine business is 90% marketing, 10% everything else.

I've heard this study quoted before and found it fairly unbelievable. I can't imagine most experienced wine tasters would find tannins in white wines.

It seems like this study had only 8 participants. That about explains it to me.

In particular, take note of the fact that in the 10th tasting, people had big reds with heavy tannins. Assuming the 11th tasting happened shortly thereafter, those tannins won't magically disappear from your mouth in a short time. Hence, I'd wonder if there was perhaps some kind of cross-contamination caused by this.

Edit: Although it does say "In the last 23 months, the Club conducted 11 blind tastings.". Perhaps these were on separate days. But still, just 8 participants. I'm confident some people bullshit about their "ability to taste/differentiate wine".

Regarding the inability to detect red/white, this study is brought up quite a bit and I find it hard to believe it's anything but an anomaly. I blind-tasted wine competitively at a national level, and it is pretty commonplace to identify region/sub-region/year/grape across 10 wines blind with ~80% accuracy. Many tastings go further than this and people are identifying chateau/year from 10 wines from the same region. It's relatively simple to train yourself to do this.

Not saying you couldn't find some reds and whites which, if tasted without seeing the colour, would be challenging to tell apart; but I cannot really see this holding up if reproduced in better settings (perhaps my bias though).

No qualms re people's preferences, which is of course subjective; lots of cheaper wines are may be more enjoyable, which is great. IMO wine flavour profiles are often full of weird signalling about what 'good' is, i.e. "taste x is considered desirable/refined/distinguished, ergo it tastes better", which is nonsense and snobbery.

I have a friend who works at a science museum. He tried to reproduce this at their cocktail hour -- he had wines dyed black and asked visitors to rate their wine knowledge on a scale of 1-5 and then identify the wines as red or white. According to him, most visitors were able to get it right, and 100% of visitors who self-identified at 4/5 or 5/5 wine knowledge were able to do so correctly. I keep telling him he should re-do this study and publish it!

We did a blind test with friends, and couldn't tell Coca-Cola from 7-Up and Fanta.

I always thought of wine as less of a scale of good vs bad, and more about the individuality of the experience, kind of the way one baseball card is more expensive than another, which is not about quality -- though I also think that wine culture doesn't necessarily think of it that way. But you don't spend $100 on a bottle of wine because it's better than a $10. You spend $100 on a bottle of wine to be able to appreciate the unique experience of what wine on a 150 year old Vineyard in a specific part of France made by a specific person tastes like, or for a newer bottle of wine, to taste some celebrity vineyard. More like appreciating art than a strict ranking.

That being said I also wonder if enjoying wine is really about maximizing the placebo effect, which may be why wine connoisseur so object to the economists view of wine, because it can spoil the illusion. I.E. part of the enjoyment of the wine is the story you tell yourself. Blindfolding removes an essential part of the enjoyment of the wine. Seeing the bottle, seeing the color of the wine, looking at the legs flow down the glass.

I'm not sure if these two kinds of people - i.e. the objectivist who would rather know objectively if there's differences in the quality of wine, and the subjectivist - the person who wants to be taken up by the illusion of the wine can ever really get eachother. But often I think the subjectivist is happier (in the vein of the 'depressive realist' https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201206...) and as someone who is more of the objectivist or realist I wonder if there are ways to leverage the other.

My palate immediately picks up two things in wine:

1) Oak in red wine, which I like very much

2) Malolactic fermentation in white wine, which I dislike

Putting wine in new oak costs money, so it tends to be more expensive wines that have the flavor profile I like. One thing I love about Spanish wine is that if it has 'crianza' or 'reserva' on the label, there's a legal minimum amount of time spent in oak. And they're relatively cheap (especially in Spain!)

Of white wines, it's generally only expensive chardonnays that get malolactic fermentation (which gives it the "buttery" taste, yuck), so it's a win-win for me. There's no reason to spend a lot for white wine.

Cheap wines are harvested by machines, which just pull up everything and grind it together. So you get some amount of stem, dirt, field mouse*, etc. in there.

I find when I drink a cheap wine I taste something distinctly like green plant matter, and I don't like it at all. But maybe I'm just fooling myself because I know it's cheap. Haven't tried it blind.

* Strictly FDA-approved quantities of field mouse, of course. Think of it like the radiation dose from eating a banana. Nothing to worry about, really!

As someone who drinks a decent amount of red wine, always trying new ones & properly decanting. This makes me curious how I would fare on a similar taste test.

I wonder if many casual wine drinkers just pour straight from the bottle? If so, it would lead to me believe they would have a hard time appreciating more expensive/better wines. Starting out I had a decoy red followed by a duckhorn red. I disliked the latter, but now I’m less of a noob I prefer the latter (if decanted)

Personally, I find there are several wines around $10 that I enjoy (J lohr merlot is one) but around ~$20-60 is the sweet spot for my fav wines (E.g juggernaut Cabernet,pahlmeyer Jayson, caymus, etc).

I have tried stuff in the hundreds & have enjoyed some but not all, and none yet have solidly eclipsed the previously mentioned to make it $ for $ worth it.

I can’t imagine drinking Austin Hope and a box red, then rating the latter as better ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm no wine expert but I bet I could reliably tell red from white in a blind tasting

I bought a $2 bottle of Shiraz from Aldi and thought it was pretty bad. Then I had someone do a blind taste test on me with that bottle against a much more expensive Shiraz that I knew I liked. I picked the Aldi bottle as my preference.

most people aren't trained tasters. you can do a lot of training to remove the subject aspect of taste preference where you taste a lot of individual compounds in isolation so you learn to pick them out. this is very important for wine processor to be able to pick out defects in the fermentation by flavor.

a similar phenomenon happens in coffee. the average taste preference is not aligned with high quality coffee, but simply doesn't know what to look for. most of their experience is with over roasted coffee that is picked whenever and processed as cost effectively as possible with no care for the innate flavors of the varietal.

Can’t wait to see similar testing in the cannabis world. How many people can differentiate between the fruitiness of a Myrcene dominant cannabis cultivar vs an Ocimene dominant cannabis cultivar? As Mr. PB would say: Let’s find out.

Most people prefer cheaper (in this case box wine) because it's often sweeter and it's supposed to be consumed right away.

I do agree with him on the '(most) wines nowadays are pretty good' but I disagree on the 'so there is no reason to pay more than $10 for a bottle of wine' part. Once you get to maybe 30-40$ it can plateau but you can get some amazing wines for 20.

Also the sample size is only of 8, and even if they are 'veterans', some couldn't discern a white from a red...

Reports like these are very silly. Telling you how unrefined most palates are instead of any fundamental truth about wine.

I'm not sure if you can distinguish really good wines. But you can definitely tell when a wine is bad.

My understanding is that wines rated 92/93 really aren’t that good, that scoring is heavily weighted

Back about twenty years ago, Calvin Trillin's amusing essay "The Red and the White" appeared in the New Yorker. He later collected it in Feeding a Yen. But I imagine one can find it on-line at the New Yorker's site.

I'm curious about whether cheaper wines use additives to achieve the taste more expensive wines achieve without them. Any knowledgeable info about this?

Having once tasted a Barolo a friend was enjoying and feeling like I had sucked on a piece of cotton, I am very curious how it was confused for a light wine.

Both served at the same temperature?