One of my favorite podcasts is “The Splendid Table” by Lynn Rosetto-Casper. On a recent podcast, she discussed a blind taste test where experts and novices were asked to say if a wine was expensive or not. The experts were no better at identifying a more expensive wine than the novices were.
I decided to find out more. I wondered how wines were rated, if experts can’t really tell the difference, and what the ratings mean. So I started by trying to find the actual study referenced in “The Splendid Table.” The only reference I could find was in the January 2008 issue of “The Economist:”
… Dr Rangel and his colleagues found that if people are told a wine is expensive while they are drinking it, they really do think it tastes nicer than a cheap one, rather than merely saying that they do.
Dr Rangel came to this conclusion by scanning the brains of 20 volunteers while giving them sips of wine. He used a trick called functional magnetic-resonance imaging, which can detect changes in the blood flow in parts of the brain that correspond to increased mental activity. He looked in particular at the activity of the medial orbitofrontal cortex. This is an area of the brain that previous experiments have shown is responsible for registering pleasant experiences.
Dr Rangel gave his volunteers sips of what he said were five different wines made from cabernet sauvignon grapes, priced at between $5 and $90 a bottle. He told each of them the price of the wine in question as he did so. Except, of course, that he was fibbing. He actually used only three wines. He served up two of them twice at different prices.
The scanner showed that the activity of the medial orbitofrontal cortices of the volunteers increased in line with the stated price of the wine. For example, when one of the wines was said to cost $10 a bottle it was rated less than half as good as when people were told it cost $90 a bottle, its true retail price. Moreover, when the team carried out a follow-up blind tasting without price information they got different results. The volunteers reported differences between the three “real” wines but not between the same wines when served twice.
Nor was the effect confined to everyday drinkers. When Dr Rangel repeated the experiment on members of the Stanford University wine club he got similar results. All of which raises the question of what is going on.
What is going on? The article below, by wine expert Jordan Ross, explains a lot. (I did not reproduce the whole article, but here is the link if you want to read more: http://www.enologyinternational.com/articles/senses2.html)
Non-Sensory Information
It is a common assumption that whether or not we like a wine is determined by its sensory attributes such as taste and aroma. But a wine is loaded with non-sensory stimuli as well, which the brain is processing even before the cork is pulled. Why else does a wine taste great on a Tuscan hillside, in romantic company but when you return home and buy a bottle, you realize it’s a modest Chianti?
This example demonstrates the importance of context. How we respond to a wine is strongly influenced by its context, the term experimental psychologists use to refer to the setting in which we taste a wine. Context is not only the physical surroundings but includes all other stimuli present such as the label, vintage, price, grape variety, ratings, reputation and cork or screw cap. Changes in context (such as tasting a Bordeaux Superior after it’s poured into a bottle labeled Chateau Petrus) do not change the wine’s flavor but will alter how the wine is perceived, what we look for, what we find and therefore how much we like it and even the words we use to describe the wine. The importance of these contextual cues can be readily seen when they are removed, such as in a blind tasting so that only the wine’s sensory characteristics are being evaluated. At times, the emperor has no clothes!
While novices are more likely to be led astray by factors related to context, there are numerous other non-sensory cues, which can influence experts. For example reputation, price and scarcity can have an enormous impact on perceived quality because they activate information stored in memory from prior experience. Which is why in blind tastings lesser-known or less expensive wines frequently beat out cult wines.
Prior Experience – The Past is Prologue
Each of us has learned about wine through our prior experiences. Who we have learned from, the wine regions we’ve visited and the wines we’ve tasted shape our opinions and beliefs. This knowledge is stored in memory and retrieved whenever we taste a wine, or even hear the name mentioned. It is impossible to imagine tasting wine without the use of memory; we are what we remember! Two tasters will inevitably have different information stored in memory and will therefore often interpret the same wine differently.
Cues such as ratings, type of closure (cork, screw cap), vintage and grape variety will activate related information stored in memory and interact with the flavor of the wine. The brain grabs this stored information, combines it with the wine’s sensory data and processes the whole thing as a unit. A mediocre wine can be perceived as interesting if handled by a prestigious importer.
Tasters are unaware how powerful this learned or cognitive component is in wine tasting. Dr. Pam Dalton, a researcher at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia comments, “The sensors in your nose and mouth respond to specific chemicals in the wine. Aside from genetic differences, which make us more or less sensitive to certain aromas and tastes, there is a relatively uniform pattern of activation across different people. But how their brains organize and interpret that incoming information is going to depend a lot on what their previous experience has been.”
Finding What’s Not There: The Role of Expectations
Non-sensory information introduced with the wine such as ‘old vines’, ‘unfined’, ‘dry farmed’ and ‘limited production’ has a symbolic value that can trigger preconceived notions. Dalton comments on the impact of these verbal cues, “The moment you give me a label for something, anything I already know that is associated with that label will start to come into play.” There is a tendency to find what you expect to find, sometimes when it’s not even there. For example, let’s say the same wine is tasted from a screw cap bottle versus a cork-finished bottle (so that the tasters can see both closure types). The novice, unaware of the association between screw cap and jug wine, will probably say, ‘they taste the same to me.’ More experienced tasters will likely prefer the cork-finished bottle, reporting differences that do not actually exist because they expect to find them. While this would be a cruel exercise, the results are reliable.
The De-Evolution of Smell
It’s one thing to detect an aroma, but finding the words to describe it is a separate task.
This explains a common occurrence in wine tasting called the “tip of the nose” phenomenon, when we detect an odor we’re familiar with, but just can’t seem to come up with the name. It’s not that our sense of smell is faulty; in fact from a standpoint of range and sensitivity, olfaction is powerful. But because the neural circuits that process odors are separated from those that underlie language, odors can be ambiguous, especially in a wine, which presents numerous aromas simultaneously. This lack of confidence we have in our sense of smell can make us tentative, forcing us to seek more reliable cues when evaluating odors; witness the blind taster fishing for cues that might narrow down the list of possibilities.
Herz explains “Because odors are invisible and because we have a hard time naming them, we seek information about them from the outside context.” She contends that is why language and visual signals in wine tasting can be so dominant, and supercede smell and taste information.
Color
Visual cues such as color in wine are a context as well and wine tasters may be surprised at powerful role color plays in flavor perception. Color contributes to the taster’s first judgment of a wine by activating stored information. An experiment was conducted in which researchers gave subjects a purple-colored, orange-flavored drink; the vast majority thought it was grape flavored. Increased color is associated with increased flavor. In other words, the same wine will be perceived as more intensely flavorful if it is darker in color.
A fascinating new wine study called “The Color of Odors” [Morrot, Brochet and Dubourdieu] has shown the impact color has in determining the adjectives we use to describe wines. A panel of 54 Enology students at the University of Bordeaux smelled a white Bordeaux wine and described it using appropriate white wine descriptors. When an odorless red dye was added, the tasters used red wine terms to describe it. The descriptors changed only because the color changed! The authors raise a provocative question: When we describe a wine, how much are we relying on our sense of taste and smell and how much on what we see?
The results of this experiment demonstrate how much people rely on the context for interpreting their odor experience. Herz explains why: “People are totally tied to things outside of their olfactory system. Because we are so visually and verbally oriented, even experts who you would expect to be less susceptible to these context manipulations look for cues in their visual and verbal worlds.” This revelation should be comforting to wine tasters who find it difficult to describe what they are tasting; “I like it” may be sufficient.
Conclusion
Is there such thing as an objective quality rating? What is quality? Today, in most cases, quality is defined by the media scores a wine receives from Robert Parker and Wine Spectator. The system is not perfect but it’s easy for consumers to use and therefore, good for wine consumption. What users of scores should bear in mind is that numerical scores are not quality ratings, but liking or preference ratings. Based on their unique prior experiences, critics are converting their feelings about a wine into a number. A wine with a microbial nose such as Domaine Tempier Rouge may receive 80 points by a reviewer who does not like non-fruit aromas. The same character may be a positive to another critic who may give it 90 points. Is a wine that scores 90 points higher quality than one that scores 80 points? It’s a difficult question to answer but it is clear that there is in fact, a psychology to quality.
So, the way that we experience wine is very dependent on context. Most of the research shows we truly will like a wine better if it is more expensive, because we KNOW it is more expensive. Also, more expensive wines have more cues related to context, which is how we rate a wine, and so we will think it tastes better. But the bottom line is that it isn’t necessarily better, and if we are aware that we are influenced by context, it might open up our experience of more wines.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I like some boxed wine. My favorite is the BotaBox Merlot. It’s about $17 for a box, and a box equals 4 bottles. We frequently buy it to make Sangria, and end up just drinking it without mixing it up!
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