Interesting article in today’s New York Times by Eric Asimov entitled What Motivates the Wine Shopper?. As many of you know, and as I’ve said before, I like wine. Although I have been told that I am, in general, annoyingly pretentious in most aspects of my life, I have to say that I fight against this when it comes to wine. While I certainly appreciate fine wine, I do have a limit as to what I will spend to put a bottle in my cellar. I don’t think that I have a particularly developed palate, and I never will be quite as detailed in my description of a wine as many, but I do know what I like.
Asimov’s piece does a nice job of summarizing some of the recent studies that have gained notoriety over the past couple of months.
…American wine drinkers have taken their turn as pop culture’s punching bags. In press accounts of two studies on wine psychology, consumers have been portrayed as dupes and twits, subject to the manipulations of marketers, critics and charlatan producers who have cloaked wine in mystique and sham sophistication in hopes of better separating the public from its money.
He then proceeds to detail some of these experiments that basically demonstrate that wine drinkers are unduly influenced by price and cachet. He also does a fine job of pointing out some of the holes in the interpretation of these experiments. Perhaps my favorite point is this:
Yet the rating system has bred an attitude toward wine that ignores context, which is perhaps more important a consideration to the enjoyment of wine than anything else. The proverbial little red wine, so delicious in a Tuscan village with your sweetie, never tastes the same back home in New Jersey. Meanwhile, the big California cabernet, which you enjoyed so much with your work buddies at a steakhouse, ties tucked between buttons, doesn’t have that triumphant lift with a bowl of spaghetti.
This is one problem with trying to judge wine in the sort of clinical vacuum sought by studies like the one in “The Wine Trials.” In the end, I don’t think you can ever eliminate context. The trick is to distinguish between the harmful or disingenuous — the marketing come-ons, the point chasing, what the guy next to you thinks — from the beneficial: the food, the company, the environment. Even in a blind tasting situation, wine is evaluated in the company of other wines, which is a different sort of context but a context nonetheless. Perhaps they’ve chosen the best wines to be sipped and spat out, but not the best wines for dinner.
I was sort of surprised that he didn’t mention perhaps the most interesting purported studies of wine tasting. Calvin Trillin, one of my favorite writers ever, wrote about his quest to investigate an alleged test at UC Davis where red and white wines were poured into black glasses (so that their color would not be visualized), and were asked simply to tell whether the wine was red or white. They didn’t have to tell the year, vintage, slope, etc., just whether the wine was red or white. The bottom line, according to the story, is that they failed. Trillin points out that this is probably an urban legend, but that, depending on how the wines are chosen, an expert will identify the wines properly about 70% of the time in this type of blind tasting.
I’m not sure what all this means in the grand scheme of things, other than to say (and if you repeat this to anyone, I will deny having said it) too much is made of wine. It is, after all, a beverage. I mean it’s not single malt scotch with its peaty nose and aromas of leather…sorry, I got distracted for a minute. Where was I? Oh yes, everyone has their sweet (and dry) spot both in terms of taste and cost. So just drink up, figure out what you like, and share it with the people that matter. Namely, me.