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Wine criticism is bogus: Recycling a story for the holidays
Have you heard news reports lately that wine criticism is all a pile of horse poop? There was this essay in The Wall Street Journal about how critics’ rankings had serious flaws and this blog in Time magazine about how favorable ratings can seriously jack up the price of a bottle. And NPR’s news quiz show “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” picked up the story over the weekend.
The funny thing is, a big piece of the “news” here is a study published the Journal of Experimental Psychology showing that even professionals can’t identify more than three or four flavors in a sip, seemingly disproving the whole enterprise. And that study was first published in…1996.
Now, it’s long been accepted that the tastes can be categorized as sweet, salty, bitter, sour and that nebulous fifth category, umami. So why the ruckus now? Why haul a 13-year-old study back out to make the case that we’re all wasting our money on top-rated wines? Well, it’s almost Thanksgiving and people want to make a statement by having a couple of eye-popping bottles on the holiday table. And, quite frankly, the holidays are a slow time for news historically.
What’s your thinking on all this? My own is that it’s not as simple as the study implies (or, more precisely, as the stories about the study imply) and not nearly as complicated as wine snobs would like it to be. Critics and teachers like Robert Parker and Kevin Zraly have spent their entire careers studying wine, and they have a stake in maintaining a certain mystique to the field even as they work to educate and enlighten suckers — I mean drinkers.
Similarly, there’s the Beer Judge Certification Program, which is designed to somewhat standardize evaluating wine’s less-respected cousin.
It’s intriguing to think that success in the field could be based not on your magnificently discerning palate but your ability to dream up descriptions like this Cab Sauv has notes of bell pepper, wet saddle and charcoal.
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By Greg
December 8, 2009 11:20 AM | Link to this
We’ve done the Napa Valley thing and couldn’t get the wine thing either - can’t taste the diff. Nice big bottle of $7 Vendange from HEB and we’re set. Did notice the diff between the Franzia boxed wine & the other one (we get the Franzia box when it goes that way). Scotch… ended up with the expensive taste. Oops. -bnf