CHEEKY LITTLE TEST EXPOSES WINE ‘EXPERTS’ AS WEAK AND FLAT.” The headline caught the tone of the article, by Adam Sage, which began, “Drinkers have long suspected it, but now French researchers have finally proved it: wine ‘experts’ know no more than the rest of us.” The test of Brochet’s that caught my eye consisted partly of asking wine drinkers to describe what appeared to be a white wine and a red wine. They were in fact two glasses of the same white wine, one of which had been colored red with flavorless and odorless dye. The comments about the “red” wine used what people in the trade call red-wine descriptors. “It is a well known psychological phenomenon—you taste what you’re expecting to taste,” Brochet said in the Times. “They were expecting to taste a red wine and so they did. . . . About two or three per cent of people detect the white wine flavour, but invariably they have little experience of wine culture. Connoisseurs tend to fail to do so. The more training they have, the more mistakes they make because they are influenced by the color of the wine.
Posted on: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 11:49:41 +0000