When Wine "Connoisseurs" Are Given the Same Glass Of Wine Over and Over(policymic.com)
policymic.com
When Wine "Connoisseurs" Are Given the Same Glass Of Wine Over and Over
http://www.policymic.com/articles/50547/guess-what-happens-when-wine-connoisseurs-are-given-the-same-glass-of-wine-over-and-over
3 comments
I'm definitely not a wine "connoisseur" by any means, and don't think cost has much of anything to do with the quality of the wine. I've had some amazing cheap wine, and awful expensive wine. However, to me this article misses the point. The more interesting question to me would be: Can these judges continually figure out if a wine is "bad" or "good". Give them the same two wines over and over again, one being "bad" (Franzia) and another being "good" (Some agreed upon California cab or similar) and see what shakes out. I'd be very surprised if any of the judges couldn't figure out which was worse than the other.
This study was conducted over the course of 15 years with 571 wine experts:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1755-0238.2008....
They found that individual judges were generally not very consistent in their rankings but that if you use small groups of judges then you can get better reproducibility.
The exact numbers are in the paper, but about 67% of the experts had statistically significant reliability for red wines and about 50% had statistically significant reliability for whites.
Also interesting is John Cleese's film about wine in which he conducted a blind taste test that found that most tasters couldn't discriminate between white and red wine. I couldn't find it online, but the whole thing is worth watching if you're interested in wine.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1755-0238.2008....
They found that individual judges were generally not very consistent in their rankings but that if you use small groups of judges then you can get better reproducibility.
The exact numbers are in the paper, but about 67% of the experts had statistically significant reliability for red wines and about 50% had statistically significant reliability for whites.
Also interesting is John Cleese's film about wine in which he conducted a blind taste test that found that most tasters couldn't discriminate between white and red wine. I couldn't find it online, but the whole thing is worth watching if you're interested in wine.
This doesn't mean there's nothing to tasting wine, though.
If the test had been to identify a really bad bottle, versus a good one, I'm sure they all would've got it. If you give someone two reds, both of decent quality, sure, a blind difference would be hard to detect.
But, give someone a corked bottle and an uncorked bottle, I'm sure they'll figure it out. (This does not refer to screw on tops vs corks, but cork contaminated wine)
Most of the people referred to as "philistines" by the author probably do not know what a corked bottle is.
I'll tell you, it tastes horrible. And once someone has helped you taste what "corked" is, you'll remember forever.