I’ve been reading lately about some fascinating tests on wine drinkers. There appears to be considerable difference that most people can’t really tell the difference between red and white wine when they can’t see the colour of the liquid they are drinking.
Hmmm, I thought, now there’s an idea for a future meeting of our local wine club. According to one article I read, people tested only get about 50 per cent right, the same odds as one would get from a purely random guess. When queried by the article’s author, one wine “expert” admitted to only identifying the correct colour in two out of seven glasses!
Now, I wouldn’t even think twice about believing such results if blindfolded volunteers also had their nasal passages blocked. Smell is much more important in helping to identify the characteristics of drinks or food than the mouth’s taste buds. But my initial response was that reds usually have a much different mouth feel. The article also referred to temperature being a key factor in how we perceive the differences between red and white wines, because reds are invariably served much warmer than whites. So perhaps what we think of as a typical mouth feel, including tannins, in reds really has more to do with the temperature. Reds also tend to have more complex tastes, but chilled liquids of any sort offer less taste and smell than when they are warmed up.
Without having actually taken the challenge, I got to thinking about how it might change my enjoyment of wine if I found that there is much less difference in reds and whites than what I assume. How much fun would it be to select a Riesling when I knew definitively that I couldn’t tell it from a Syrah? And would quality still be a factor? If I couldn’t tell a $10 German Riesling from a $40 Washington Syrah (currently the highest wines on my pleasure meter) would there be any point to drinking either?
There’s an old adage that says a lawyer shouldn’t ask a client a question that he doesn’t already know the answer to. Perhaps the same goes for wine lovers. Maybe we are better off not taking the test, opting instead to at least keep the perception of what we enjoy intact.
The truth is that I think there is too much emphasis on rating wines and think the 100 point system has more to do with creating snob appeal than it does with providing a genuine measuring stick of quality. While I don’t profess to have a highly developed palate I do know that what I taste in a particular wine is affected by any number of factors — my mood, what I have eaten or had to drink earlier, the environment, the people, the expectations and so on. If I walk into a winery’s tasting room with the expectation of a positive experience I’m much more likely to enjoy the wines than if I believe that the wines will be run of the mill. If I’m enjoying a day of driving in the sunshine in Naramata, for instance, I think I’m more likely to enjoy the wines than if I trudged through a rainstorm to go to a tasting in a dreary warehouse.
Perception, is has been said, is everything. The question is whether I am willing to put my perceptions to the test, finding that almost all the pleasure I take from drinking wine comes not from the bottle but from inside my own head.
Lorne Eckersley is the publisher of the Creston Valley Advance.