
Study That Embarrassed Wine Experts Across the Globe (2014) - Tomte
http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infamous_study_on_wine_tasting.html
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INTPenis
That's a classic but lately a swedish journalist uncovered that the wine we
drink in Europe is largely bogus.

Apparently wine distributors are not required to declare contents and they can
use up to 60 approved ingredients, ecological wine had 30 or 40 approved
ingredients.

And the issue is with the industrial yeast that they use. This is apparently
tailored yeast to give the wine flavor like mango or pomegranate. The flavors
listed by the manufacturer of the industrial yeast often match what is later
seen in the store where the wine is sold.

Essentially distributors buy wine from a country like south africa or germany
for example. Then they process it, often here in Sweden or in another european
country. And that's where they add things like oak flakes to fake oak cask
maturing, and of course the industrial yeast to add other flavors.

The flavors differ between different european countries, catering to that
population and culture.

A bottle of "fake" wine can cost between 8 and 14 euro, a bottle of natural
wine can cost 30 euro or more.

I've completely stopped buying the generic wine from our national alcohol
store after seeing this.

Imho almost all of the wine we have available to buy should be called
something like "wine drink" instead of wine. The EU is working on leglislation
to force distributors to reveal their ingredients but so far they're very
secretive.

~~~
Pamar
Source, please?

(I am Italian, my family used to own a small vineyard so I have some hands-on
experience on wine making, albeit we made it only for our own family).

I find the part about "yeasts" a bit difficult to believe, but I have been
wrong in the past so I would like to find out more.

~~~
eecc
Well, I'm from Rome and I remember the stories of my friends having to toss
their wine batches because they added too much "polverina" to the mix. I also
remember one time I nearly got into a fight with a producer at a summer show,
when I commented to a friend (unaware the other guy was standing next to me, I
guess I had enough already ;) that this "barrique" they were peddling really
tasted of supermarket wine washed in wood flakes, and you could tell the two
"tastes" apart like they were glued together by a child.

~~~
Pamar
This is not what the OP was talking about, though. I do know about faking wood
barrel ripening with wood flakes and I heard about "polverina", but the latter
is, for what I know, something of the past (and the Ethanol scare in Italy
played a large role in taking it out of the game, for what I know).

In other words: _" the plural of anecdote is not data"_ \- I would like to get
to the source and understand better the "flavored yeasts" claims. And also see
what countries the article was talking about.

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Animats
Synthetic wine has been under development for years. Now there's an SF startup
making some.[1]

Custom liquor production, including wine, can be outsourced. Frank-Lin
Distillers's Products in Fairfield, CA, makes most of the low-end liquor on
the west coast. They have their own brands, and also do contract
manufacturing. They used to make Skyy Vodka; the company behind Skyy was
purely a marketing operation with no manufacturing capability. (Skyy was sold
to Campari, which has their own plants, and they moved manufacturing in-
house.) Ethanol comes in by rail in tank cars, it's re-distilled, de-ionized
water and flavoring are added, and the product is bottled. Most of the effort
goes into bottling and labeling; they fill a huge variety of bottles with
about a thousand different labels, but only have about a hundred different
recipes.

So once you get your wine formula working and passing blind taste tests, give
them a call and have them start cranking it out.

[1] [https://www.newscientist.com/article/2088322-synthetic-
wine-...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2088322-synthetic-wine-made-
without-grapes-claims-to-mimic-fine-vintages/)

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lemming
There's a great restaurant chain called "Dans le noir" \- I went in Barcelona,
but there are several. You dine in total darkness, and all the waiters are
blind. They don't tell you what you're eating or drinking. It is _amazingly_
hard to tell - most people couldn't guess what they were eating, and no-one
could reliably tell the red wine from the white. I'm a total wine peasant, but
this included a guy sitting at our table who worked in the wine industry.

It's a highly recommended experience, it's really interesting.

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blairanderson
I totally agree but would like the study more if it were to be conducted on
wine experts instead of winemaking students.

Winemaking is more about chemistry than flavor profiles.

~~~
taneq
Yeah, maybe if they'd picked people who actually drank wine on a regular basis
they'd have had different results. You can't tell me with a straight face that
white wine and red wine taste the same.

~~~
barking
I have no idea but a simple blindfolded test should answer that one, you'd
think. This guy did a small one and it seems to show that his small group of
people can tell the difference mostly. Rose tripped them up a little
[https://erikras.com/2012/06/11/blindfolded-wine-taste-
test/](https://erikras.com/2012/06/11/blindfolded-wine-taste-test/)

~~~
taneq
Rose is basically a sweet white with a little bit of red in it, so it's not
surprising they were on the fence for that one. As for the expensive red vs.
the cheap red, I've found I actually prefer low-to-midrange wine over some
more expensive wines. The higher or lower the price, the more of a crapshoot
it seems to be.

~~~
barking
yes i dislike as much wine as I like, I find beer a lot more reliable.

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thomasahle
Why make the study with colored wine, when you could just blindfold the
participants? It seems to me that would better distinguish whether visual aids
are necessary or just helpful.

~~~
dmurray
That would be a different study, and it has certainly been done, but not with
the same headline-grabbing results. It turns out even first year oenology
students are actually pretty good at telling red wine from white when
blindfolded. The real finding of the study is that the visual "aid" overpowers
the evidence of taste and smell when it contradicts then.

~~~
King-Aaron
I remember hearing about a similar study about visual cues fooling the brain -
there was a Japanese group who used augmented reality to change the size of a
cookie when participants looked at it. Those who were shown the cookie
enlarged, didn't eat the whole cookie, thinking it would be too much. Those
who were shown the cookie in reduced size, tried to scoff it down in one bite
haha. Although all the cookies were the same size, the visual perception of it
had a major impact in how the test subjects reacted to it - even though they
were all holding the same physical sized cookie.

I don't have a journal article handy, but here's a news report about it:
[http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/japan-diet-
glasses...](http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/japan-diet-glasses-fool-
wearers-into-eating-less/news-story/a82dc65e49dfa34794f268eb67caddd9)

------
cafard
If you go to the New Yorker website, you can probably find Calvin Trillin's
piece "The Red and the White", which appeared about 2002 and was later
collected in _Feeding a Yen_. I mention this not for any deep insights it
brings, though it does mention the bits of folklore that are passed along as
fact, but because Trillin is a funny and graceful writer.

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jonathanstrange
Empirical studies with only 54 participants are practically meaningless, just
like anecdotal qualitative research. You cannot draw conclusions about tens of
thousands of wine experts or millions of wine consumers from such a small
group.

That being said, there is also something annoying about this study, because it
so much misses what the experience of wine tasting is about - all senses work
together, and of course you can fool them by providing falsified input (e.g.
wrong color). There are many ways to fool the senses, ranging from artificial
flavors to stage magicians' tricks. But it's much nicer to be surprised by a
wine when you're not being fooled or tricked by someone, and with some
experience it's possible to describe and agree with others on some of the
objective features of wines - whether you then like the wine or not is purely
subjective. What I like about wine is that you never really know for sure what
you get, if you vary the vineyards, grapes and years each time.

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taneq
I think the results of that study have been badly misinterpreted. If anything,
the conclusion you should draw is that most of the words used to describe wine
have nothing to do with the actual flavours or odours of the wine, and so are
pretty meaningless. You can't say that the students were fooled into thinking
the red-dyed wine was red wine unless you asked them "is this wine red or
white?"

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lukego
Have similar studies been made of coffee tasting?

~~~
bjourne
The coffee equivalent would be comparing coffee brewed from Arabica beans vs
Robusta. And there is no way in hell any regular coffee drinker would not be
able to tell the difference. :) Robusta beans are despised by every "coffee
snob" in existence because of their sour and vile after taste. The coffee
challenge is easier though because regular coffee only tastes either as
Arabica coffee or Robusta coffee (there are some crossbreeds), but wine can
taste in thousands of different ways.

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Traubenfuchs
The continued effort put into this pretentious hobby baffles me. Shame on
every intelligent person who falls for this and wastes their money!

~~~
jbmorgado
Calm down, don't trow the baby out with the water.

Yes, enologists mostly lack coherence in their job and created for themselves
a nice little niche of uncriticizable people that look at themselves with the
highest regard.

But, let's not get into the fallacy of saying that because of that all wines
are made the same. Wine quality varies greatly and some vineyards are very
clearly better than others.

