The oldest controversy in the world of wine is the practice of describing a taste of a wine in words, and in the process stating its quality. It’s hard to translate a feeling of the senses into language. It sounds simple, but doing it well is difficult. The wine bore and wine bluffer are well-known species! This ancient art of tasting and talking has had its controversy re-ignited by a ‘scientific’ paper published recently in France. The gist of the article is that wine experts are no better than ordinary consumers when it comes to evaluating wine, and the range of interferences on objective tasting is so great and pervasive that such tasting and evaluating is not valid.

The paper is ‘Tasting: Chemical Object Representation in the Field of Consciousness’ by Frederic Brochet at the Faculty of Oenology, Talence, France. The widespread discussion of this obscure sounding paper has resulted from its considerable publicity via the UK newspaper The Times, where writer Adam Sage gleefully stated, “Cheeky little test exposes wine ‘experts’ as weak and flat,” and via Amorin, the cork producer, whose newsletter is sent to most people in the Australian wine industry. Amorin is based in Portugal and regularly reports on pieces of research in its newsletters. Brochet conducted trials for his paper where the same wine was presented differently to experts - different glasses, different shaped and coloured bottles, and then with labels where a second label indicated a higher quality than the first label although it was the same wine served. Brochet particularly was triumphant about adding flavourless red colouring to a white wine that led to the expert tasters using red wine terminology to describe this doctored white wine. Brochet did some brain scan analysis and made some conclusions about the psychology of tasting. He received an Amorin Academy prize for his work.

Consider the taste and talk process. You have to reach a taste conclusion by brain processing the complex flavours received, and then convert that to well-chosen words that are communicated well to the next person. This latter event is the crux of it all. Wine generally excites the taster and there is a resulting need to communicate that excitement. The discovery of these differences and the enjoyment by discussing with a fellow taster is crucial to the enjoyment and passion of wine.

Everyone is equipped to be a wine taster and talker. It is a skill that is learned. Some are more receptive and quick than others to the process. No matter what skill we possess, there are distorting influences on this subtle process. The main recognised influence is sight - a glance at the shape of the bottle, the colour of the capsule protruding from a bottle mask and the appearance of the wine itself. The famous industry expression is, ‘A glimpse of the corner of the label is worth 100 years of tasting experience’. Then there are the distortions from other influences, some very subtle. You may have a good knowledge of the other person’s cellar contents and when they serve you a hidden wine, you can make some pretty good guesses - all under the guise of tasting evaluation, of course! This is known as ‘playing the man and not the ball’, to use a football metaphor. There are wine clubs around who meet regularly to taste masked wines and talk about them. Competition between participants inevitably creeps in and it becomes vital to make a good go of describing the wine when it’s your turn. In many cases the bottles are in brown paper bags. Then tasters may be able to discern capsule colour, thickness of the bottle neck (for example where a particularly thick glass neck indicates imported wine), the chilled condensation making the bottle bag translucent so you can make out part of the label, and knowledge of what trendy new wines are ‘around town’, thus utilising these external influences to talk about the taste and the quality of the wine. I’ve seen groups of tasters yak on about wines in these tasting conditions, convincing themselves that they are great tasters. However when the wines are truly masked (numbered identical decanters or refilled bottles left over from another tasting, with the real bottles hidden in another room) the normally noisy tasting group can be reduced to silence.

It is obviously possible for an expert to influence inexperienced tasters. I greatly enjoy using the beautiful Riedel glasses and I know that the wines will taste better. This I attribute to the beauty of the glass and the psychological improvement in the taste. I don’t believe that subtle differences in the shape of Riedel glasses make a difference to particular wines, although some tasters in sensory workshops swear by this.

Along with many experienced judges, I have learned, as much as possible, to put exterior influences aside and focus purely on the taste of the wine. At the Australian Wine Research Institute in Adelaide, statistical tasting tests are held using a procedure called a ‘triangle test’ where sets of three wines are tasted and evaluated. This is done in a dark booth where there is no interference on the taste process from sight or outside stimulation. It has been known for decades about external influences and hence Brochet’s paper does not progress the knowledge of tasting and evaluating.

This won’t stop critics of judges using it to dismiss their results. It is in the interests of many groups to be able to call upon ‘evidence’ to dismiss judges’ results. Amorin themselves are in the midst of a scientific campaign to prove that cork closures are satisfactory. Plenty of wine producers are moving to screwcaps in order to combat the continued cork taint incidence in wines. There is no doubt that Amorin and other cork producers have improved but disappointment at tainted wines continues. Therefore Amorin is probably happy to have a scientific paper to call upon when necessary to ‘prove’ that experts don’t know what they are talking about.

Times writer Adam Sage was no doubt chasing a headline but he does represent numerous critics of wine talk - unfortunately there is so much wine bluffing out there that debunking wine assessment is a popular pastime. There are wine producers who get in guest experts, but they like a certain type of expert who is onside - they don’t want a true international expert such as a visiting Master of Wine, for example. There have been examples at several seminars where a visiting expert has not hesitated to say that the ‘emperor is not wearing any clothes’, in the process knocking down a famous wine from its undeserved pedestal.

The French wine industry has suffered dramatically at the hands of independent tasters. The Stephen Spurrier tasting of 1978 where French tasters mixed up Californian wines with great Bordeaux is still discussed. Whilst the French invented the flowery sensory language technique (the kit of essences called Le Nez du Vin is well known to many), they are careful now where to apply it. In wine competitions the French believe that the wine identity should be known by the judge and the estate’s history and culture should be taken into account in the awarding of scores! This runs contrary to true independent assessing and the comments of wine critics, who judge strictly under anonymous conditions.