Most psy­chol­ogy stud­ies focus­ing on my good friend, wine, rely on apply­ing the sci­en­tific method to the tast­ing of dif­fer­ent wines, and this is done in one, rel­a­tively sim­ple way: blind tasting.

Finance blog­ger at Reuters, Felix Salmon, isn’t a fan of blind tast­ing, and after read­ing his eminently-quotable piece on the sub­ject I tend to agree. The prob­lem, accord­ing to Salmon? We know that wine has a lot to do with con­text and, in tast­ing wine, objec­tiv­ity is over­val­ued.

This from Bob Millman:

It should be obvi­ous to any think­ing per­son that blind tast­ings nec­es­sar­ily favor–on a group vote basis–wines which offer imme­di­ate plea­sure and grat­i­fi­ca­tion. Left to their undi­rected devices, the senses will almost always grav­i­tate to the obvi­ous and miss the subtle

and this from Salmon:

If you know exactly what it is that you’re tast­ing — a young first-growth wine, for exam­ple — then you can taste it in that light. Sim­i­larly, if you know that you’re look­ing at an Ad Rein­hardt paint­ing, you’ll be will­ing to spend a few min­utes with it so that you can appre­ci­ate its sub­tleties. If you didn’t know it was a Rein­hardt, then you’d prob­a­bly just read it as a black mono­chrome and move on.

In that arti­cle it is noted that pro­fes­sional wine taster Robert Parker does not taste wine blind because of these issues, and in a later arti­cle Salmon dis­cusses how at one event, when Parker was per­suaded to taste blind a selec­tion of wines he had pre­vi­ously rated, he scored a once-reviled Bor­deaux as his favourite of the evening. The fol­low­ing quote from the piece looks at the futil­ity of (inher­ently sub­jec­tive) wine rat­ings:

Wine is not a fun­gi­ble com­mod­ity, where one bot­tle is always the same as the next — quite the oppo­site. But the fact that wine changes, from bot­tle to bot­tle and from month to month, rather defeats the pur­pose of [rank­ings and] mag­a­zines such as Wine Spec­ta­tor.

The Frontal Cor­tex con­tin­ues by say­ing that “our sen­sa­tions require inter­pre­ta­tion” and that “we parse their sug­ges­tions based upon what­ever other knowl­edge we can sum­mon to the surface”.

This point was brought home when, in 2004, Gourmet looked at the grow­ing craze of Riedel wine glasses not­ing that what recep­ta­cle is used to drink wine from really does have a mas­sive influ­ence on how we per­ceive its taste and smell. This is mainly because,

Riedel and other high-end glasses can make wine taste bet­ter. Because they’re pretty. Because they’re del­i­cate. Because they’re expen­sive. Because you expect them to make the wine taste better.

Researchers are now start­ing to look at this directly by run­ning exper­i­ments on how the hap­tic qual­i­ties (feel) of a drink­ing ves­sel affects our per­cep­tion of its con­tents.

Those who like to touch [high autotelics] are least influ­enced by touch in taste eval­u­a­tions. Indeed, in a taste test of the same min­eral water from both a flimsy and a firm cup, it was low autotelics [those who don’t like to touch] who gave the most neg­a­tive eval­u­a­tions of the taste of the water in the flimsy cup.

The results were sim­i­lar when par­tic­i­pants were just told about the con­tain­ers in a writ­ten descrip­tion and did not actu­ally feel them: Low autotelics expressed a will­ing­ness to pay more for a firm bot­tle of water, while high autotelics did not.

So keep all this in mind if you’re a red wine fan when you next order fish: it’s now been shown that low-iron red wines are a per­fect com­ple­ment to some types of fish, so don’t let your pesky sub­con­scious get to the wine first.

As Lawrence Rosen­blum of Sen­sory Super­pow­ers says, “you drink what you think”.