Wine Tasting and Fancy Descriptions

“Taste—as in personal preference, discernment—is subjective. It's ephemeral, shaped by trends and fads. It's one part mouth and nose, two parts ego. Even flavors that professional evaluators agree are 'defects' can come to signify superior taste,” says Mary Roach in her new book, Gulp. “Because it's hard for people to gauge quality by flavor, they tend to gauge it by price. That's a mistake. Sue Langstaff has evaluated wine professionally for twenty years. In her opinion, the difference between a $500 bottle and one that costs $30 is largely hype.” (1)

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Paul Bloom writes, “We are always influenced by our beliefs. Pleasure is always deep, For a painting, it matters who the artist was; for a story, it matters whether it is truth or fiction; for a steak, we care about what sort of animal it came from. Wine is a perfect example of this. You can take the same wine and label it in different ways, and this affects how people, including experts, experience it.” (2) Paul Wagner, a top wine judge, plays a game with his wine-making classes at Napa Valley College. The students, most of whom have several years' experience in the industry, are asked to rank six wines, their labels hidden by brown paper bags. All are wines Wagner himself enjoys. At least one is under $10 and two are over $50. Over the past eighteen years, every time, the least expensive wine averages the highest ranking, and the most expensive two finish at the bottom. In 2011, a Gallo Cabernet scored the highest average rating, and a Chateau Gruaud Larose (which retails from between $60 and $70) took the bottom slot. (1)

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In one study, a Bordeaux was either labeled as a 'grand cru classe' or as a 'vin du table.' Forty experts said the wine with the fancy label was worth drinking while only 12 said this of the cheap label. The grand cru was 'agreeable. woody, complex, balanced and rounded,' while the vin du table was 'weak, short, light, flat, and faulty.' In another study scientists scanned peoples' brains while they tasted wine. It was always the same wine but it was described as costing either $10 or $90. People reported liking the wine more when it was described as expensive—and the parts of the brain associated with pleasure and reward were far more active. (2) Coco Krumme wondered if wine descriptors might be correlated with something other than flavor: price. So, using descriptors of 3,000 bottles, ranging from $5 to $200 in price she derived a weight for every word based on the frequency with which it appeared on cheap versus expensive bottles. Her analysis revealed that 'cheap' and 'expensive' words are used differently. Cheap words are more likely to be recycled, while words correlated with expensive wines tend to be in the tail of the distribution. That is, reviewers are more likely to create new vocabulary for top-end wines. The classifier also showed that it's possible to guess the price range of wine based on the words in the review. Based on these results, she came up with this descriptor for the most expensive-sounding review in the world: “Velvety chocolate with a silky ruby finish. Pair with shellfish.” (3) Krumme also observes, “In defense of critics, one might argue that these correlations exist because expensive wines actually taste like focused casses, where cheap wines are just juicy. But food scientists think that's doubtful. Recently, researchers have been analyzing wines in mass spectrometers, looking for odorants like ethyl 2-methylbutanoate, which smells like apples. While they are finding minor differences between the varietals, the similarities are more striking. Merlots contain more earthy compounds than cabernets, but the two are otherwise indistinguishable. It's impossible, furthermore, to pick apart differentiating flavors of specific spices or flavors in any wine. Granted, the human nose is more agile than a mass spectrometer, which only detects the mass and structure of molecules. It's unlikely, however, that experts have such precise senses that they can identify minute variations of tastes and odors that a sophisticated machine cannot observe at all.” (3) Leonard Mlodinow adds, “From a theoretical viewpoint, there are many reasons to question the significance of wine ratings. For one thing, taste perception depends on a complex interaction between taste and olfactory stimulation. Strictly speaking, the sense of taste comes from five types of receptor cells on the tongue: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. The last responds to certain amino acid compounds, prevalent for example, in soy sauce.” (4) The perceived taste of wine arises from the effects of a stew of more than 2,000 volatile organic compounds on both the tongue and the nose. (5) This is 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. (6) Orley Ashenfelter is one person who has tried to make wine evaluation quantitative. He has used math to evaluate wine and has upset many wine experts. As Ian Ayres says in his book, Super Crunchers, “What's really gotten Ashenfelter in trouble is crunching numbers to assess the quality of Bordeaux wines. Insted of using the 'swishing and spitting' approach of wine gurus like Robert Parker, Ashenfelter has used statistics to find out what characteristics of vintage are associated with higher or lower auction prices.” (7) “Wine is an agricultural product dramatically affected by the weather from year to year,” says Ashenfelter. By using decades of weather data from France's Bordeaux region he found that low levels of harvest rain and high average summer temperatures produce the greatest wines. The statistical fit on data from 1952 through 1980 was remarkably good for the red wines as well as Bordeaux. By plugging weather statistics for any year into this formula he developed, Ashenfelter can predict the general quality of any vintage: Wine quality = 12.145 + 0.00117 winter rainfall + 0.0614 average growing season temperature – 0.00386 harvest rainfall As might be expected, traditional wine critics did not embrace Ashenfelter's predictions in spite of his good results. When he gave a wine presentation at Christie's Wine Department, dealers in the back openly hissed at his talk. His detractors see him as a heretic. He threatens to demystify the world of wine. He eschews flowery and nonsensical ('muscular,' 'tight,' or 'rakish') jargon, and instead gives out reasons for his predictions. Yet, as Ayres concludes, “In spite of a lot of back and forth bickering, the traditional experts are now paying a lot more attention to the weather. While many of them have never publicly acknowledged the power of Ashenfelter's predictions, their own predictions now correspond much more closely to his simple equation results.” (7) In China, nouveau-riche status-seekers are spending small fortunes on counterfeit Bordeaux. In France in June 1973, eighteen men were prosecuted by the French government for passing off humble wines from the Languedoc region as the noble and five-times-as-costly wine of Bordeaux. During the trial it came out that the Bordeaux wine merchants regularly defrauded foreigners. One vat of wine considered extremely inferior, for example, was labeled, “Salable as Beaujolais to Americans.” (8) Before leaving the subject of wine, the next time you imbibe your favorite Cabernet Sauvignon think of what Robert J. McGorrin of Oregon State University reports, “At high concentrations, 4-mercapto-4-methyl-2-pentanone (catketone) has an off-odor associated with cat urine, but in the context of Cabernet Sauvignon wine, it provides the typical flavor impressions of the Sauvignon grape.” (9) If cat urine isn't enough to sniff at, try estrogens. A single glass of red wine contains biologically active plant estrogens that weigh 1,000 times as much as all the environmental chemicals an individual would ingest from pesticide's in a day's food. (1) So, if cat urine and pesticides deter you, leave the cork in the bottle in spite of the fancy name. Jack Dini Livermore, CA

References

1. Mary Roach, Gulp, (New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2013), 9
2. Paul Bloom, “What makes people feel pleasure?”, cnn.com, August 28, 2011
3. Coco Krumme, “Velvety chocolate with a silky ruby finish. Pair with shellfish,” slate.com, February 23, 2011
4. Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard's Walk, (New York, Pantheon Books, 2008), 131
5. Helen Gillespie, “From grape to table: the chemistries of wine,” Today's Chemist at Work, 7, 49, September 1998
6. D Laing and W. Francis, “The capacity of humans to identify odors in mixtures,” Physiology and Behavior, 46, 809, November 1989, and D. Laing, et al., “The limited capacity of humans to identify the components of taste mixtures and taste-odor mixtures,” Perception, 31, 617, 2002
7. Ian Ayres, Super Crunchers, (New York, Bantam Books, 2007), 1
8. Leonared Mlodinow, “A hint of hype, a taste of illusions,” wsj.com, November 20, 2009
9. Mark S. Lesney, “A fragrant feast,” Today's Chemist at Work, 11, 27, June 2002
10. James P. Collman, Naturally Dangerous, (Sausalito, CA, University Science Books, 2001), 163

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