More news on subjective perceptions from the wine indistry

[kemmler3D]

Hopefully not spreading misinformation thru bad memory. A few years back I was watching a program about how sommeliers are credentialed. The highest credential is very hard to get, and very few pass the test. Somewhere was an article showing details of that. Not only did very few pass the testing for that, but you were allowed to take that test as often as you would pay for it. And most took it multiple times. In the end the passing rate was so few it appeared to me to be random. As in just statistical probability would let someone pass every once and while. Made me wonder if in fact no one passes the test or at least that most who do simply eventually get lucky enough.

There are only a bit more than 200 Master Sommeliers in the entire world.

Fortunately in audio we are blessed with way more than 200 master subjective reviewers. Then again, they don't have to pass a test.

I think a friend or ex-girlfriend was going through sommelier testing. I looked up the requirements to pass the master examination and ran some numbers, I don't have the numbers at hand but at the time I found it numerically implausible that anyone could pass by chance.

You have to correctly identify the region, grape, and vintage for several wines, given that there are dozens of regions and grapes, I don't think enough people take the test to have many random sequences of guess get through. It's not just "is this wine french or not", it's "where is this wine from", where you have to pick from a longer list. Also IIRC you can only take it 3 times.

It is also the case that people really can taste the differences in wine unsighted, perhaps not perfectly, but certainly better than untrained sippers.

I would not guess that your average wine judge is well-trained, necessarily.

 

[killdozzer]

wine is an interesting analogy, because there is a ton of BS flying in that world as well, with hucksters competing to separate rich people from their money. But with wine there really ARE subtle differences anyone can notice and that a trained taster can pick out and identify consistently. The wine world is what High End audiophiles THINK their world is.

Also, there's a lot of real world economy. Dressing a cable pretty never amounts to its price. But you can't make wine appear 10-15 years old if it's not. This implies taking care of storage and this can't be a metal container like in Storage Wars (unless you're making Madeira). You'll either dig a costly cellar or even if you have one, you'll dedicate a significant portion of it for the amount of wine you're aging. During the period of 10-15 years aging, you could've made those cheap and cheerful wines by millions of gallons and sell them easily, while you have no return on your wine that sits and waits.

You'll significantly decrease yields since only healthiest bunches can go on for so long. Which means you'll get less volume in the end. Not all years even amount to such good quality of grapes which further decreases the amount of the wine.

A decent barrel for aging is 1500$ for the smallest (barrique). You wouldn't have that expense for cheap and cheerful.

You pay knowledge from a master winemaker (none needed from a "cable engineer" ). You pay for the end bottle design and materials. You invest in conveying all you did to people who'd listen through rather expensive channels and in confined form since it is alcohol.

That's why I wouldn't say it's "hucksters competing to separate rich people from their money", although there's that as well.

I'd rather go with polishing a turd and the fact that you can't. If you have an excellent wine in front of yourself, it was made from value, with knowledge and with high risk that at any given step in the production, you can lose it all.

 

[SIY]

I would not guess that your average wine judge is well-trained, necessarily.

I've judged competitions in France and California. The people on the panels were extremely experienced and had very sharp observational abilities. They had all passed numerous tests, done blind of course. Same with my QC tasting panel experience at major wineries.

I can't vouch for more, ahhh, informal situations.

 

[ahofer]

For a really interesting wine documentary with a lot of filmed blind tasting, I recommend Somm. It is streaming on Amazon Prime.

You will see some tremendous feats of blind identification, but also a lot of the vague descriptive language (ambitious?). Also some interesting digressions about critic tastes vs mass tastes.

So much of wine appreciation is appreciation of the story behind the wine - the vintner, the methods, the growth of a region. A lot of that carries over into hifi to sell the expensive, boutique brands.

 

[MattHooper]

I guess I never refined my knowledge about wine enough, but I rarely found that how much I liked a wine tracked with price. I would go to dinners with friends who are wine snobs, and I remember one time a pal spending quite a while ruminating over which wine to order with our meal, going back and forth with the sommelier, etc. We ended up with the worst, most bland wine I've ever had.

I'm not a big drinker and far from knowledgeable but always loved wine tasting courses with meals. Oh how I miss wine. And beer. And fancy drinks....(I developed alcohol intolerance this year, so really missing it).

 

[lc6]

From "Is Wine Fake?":
"Wine is not fake. Wine experts aren’t fake either, but they believe some strange things, are far from infallible, and need challenges and blinded trials to be kept honest. How far beyond wine you want to apply this is left as an exercise for the reader."
"the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less.” But experts might prefer more expensive wine; the study found that if wine A cost 10 times more than wine B, experts on average ranked it seven points higher on a 100-point scale. However, this effect was not quite statistically significant, and all that the authors can say with certainty is that experts don’t dislike more expensive wine the same way normal people do."

Do any analogies with AV equipment and audio perception come to mind, especially with regard to speaker cables, interconnects, power conditioners, DACs, power amps, etc.?