Balderdash, With Just A Hint of Poppycock

Allow me to make a confession: When I'm sampling a wine and the notes tell me that I should be getting hints of "mint, fresh apple, chilies, tobacco, and tar", but I taste none of these things, I often wonder if its just because my palette's no good. So it was enlightening to read yesterday's article in the WSJ about problems with wine ratings and the general unreliability of tasting notes. It seems that, when wine judges are subjected to controlled trials, they turn out to be much more like us ordinary mortals.

The article demonstrates that the emperor, while not necessarily naked, could stand to put on a pair of pants. For example:

• When a wine is presented to the same judge on multiple occasions it may receive ratings which vary by ±5 points (or more).
• Judges often claim to taste as many as 8 distinct flavors in a wine, but it turns out that they can reliably detect only 3 or 4 on average.
• The same wine may receive markedly different descriptions from different judges.

And so on. In the very least this lends credence to the idea that the perception of a wine is heavily influenced by external factors such as time, place, personal chemistry, etc. Though, were one to be less charitable, there's also an argument to be made that the people who hand out medals are just making shit up.

One item which was mentioned only in passing, but which I think stands to be emphasized, is just how many wines judges may be evaluating at any given time. The article talks about one study conducted at the California State Fair Wine Competition where the judges were presented with approximately 100 wines over the course of 2 days. Sweet jebus that's a lot of wines. I don't care how talented you are or how rigorously you scrub your palette between tastings; if you taste 50 wines in a day they're eventually going to become a blur and the ones at the end are going to be getting short shrift.

This is especially true if you're tasting high-end wines. These wines deserve to be evaluated over a longer period of time. I mean, really... even when I was doing my private tasting for 1 of a Petite Syrah, which certainly wasn't a grand cru, I went back to it a couple times over the course of an hour or so to see how it developed. A really nice red deserves more attention since the character can change significantly once its been out of the bottle for a little while. The nuances which make such a wine enjoyable have got to be lost in the noise at one of these gigantic tastings.