Wine Snobs Got Nothing

[troutman]

http://www.slashfood.com/2011/04/15/...rom-expensive/

People can't tell the difference between cheap and expensive wine, says psychologist Richard Wiseman after conducting a survey of 578 drinkers at the Edinburgh International Science Festival, reports The Guardian. The participants sampled a variety of red and white wines in a blind taste test with prices ranging from about $6 to $50. The results concluded that people could only tell the difference between cheap and expensive white wines 53% of the time, and 47% of the time for red wines.

The Journal of Wine Economics backs up Wiseman's findings. Its 2008 study, "Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better?" reported that:

Individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine. In a sample of more than 6,000 blind tastings, we find that the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less.

[Yasa]

I can tell the difference between wines I like and wines I don't. Beyond that, I couldn't care less about the price.

This reminds me of a study about Monster cables I read a while back on Engadget. The study involved comparing the sound quality of Monster 1000 speaker cables and a coat hanger.

Price changes perception.

[something]

Taste is subjective, price is not.

Seems like a wasted effort in that study...

[troutman]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_tasting

Scientific research has long demonstrated the power of suggestion in perception as well as the strong effects of expectancies. For example, people expect more expensive wine to have more desirable characteristics than less expensive wine. When given wine that they are falsely told is expensive they virtually always report it as tasting better than the very same wine when they are told that it is inexpensive. French researcher Frédéric Brochet "submitted a mid-range Bordeaux in two different bottles, one labeled as a cheap table wine, the other bearing a grand cru etiquette" and obtained predictable results. Tasters described the supposed grand cru as "woody, complex, and round" and the supposed cheap wine as "short, light, and faulty."[4] Blind tastings have repeatedly demonstrated that price is not highly correlated with the evaluations made by most people who taste wine.

Similarly, people have expectations about wines because of their geographic origin, producer, vintage, color, and many other factors. For example, when Brochet served a white wine he received all the usual descriptions: "fresh, dry, honeyed, lively." Later he served the same wine dyed red and received the usual red terms: "intense, spicy, supple, deep." [5]

The world of wine has numerous myths and exaggerations that are only now being disproven scientifically, yet they influence perceptions and expectancies. Not even professional tasters are immune to the strong effects of expectancies. Therefore, the need for blind tasting continues.

The Wine Snob Scandal:

http://www.seattleweekly.com/2002-02...ob-scandal.php

After appropriate statistical massaging, Brochet's results prove that a lot of what wine connoisseurs say about wine is humbug: A side-by-side chart of best-to-worst rankings of 18 wines by a roster of experienced tasters showed about as much consistency as a table of random numbers.

[peter12]

I'd recommend this great little book for anyone interested in the subject of wine.

http://www.amazon.ca/Drink-Therefore...3143993&sr=8-1

[WilsonFourTwo]

Should probably buy this book as well.....

[Table 5]

I would think a wine connoisseur would be able to tell...., but yeah, the general public probably can't tell the different. There's a reason why advertising exists....people are pretty suggestible about things they don't know much about. They should do these studies on people who actually buy $50 bottles of wine, not science nerds.

I'm not a big wine guy, but for my birthday my gf took me to a fancy pants restaurant, where i had a glass of something delicious. I had the waiter write the name of it down for me for the future. When I looked into it, I was expecting it to be $60-75 bucks per bottle....and was pleasantly surprised when it came out to be about $15 (which was basically what they charged me per glass at the restaurant!).

[JayP]

Originally Posted by Table 5

I would think a wine connoisseur would be able to tell....

Actually I've seen studies that asked experts to blind taste test and grade wines of a wide range of price and "quality" and with a big enough sample size the grades turn out to be the same for every wine.

[JFK]

I've been bitching about it forever, but it's the same way with beer snobs.

Pour a budweiser in some micro-brewery bottle from rural Germany, and serve it to a beer snob and he'll probably rave about how fantastic it is. Then serve him a bud in it's proper bottle, and you'll get some "mass-produced", "quality deprived" BS response.

Snobs suck balls.

[Yasa]

Originally Posted by JFK

Snobs suck balls.

But only the finest of balls.

[JFK]

Originally Posted by Yasa

But only the finest of balls.

Unless they're blindfolded, in which case you hand them donkey balls, and they don't know the difference.

[SeeBass]

Originally Posted by JFK

I've been bitching about it forever, but it's the same way with beer snobs.

Pour a budweiser in some micro-brewery bottle from rural Germany, and serve it to a beer snob and he'll probably rave about how fantastic it is. Then serve him a bud in it's proper bottle, and you'll get some "mass-produced", "quality deprived" BS response.

Snobs suck balls.

I find poor people who can't afford to buy nice things suck more

[Sliver]

Originally Posted by SeeBass

I find poor people who can't afford to buy nice things suck more

You're probably half kidding, but don't pretend what he said isn't the truth lol.

[username]

Hmmm maybe they should sample some of my dad's home made potions and run this study. His wine is like drinking diesel compared to 7 dollar bottle "cheap" wine.

[Gozer]

Originally Posted by peter12

I'd recommend this great little book for anyone interested in the subject of wine.

http://www.amazon.ca/Drink-Therefore...3143993&sr=8-1

Pedantic on the topic of alcohol?

I admire the devotion.

[Save Us Sutter]

I'm currently reading a book called "The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives". Pretty interesting stuff and recommended for people who are into this nerdy stuff.

Anyway, one of the chapter's is about measurement and the law or errors and one of the things talked about it is subjective measuring, like wine tasting. A couple of quotes:

"The perceived taste of wine arises from the effects of a stew of between 600 and 800 volatile organic compounds on both the tongue and the nose. That's a problem, given that studies have shown that even flavor-trained professionals can rarely reliably identify more than three or four components in a mixture"

"In a 2008 study a group of volunteers asked to rate five wines rated a bottle labeled $90 higher than another bottle labeled $10, even though the researchers had filled both bottles with the same wine.What's more, this test was conducted while the subjects were having their brains imaged in an MRI scanner. The scans showed that the area of the brain thought to encode our experience of pleasure was truly more active when the subjects drank the wine they thought was more expensive."

And for those who think the experts can get it right... while they may be better than an average joe, they are far from reliable. In a study where experts tasted three wines (2 of which were the same) they couldn't identify which one was different in 33% of cases. When also asked to rate wines on 12 components (alcohol content, sweetness, fruitiness, etc) experts disagreed significantly on 75% of them. And finally, when asked to match wines to descriptions provided by other experts, subjects were only correct around 70% of the time.

There's also some quotes from the editor of Wine and Spirits Magazine where he basically says the wine rating system is "nonsensical, misguided and misleading"

If anyone wants sources for any of this, it's all available in the book, just didn't want to type it all out.

[Bobblehead]

Price should be irrelevant. It is what you enjoy.

Sometimes there is a correlation because a more expensive process is used to create the product, but if you enjoy a product that is less expensive, why should anyone else care?

Personally, many of the beer I enjoy are more expensive, but that is largely because the flavours I like aren't mass produced. But if those beer were ever mass produced and came down in price, then assuming it still tasted the same I would be happy. Same beer, more money left in my pocket.

[comrade]

Originally Posted by Bobblehead

Price should be irrelevant. It is what you enjoy.

Sometimes there is a correlation because a more expensive process is used to create the product, but if you enjoy a product that is less expensive, why should anyone else care?

Personally, many of the beer I enjoy are more expensive, but that is largely because the flavours I like aren't mass produced. But if those beer were ever mass produced and came down in price, then assuming it still tasted the same I would be happy. Same beer, more money left in my pocket.

Except that the findings of these experiments indicate that price is very relevant to peoples enjoyment and suggest that you and I are not impervious to such influences, despite what we believe about ourselves.

[GreenLantern]

Every now and then for wine I will splurge and go with something over 20 bucks, but usually that 15-20 dollar range is where I find my best bottles.

[comrade]

Originally Posted by fotze

I would like to do one of these. I can surely tell those really, really cheap one's. Mind you if its the right expensive one that is not something you like it moght be hard. I really don't like the heavy one's like Malbec, so I would have trouble with them.

Mind you, are dudes who go to a science festival really the ones who could tell, or would ive a crap. Do those guys even drink alcohol? They would be more likely to tell the difference between Macs and 7/11 4 litre big gulps.

So you reject that the findings of the experiment (performed on several hundred people) apply to you due to a baseless assumption that "science nerds" (defined as anyone who has attended a science festival) could not possibly have any interest or experience with wine, unlike you. You then admit a few posts later that you're "not a big wine guy" and offer an example where you were duped in the exact same way as the subjects of the experiment.

Have you ever considered that you're just rationalizing away past decisions that you've made that the experiment's findings call into question?

Coincidentally I was just reading a very relevant article. (fixed)