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In Blindness Veritas?Tasting wine blind isn't all it's cracked up to be.

By Mike Steinberger
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2007, at 12:01 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

Salon and Bollinger showed well that morning, but it might have been a very different outcome for them (and me) the next day. Blind tastings are wonderfully democratic, but there is a tendency to overlook the fact that wines and palates are fickle and to read more into the results than is justified. This was certainly true of history's most famous blind tasting, the 1976 Judgment of Paris, when a panel of French experts rated several unheralded American wines superior to a handful of top Bordeauxs and white Burgundies. The Paris tasting demonstrated that the United States was capable of producing great wines; it did not prove, as some suggested, that first-growth Bordeauxs and grand cru Burgundies were overrated.

Celebrated wines often fail to live up to expectations in blind tastings. Earlier this year, I took part in a blind tasting of 1996 Barolos and Barbarescos. A dozen wines were served, among them two Red Label Riservas from Bruno Giacosa. Many people consider Giacosa the finest producer in Italy's Piedmont region, and his 1996 Red Label Riservas had been widely hailed as brilliant. Around 40 people participated in the tasting, and all were asked to pick their top three wines. Amazingly, one of the Giacosas failed to garner a single vote and finished dead last, while the other received just one first-place vote and two second-place votes and came in ninth. People who are convinced that wine experts are full of it and who also believe that expensive wines are never worth the money invariably regard such "upsets" as proof of these general propositions. That's silly. Great wines don't acquire their reputations by accident. Given the unanimity of opinion about the Riservas, and Giacosa's track record, I'm pretty confident we just caught the wines on an off night. All wines evolve in the barrel, the bottle, and the glass, and their timetables don't necessarily accord with ours.

A good showing can also be extrapolated to excess. In London last month, Chateau Pavie finished first in a blind tasting of 150 wines from the 2001 Bordeaux vintage, beating out such eminences as Petrus, Lafleur, Margaux, and Latour. Pavie has aroused lots of controversy in recent years: Many people love it, but others contend that it is now made in a style more evocative of Napa than Saint-Emilion (its appellation). It also has an uncanny knack for performing well in blind tastings of young Bordeauxs. Naturally, Pavie fans do cartwheels every time this happens. But have these results really settled the argument over Pavie, or do they simply prove that Pavie, in its current incarnation, stands out among juvenile, tannic wines? The real test of a Bordeaux is how gracefully it ages; let's see how the Pavie compares with its peers a decade from now.

With blind tasting, it is just you, your retronasal passage, and the juice. The results are often surprising and frequently humbling, and those are good things. But tasting blind doesn't necessarily make for better wine criticism. If you don't know the wine's name, you also don't know its back story—how it was made and how it has tended to evolve in prior vintages. These are important considerations, particularly when appraising younger wines (a point made very persuasively by New York Times wine critic Eric Asimov in a recent post on his blog).

No question, having the bottle in front of you can be a crutch, and there is overwhelming scientific evidence that labels affect how people respond to wines. But with or without knowing the name, a good critic ought to be able to deliver an honest and accurate assessment of a wine's quality. It's not an either-or proposition, of course, and a combination of the two approaches probably yields the most useful information. The truth, ultimately, is in the wine, but tasting blind isn't the only way to get at it.

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Mike Steinberger is Slate's wine columnist. He can be reached at .
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.
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Remarks from the Fray

What the research shows is that humans are absolutely awful at delivering honest and accurate assessments of anything, and that our prior judgments and outside opinions completely overwhelm our evaluation systems. Recent work is starting to show that this happens on a deep sub-conscious level, probably making conscious control over it a physical impossibility.

--profcrabbe

A single taster may have a good or bad day but if a panel is used, statistics eliminate the single taster with a bad day. The defense of bad day sounds like performance of an athlete which varies but a wine? This is excuse making by the manufacturer. Future development in non-blind tastings is based on history of the wine maker. If it can't be done blind, then what exactly is being evaluated?

--The Ranger

(To reply, click here, and see also here - "remember what the purpose of a taste competition is:To have something to advertise with.")

In my many long years dabbling in liquors and beverages of one kind or another, only ONE thing has become eminently clear: that most comments about wine and other drinks are based on fashion and habit. Beer drinkers in England like English beers because that's what they grew up with and were told was great. Beer fashions have come and gone, as have beer brands. Wines are a little more complex than this but not much…Let's hope someone gets up and espouses variety and adventure again sometime.

--distantvoice

(To reply, click here)

(11/12)

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