Blind Taste

I like a good glass of wine now and again.  I tend to buy moderately-priced wines, neither cheap nor dear.  And I’m finding support for my position in dozens of tests that seem to show that the art and science of wine tasting is, for the most part, utter delusion.

A 2008 paper in The Journal of Wine Economics, for example, found that when consumers are unaware of a wine’s price, they “on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less [than cheap ones].” Experts do not fare much better. The study could not conclude that experts preferred more expensive wine: “In sum, we find a non-negative relationship between price and overall rating for experts. Due to the poor statistical significance of the price coefficient for experts, it remains an open question whether this coefficient is in fact positive.”

In another experiment, critics tasted one red wine and one white wine. They described the red in language typical of reds and the white in language typical of whites. The problem? Both were identical white wines; the “red” had been tinted with food coloring. 

When your taste experts can be fooled by food coloring, I’d say you can safely disregard anything they might care to say.

What this means is you get to train your own palate, find out what you like, buy that and drink it.  If you want to impress your friends when you serve them, just memorize the back label: “I think you will find hints of nutmeg and clove, as well as more than a soupçon of macerated strawberry.”  And you can always praise the “long oak finish,” because every damn wine in the world claims to have one.

These are your taste buds we’re talking about.  Taste buds aren’t impressed by price or pedigree, they’re impressed by taste.  And it’s not like your tastes can’t change— over time, you might be able to discern and enjoy complexities hat were invisible to you at first go— but the first rule is to please yourself.

And may I just add that I’m really happy that there is such a thing in the world as the Journal of Wine Economics?