I blog occasionally at A little bit of vino… rating random bottles of wine I’ve been given or can afford to buy. And so it was with interest I ran across a post in which a number of $12 wines where reviewed. Below is an excerpt… I strongly suggest you read the whole well written post at The Frontal Cortex.
[...]but it’s such a cool experiment that it’s worth repeating. In 2001, Frederic Brochet, of the University of Bordeaux, conducted two separate and very mischievous experiments. In the first test, Brochet invited 57 wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn’t stop the experts from describing the “red” wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert praised its “jamminess,” while another enjoyed its “crushed red fruit.” Not a single one noticed it was actually a white wine.
The second test Brochet conducted was even more damning. He took a middling Bordeaux and served it in two different bottles. One bottle was a fancy grand-cru. The other bottle was an ordinary vin du table. Despite the fact that they were actually being served the exact same wine, the experts gave the differently labeled bottles nearly opposite ratings. The grand cru was “agreeable, woody, complex, balanced and rounded,” while the vin du table was “weak, short, light, flat and faulty”. Forty experts said the wine with the fancy label was worth drinking, while only 12 said the cheap wine was.
[More at The Frontal Cortex]
I came to the conclusion a while ago that there are a number of VERY good wines out of the Napa Valley, and it actually seemed hard for a wine maker to make a bad bottle. That said I normally can tell the difference between a cheaper wine and a more expensive wine by the tannins (how smooth) the wine is. At the same time I’ve rated some extremely cheap wines higher then more expensive wines ($2 Buck Chuck verses a supposedly better $12 award winner). I just can’t see how the reviewers couldn’t tell the difference in one case, and the fact it was the same wine in another.
Tags: Agriculture, Food and Drinking, Interesting, Napa, Psychology, Review, Science, Wine
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