In one study with over 6,000 taste tasters,
comprising about 12% sommeliers and the rest general public,
they tried to determine if people like expensive wines more than
cheap ones.
It found the
correlation between price and overall rating is small and
negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more
expensive wines slightly less. For individuals with wine
training however, there are indications of a positive
relationship between price and enjoyment.
Results indicate that
both the prices of wines and wine recommendations by experts may
be poor guides for non-expert wine consumers.
Consider that over 400
compounds which influence the scent alone have been identified
in wine. Also, temperature by itself can make a huge difference
to taste, because of how this can affect smell and taste. As
wine enthusiast David Derbyshire notes, “Serve a New World
chardonnay too cold and you’ll only taste the overpowering oak.
Serve a red too warm and the heady boozy qualities will be
overpowering.”
As for the wine experts, while they may have honed their skills
with sometimes thousands of hours of study into all things wine,
they still have the same brain as the rest of us. Wine expert
and journalist Katie Kelly Bell, was traveling with a fellow
group of wine connoisseurs. While at Waters Vineyards in
Washington State, the owner poured everyone two glasses of white
wine and asked them to identify what types they were.
Bell sums up: "We
swirled, we sniffed, and we wrinkled our brows in contemplation,
some of us nodding with assurance. I took notes, finding the
first white to be more floral and elegant than the second.
Drawing on my years and years (there have been too many) of
tasting, studying and observation, I swiftly concluded that the
first wine was an unoaked Chardonnay and the second was a
Sauvignon Blanc, easy peasy. Much to my mortification I was dead
wrong, as was everyone else in the room. The proprietor chuckled
and informed his room that the wines were actually the same
wine; one was just warmer than the other. He wasn’t
intentionally shaming us (not one person got it right); he was
pointedly demonstrating the power of just one element in the
wine tasting experience: temperature."
A test conducted at the suggestion of winery owner Robert
Hodgson at the California State Fair wine competition. Panels of
65 to 70 expert judges were given a huge variety of wines to
rank as per usual, but what they were not told was that they
were actually given each of the wines three times and from the
same exact bottle.
After running this same experiment four consecutive years, what
Hodgson found was that, to quote the paper published on the
experiment, only “about 10 percent of the judges were able to
replicate their score within a single medal group.” In fact, he
even found about 10% of the judges were so far off that they
switched a Bronze rating to a Gold for the exact same wine from
the exact same bottle.
In another experiment, Brochet also gave a similar panel a glass
of white wine and a glass of red wine and gave them a list of
common words used to describe white and red wines and told them
to assign them appropriately to the two wines in front of them.
It turns out the red wine was actually the same as the white
wine except dyed red, and only a small percentage of the testers
were able to accurately identify that both wines tasted the same
in the descriptive words they chose to identify each wine. Not
all of the taste testers got it wrong.
Bottom Line - Wine tasting is subjective and what about a given
type appeals to you is all that matters. If knowing you paid
$200 for that glass enhances your experience, great. For others
buying several bottles of Two-Buck Chuck so they can enjoy many
glasses with friends may make that one all the more enjoyable.
The only thing that matters with regard to a wine is whether
or not you like it.