
Is Wine-Tasting Junk Science? - 1337biz
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2014/08/08/338839598/is-wine-tasting-junk-science
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grimman
I'll just throw this whisky tasting link in for contrast:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Boj33DVSILQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Boj33DVSILQ)

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adwf
That's a brilliant video. Scottish people and pretentiousness don't tend to go
together very well :)

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arethuza
That's not strictly true - it's practically mandatory here in Edinburgh at
this time of year ;-)

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gabemart
I have wanted to perform a rigorous double-blind wine-tasting experiment for a
long time, but have always lacked the resources.

The true test of the validity of wine-tasting isn't whether experts can tell
"good" wine from "bad" wine, but whether experts can reliably describe the
same wine with the same language with an acceptably small margin of error.

My ideal experiment would give blindfolded wine experts a number of wines to
taste. They would rate each wine using some appropriate standardized scale
that would measure a number of relevant qualities of the wine. The experts
would be given multiple samples of each wine, randomized appropriately. The
experiment would measure how closely each expert mirrored their own rating of
each wine on subsequent tastings.

This is basically a slightly more complex version of the famous (and
hypothetical) "Lady tasting tea" experiment [1].

I like this setup because the ratings of each expert are compared only to
their own previous ratings. I think this minimizes ambiguity and external
sources of error.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_tasting_tea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_tasting_tea)

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JoeAltmaier
Doesn't have to cost much. Just choose some supposed wildly different wines,
and tear up a sheet to make blindfolds.

My father-in-law Thomas is from India. He likes whiskey including Indian
brands; his colleague was a Scotch whisky snob. At a party he challenged the
snob to name all the whiskeys on the bar.

Thomas went into another room with the bottles in a bag; came out carrying a
tray with half a dozen shot glasses. The snob tasted each one, make erudite
remarks about their qualities and selected a brand for each one. Thomas opened
the bag and showed that only the Indian bottle had the seal cracked.

Needless to say Thomas doesn't get invited over there any more.

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gabemart
> Doesn't have to cost much. Just choose some supposed wildly different wines,
> and tear up a sheet to make blindfolds.

The hard part is finding qualified experts who are willing to participate. The
experiment would be most interesting and uncontroversial if it was done with
experts whose credentials were unassailable.

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JoeAltmaier
You could find experts in your social circle. The results would be just about
as satisfying personally.

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mankyd
> The brothers' taste is [...] vindicated by their ability to name and
> communicate what they notice in the wine, and to enable us to come to notice
> it, too.

But that's the point of calling it "junk". What they notice (and thusly
communicate) about the wine often simply isn't there. They certainly do
"notice" things, but what they notice is often imaginary.

A good bottle of wine can certainly be enjoyed. It's a question of where they
enjoyment stems from, and how much credence we put in the idea of some wines
being significantly different and better than others.

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JoeAltmaier
Sure some are better than others. Some batches of coca cola are better than
others. The 'junk' comes in when the expert starts naming imaginary features
and rating them.

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mankyd
Yes. I should elaborate on what I mean by "how much credence". We have an
entire industry built up not just around wine, but around _tasting_ wine -
judging it, speaking about it, writing about it, etc. It seems that, while
some wine will certainly be better than others, the degree of difference from
one quality wine to the next, and the amount of significance we ascribe to it
is where the debate should really lie.

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diego_moita
There are a lot of experiments showing that wine experts are very unreliable:
by serving them the same wine in 2 different bottles (cheap and expensive), by
adding food colorant to white wines, etc. Daniel Kahneman describes some of
them in "Thinking Fast and Slow".

The same thing has been done with other fields dealing with vague and loosely-
defined concepts: stock-picking, sports commentary, etc.

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bane
There's not really a good correlation between price and "goodness" of wine.
The real rule of wine is, if you like it, it's good wine. If you don't like
how it tastes, it's not good wine. That's it.

The wine world is notoriously pretentious.

It's good to know locations, varietals and aging a little because it can help
you narrow the window down to find a wine you'll probably like well enough vs
ones you won't. I for example, tend not to like Malbecs. Why? I dunno, just
something in the flavor. I also don't like Mountain Dew.

Wine can help accent or suppress flavors in your food as well. Just like
drinking beer with pizza tastes good, you probably wouldn't drink coke with
your morning cereal.

If you really want to get into wines, there seems to be a correlation between
rating and flavor complexity. And there's all kinds of ways to taste (or miss)
complexity in wines. Just like a good bbq sauce has elements of sweet, sour,
spicy, etc., wine can be more or less complex in flavors. But not everybody
likes complex flavors and that's fine. That's _easier_ in fact since
complexity is _usually_ a result of more expensive wine making processes like
aging so your local Two-Buck Chuck might make those people happy. But
detecting the differences or preferences for flavor complexity is like
detecting the differences between two different batches of your grandmother's
home-made Spaghetti sauce. You can probably describe it (the first had more
garlic, the second more basil), but absolute comparisons are really impossible
and don't really matter all that much. It's like asking "which is better a
sponge or the number 7?"

Something revealed to me during trips to various places where a glass of wine
with lunch or dinner is normal, is that wine is just another drink. Some of
the better meals I've had were had with a 2 euro 1/2 L carafe of the local
watered down table wine. In these places, wine is just a drink, like juice,
water or soda. People who drink wine with every meal really don't care what
the wine is so long as it doesn't taste bad.

You can probably find more than enough wines anybody will like for under $10 a
bottle.

It's just a drink.

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pappyo
It's actually quite impressive what a master Sommelier can do. S/he can taste
a wine, tell you the varietal, tell you the region it was made and the year it
was produced. The flowery language behind describing the wines is for the
person the Sommelier is explaining the wine to.

I highly recommend the documentary Somm [0]. It's not an easy thing to become
a master wine taster.

[0]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4zeyuk8hL8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4zeyuk8hL8)

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okabat
I walked away from Somm convinced that wine tasting is a load of crap. The
organization that puts on the "Master Sommelier" exam doesn't share results or
a scoring rubric, which is a huge red flag that the test isn't merit based. It
screams of manufactured exclusivity.

The best trained wine tasters can use deductive reasoning to narrow down the
wine's identity, but a significant portion seems to be visual. Arguably, they
are only effective at this because wine taxonomy is defined by visual
characteristics. In a double blind taste test, I highly doubt it's possible to
precisely identify the wine.

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sudhirj
Wine tasting as layment know it and as the connoisseurs know it is a little
different. Or as a sommelier knows it, rather.

I like wine generally, but most of what I know of it comes from the
documentary Somm, (on Netflix) - a sommelier's job is to tell a story - and to
do this s/he must very knowledgeable and articulate about wine, its history,
and its present. The history is basically a memory test, tasting wine is
articulating what the drinker might experience in words, and having a palate
honed enough to determine exactly what the wine is and where it's from.

All three, except the articulation, are verifiable quantitative tests. Even
the during articulation the sommelier cannot stray too far from what is
conventionally accepted.

I'm not harping too much on the sommelier service test, because the article is
about wine tasting, but other sides apply. People train themselves to learn
about wines in detail, and to differentiate wines right down to the highest
level of classification and regionality just by just smell and taste alone.

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blakeja
So is this article saying that trying to quantify what makes a wine "good" or
"bad" is a matter of perspective and lacks any kind scientific method? I mean,
do we need a scientific method if it is something we collectively can pretty
much agree upon? They can do all the studies they want and criticize this all
to the finest minutiae, but in my own personal experience I can say with
certainty that wine recommended me to by trusted experts is generally better
than just blindly picking a bottle. (Well not quite blind, but with a really
limited knowledge of regions and vintages). At the end of the day for all us
casual wine drinkers, I would think that is all that really matters. It may be
interesting to see some statistics on casual vs serious wine drinkers, could
help clarify a lot of this.

I would also say getting to know an expert to the point where they know your
own individual tastes really helps. Perhaps it is this aspect that people are
getting hung up, everyone will have their own tastes, enter the expert who can
categorize this for you, etc.

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glenra
No, it's saying that people who claim to be able to identify which wines are
"better" than others (and how they differ) can't reliably do that.

Wine recommended to you by trusted experts is _not_ better than just blindly
picking a bottle. Or at least, that is not something you can "say with
certainty" if you haven't _tested_ it. (And if you do test it, the results are
likely to surprise you.) An awful lot of the experience of wine turns out to
be the result of your _expectations_ of it.

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acd
I've been at wine tastings where the sommelier who is a sommelier teacher can
pick from what exact bordeaux region a certain wine is from without looking at
the label. Respects that expert skill different from computers but mastery. I
think it is like in all fields there are self proclaimed experts and real
experts and not all who claim to be an expert are one some fake it.

However its also been proven that people think that an expensive wine tastes
better than a cheap one. So psychology and expectations play a big role.

I would advocate that we get mass spectrometers out there in smart phones so
that we can scan the wine and tell its contents. Not only do we want to test
the wine contents, we also want to scan our meat to check that it is what is
says it is and we also want to scan vegetables for pesticide residue.

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dbbolton
Mass spec isn't terribly useful on a mixture with a large number of unknown
chemicals (like wine). The resulting spectrum would likely have overlapping
peaks all over the place and wouldn't really tell you much about the
composition.

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reubenswartz
A few weeks ago I was cooking dinner for a couple of couples at our house. I
opened a fancy bottle of wine about an hour ahead of time, and I also had an
$8 bottle left over from cooking breakfast the day before. (You'd think from
all this that I'm some kind of chef, but it doesn't take much to throw a
little wine on some mushrooms.)

I had a couple of sleeves for wine bottles, so I decided to put them over the
bottles and do a blind taste test. Of the 5 other people, 3 preferred the
cheaper wine, 1 was neutral, and 1 preferred the more expensive one.

You don't need wine sleeves-- we've used paper bags, or you can decant in a
double-blind safe way.

No one said science was easy, but someone's got to do it. ;-) You might even
save yourself some money.

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nsomniact
In college we used to pour handles of McCormick vodka into left over Grey
Goose bottles(same ones used over and over). I think you all can guess that no
one ever knew the difference. :p

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misiti3780
Is it just me or does the art example goes against the entire concept of "thin
slicing" in Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink. He gave an example of the exact
opposite - a bunch of art experts thinking a statue is authentic, then one guy
walking in, looking at the piece for 5 seconds, and saying it is fake (which
it was).

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aruggirello
While everything about wine-tasting is debatable, it must be said that
sommeliers / wine tasters spend a lot of time training themselves to discern
the scents and flavours of the different wines.

In fact there are several wine tasting training sets for sale, with tens of
different wine aromas.

As humans OTOH, our smell is inferior to, say, dogs.

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twoddle
For your average Joe, yet is probably is (it certainly is for myself), but
those who are 'trained' in the field or have had experience will be able to
taste subtle differences between a £10 bottle of wine from Bordeaux and a £10
bottle of wine from Cali.

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programmer_dude
>What these examples remind us of is that perceiving isn't opposed to or
independent of understanding and thought; it is, rather, an exercise of
understanding and thought.

I think this is what people should take away from this article.

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dbbolton
Wine tasting itself isn't necessarily a futile activity.

The "junk science" part is when self-described "experts" assign arbitrary
percentile scores based on the tasting.

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nsomniact
I don't trust anyone who can "smell" winners or losers. Seems like it's going
on in the startup world lately

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raverbashing
Blah blah blah, drink your wine and enjoy it.

If you like it great.

This doesn't mean all aspects are purely taste, like: acidity, tanninity, type
of grape, etc

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jnazario
having come to that realization myself, that's more or less what i tell people
who are new to wine. but i added something: learn how to describe what you
like (or don't like) so that you can find new wines to try and are likely to
enjoy. figure out how to communicate, say, a certain flavor with the term
"tannin" or "oak" and when you talk with a wine expert you can learn new
varietals to try.

since i've done this (in the past ten years) my enjoyment of wine has gone up.

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bane
Yeah exactly, all the varietals and vintage and flavor descriptions are
basically just ways of narrowing the window to help you find something you
_might_ like.

For example, I tend to like wines with medium tannins and oak flavor, deep
plum and tobacco notes. If there's spice flavors or not I'm also fine. I find
I usually can find what I want in Chilean Cabs, and have less luck with other
wines.

However, I've liked other kinds of wines too. Where I live the local Cabs are
generally terrible, but the local Chambourcins, which have few of the
qualities I generally look for, are good drinks too.

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WorldWideWayne
Was anyone calling Wine-Tasting a science to begin with?

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tormeh
Spoiler: Yes.

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swombat
Article: can npr headlines contradict Betteridge's law of headlines? Can this
very headline do it?

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u124556
The answer is no. Not because it's not junk, but because it's not science.

