I wrangled together 20 classmates, and poured tastes of a red (a beaujolais) a rose (a bit on the dry side) and a white (a viognier on the sweet side) into opaque black cups. I switched the order of the tastes around to see if there were any patterns in what helped people recognize the wines. Before each person tasted, I told them that they would taste one red, one rose, and one white. At the end of the three tastes, they would guess the order of the tastes.
My sample size was only 20, so this is certainly not a statistically significant dataset, but only 4 people were able to identify all of the wines! Given that there were 6 potential guesses, people had a 1 in 6, or 16%, chance of getting them right. Our classmates got 4/20 correct, so at 20% accuracy were just above random chance.
Three of the four people who were able to identify all three wines tasted the red first. Five of the 20 weren't able to distinguish between the red and the white, and got them all wrong. The remaining 11 people mixed up the rose and the white.
What was interesting as I watched people taste, is that having the knowledge that they would taste a red, a rose, and a white helped them modify their guesses as they continued to taste. I'd be very curious to do this again, but ask people to guess the wine immediately after the taste, as opposed to after they had tasted all three.
Pictures of the event below!
Chipping in my experience as an unsuccessful taste tester - I was blown away with how much sight played into the experience of wine and especially how prior expectations of certain wines influenced my decisions. When we were told we would be tasting red, white, and rose, I immediately put together profiles in my head of what each wine "should" taste like. I expected the red wine to particularly bold and tannic, the white to be crisp and chilled, and the rose to be sweet and bubbly. Without the benefit of sight or a sommelier's training, my guesses relied on these simple presuppositions instead of recalling that a pinot noir could be much milder than a typical cab sauv, a chardonnay could be crafted to taste candy-sweet, or that a well-made grenache could be actually quite balanced. It was almost reminiscent of Alder Yarrow's talk on identifying flavors in a wine while holding a list of potential descriptors - my brain needed sight as a trigger to help recall the number of different taste profiles that I could experience with a certain type of wine.
ReplyDeleteDespite my disappointing test score for the evening, it was a fantastic experiment that surprised many of the attendees, myself included. Thanks again for hosting such a cool event Jane!
Jane - What a fabulous idea! I am curious as to whether you and the rest of the participants had any sort of discussion prior about people's levels of familiarity with wine so that you could compare what people say they know versus the tasting results.
ReplyDeleteWhen I started reading this, I thought to myself that I would surely be able to taste the difference among the three wines but after seeing the results of the taste testing, I am starting to wonder! To Lou's point above, interesting to think about how much sight is a key piece of how we experience a beverage. To me, it makes a lot of sense the importance sight plays in food tasting but I had not ever thought of it specifically in terms of wine tasting (or another beverage for that matter).