Felix salmon recently posted an interesting piece about the potential pitfalls of tasting wine blind.
He argues that blind tastings tend to favor simple, straight forward, soft-fruity-sweet wines that offer immediate pleasure and gratification over austere, complex wines whose subtleties take longer to become aware of and appreciate properly.
According to Salmon, the very fact of not knowing what we’re tasting tends to bias us against subtle, complex wines:
…If you know exactly what it is that you’re tasting — a young first-growth wine, for example — then you can taste it in that light. Similarly, if you know that you’re looking at an Ad Reinhardt painting, you’ll be willing to spend a few minutes with it so that you can appreciate its subtleties. If you didn’t know it was a Reinhardt, then you’d probably just read it as a black monochrome and move on…
I agree with Salmon’s take on blind tasting. I have done some of it since the end of 2008 while traveling back and forth between New York and Buenos Aires (and a one-month stop in San Francisco), all cities where great wine is easy to find, which inevitably made me catch the wine bug.
I think there might other psychological elements that contribute to the problems with blind tastings. A couple of days before reading Salmon’s piece, I came across an article posted at the BPS Research Digest blog (Ht: The Situationist), about a new study by Ayumi Yamada suggesting that talking about art can alter our appreciation of it.
Half of 129 students in the study were asked to verbalize their reasons for liking (or not liking) two paintings, one abstract, and another representational. They were then asked which one of the paintings was their favorite. The remaining participants just viewed the paintings without saying anything. Afterwards, all the participants had to choose their favored painting.
Representational paintings are realistic, with content that can be easily talked about. Abstract art, by contrast, is less grounded in reality and more tricky to talk about.
… Those participants in the verbalisation condition who’d been challenged to say why they liked the paintings were subsequently biased towards choosing the representational painting as their favourite… participants in the verbalisation condition who’d been challenged to articulate their reasons for disliking the paintings were subsequently biased towards choosing the abstract painting as their favourite.
… Yamada thinks that… because participants found it easier to talk about why they liked the representational painting compared with the abstract one, this biased them in favour of the representational painting. Similarly, participants who had to talk about their dislike for the art, found this easier for the representational painting, which subsequently biased them against it.
As Salmon says, blind tastings probably diminish our capacity to judge subtle, complex wines because they’re akin to abstract paintings, and therefore difficult to evaluate from a “position of ignorance” that doesn’t provide the incentive for us to pause and let these wines grow slowly in us.
But it might as well be that the obvious, salient qualities of soft-fruity-sweet wines not only provide more immediate sensorial gratification. As it happens with representational paintings, this qualities are easier to verbalize. This would be a more fundamental advantage for these wines at any formal tasting, blind or not, which invariably consist of putting wine’s taste and aromas into the very concrete words that make up the jargon of wine connoisseurs.
Yamada study is consistent with past research showing that attempting to verbalise our feelings can distort our later choices. For example, a prior study showed that participants who attempted to explain their preferences for different jams subsequently showed less agreement with expert ratings than did control participants.
This is probably why I have discovered the wines I like the most in all kinds of situations other than wine tastings, precisely when I’m not consciously focused on tasting the wine.
Salmon is of the opinion that the best way of enjoying great wine is
“…with good food, on a special occasion, with people you love, purely for enjoyment. If you take most of that away, and drink wine blind, surrounded by serious men spitting into buckets, you’re doing something qualitatively very different indeed. And it should come as no surprise that there might not be much if any correlation between how much you like a wine in the former context and how much you like it in the latter.”
I think that a big part of this qualitative difference is that drinking wine “with good food, on a special occasion, with people you love, purely for enjoyment” is not only intrinsically more enjoyable than being “surrounded by serious men spitting into buckets”, but more crucially, it doesn’t let us concentrate too narrowly, rationally and deliberately on tasting the wine. We are going with the delicious flow of the situation, and wine is but one of the multiple delights that register in our subconscious.
The wines I like the most have always managed to surprise me in these situations, when I’m almost not paying attention to them. They pull me out of conversation for a few seconds that I use to revel more intently in the sensory pleasure they provide. But this pleasure is always enigmatic to the point that even if I could, I wouldn’t want to define it or attach any words to it. It almost feels as if I would somehow spoil the experience by analyzing it. And that’s how, so far, my best technique for discovering great wines is to not even try to.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
WIne is just like life, is the unexpected “Wow” moment that marks your life, our you tongue papillae!
Ile