Back in December I posted under the headline “The myth of the wine connoisseur” what I called a little piece of wine wisdom exploding the myth of the wine connoisseur. An astute Glug reader Kerry has now politely pointed out how the evidence I quoted was no evidence at all. Mea Culpa.
My first reaction was to delete the offending post. On reflection I have left it substantially as was (in italics below) to serve as a reminder not to take everything read on the internet as gospel truth. My brother David has used Kerry’s correction to give some reflections on how he is not sure he can recall a masked tasting where he was not fooled by one or two wines.
The evidence for that verdict was not presented by a newspaper wine writer. No surprise there. Debra Kelly, writing in Mashable, clearly has a wide range of interests. She is a journalist not captured by the bribes of free bottles of wine sent to review.
To the argument advanced.
Debra Kelly writes:
A study done by Frederic Brochet from the University of Bordeaux asked a series of wine experts to describe, in detail, two bottles of wine — one white and one red. The bottles actually contained the same wine (one was just dyed red), and not one of the 54 test subjects picked up on the deception.
Another study done by Cal Tech (involving expensive wines with cheap price tags, and vice versa) got similar results. Even further studies found that our environment and the presentation of the wine had the most impact on our opinions. Ask someone to describe what’s advertised as a $10 bottle of wine and ask them to do the same of a $120 bottle, and you’re likely to get two entirely different answers, regardless of what’s actually in the bottle.
So what does that all mean? The idea of a wine expert is built largely on subjective ideas, and those ideas are going to differ from person to person. If that $10 bottle or $3 bottle tastes good to you, you keep enjoying it. And feel free to remove the price tag and tell your friends you splurged on this one. They’ll probably love it because they think they should.
