Wine Tasting Exposed: How Our Expectations Rule our Senses

I recently heard from the Free Range Gnomes that Andrew Sullivan provided an interesting summary of a wine tasting study. Andrew quoted the following from the blog, The Frontal Cortex.

“In 2001, Frederic Brochet, of the University of Bordeaux, conducted two separate and very mischievous experiments. In the first test, Brochet invited 57 wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn't stop the experts from describing the "red" wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert praised its "jamminess," while another enjoyed its "crushed red fruit." Not a single one noticed it was actually a white wine.

The second test Brochet conducted was even more damning. He took a middling Bordeaux and served it in two different bottles. One bottle was a fancy grand-cru. The other bottle was an ordinary vin du table. Despite the fact that they were actually being served the exact same wine, the experts gave the differently labeled bottles nearly opposite ratings. The grand cru was "agreeable, woody, complex, balanced and rounded," while the vin du table was "weak, short, light, flat and faulty". Forty experts said the wine with the fancy label was worth drinking, while only 12 said the cheap wine was.”

However, Andrew stopped short of the conclusion. Going to the source, The Subjectivity of Wine, I found that the rest of the story said:

“What these experiments neatly demonstrate is that the taste of a wine, like the taste of everything, is not merely the sum of our inputs, and cannot be solved in a bottom-up fashion. It cannot be deduced by beginning with our simplest sensations and extrapolating upwards. When we taste a wine, we aren't simply tasting the wine. This is because what we experience is not what we sense. Rather, experience is what happens when our senses are interpreted by our subjective brain, which brings to the moment its entire library of personal memories and idiosyncratic desires. As the philosopher Donald Davidson argued, it is ultimately impossible to distinguish between a subjective contribution to knowledge that comes from our selves (what he calls our "scheme") and an objective contribution that comes from the outside world ("the content"). Instead, in Davidson's influential epistemology, the "organizing system and something waiting to be organized" are hopelessly interdependent. Without our subjectivity we could never decipher our sensations, and without our sensations we would have nothing to be subjective about. In other words, we shouldn't be surprised that different people like different bottles of cheap wine.”

Or as my academic hero, Piaget, the genetic epistemologist who many feel stared development psychology, would say – we operate through a combination of our mental context and what we perceive, We assimilate our perceptions based on our cognitive structures and we accommodate our cognitive structures base don what we assimilate. He showed that our cognitive structures or thinking processes go through qualitative changes as we mature.

In Talking About Wine (& Complexity) – The New Yorker I wrote about a different take on wine tasting earlier contrasting the North American obsession with quantifying things resulting in Robert Parker’s number system and the European appreciation for the more qualitative context to fully appreciate wine. Despite the fact that French wine tasters were fooled at least they did not try to put a number on their foolishness.

Comments

[Greta and Vladimir]

DEAЯ MЯ IVES

СПАСИБО FOЯ MUCH APPЯECIATED ATTENTIONS ON WINE STOЯY WE FIND. TЯULY WE KNOW MOЯE ABOUT VODKA THAN WINE BUT WE AGЯEE MUCH THINKING CHANGES AS WE AGE OLDEЯ -- AND PEЯCEPTION DЯIVES ЯEALITY AS WE ЯEALIZE MANY TIMES.

НЕЖНО
GЯETA AND VLADIMIЯ KOKOSCHKA