When an expert tells you something will be good, the chances are you will think it is good when you taste it.
If my kids hear me complain about this again they will shoot me. We went on a tour of the Napa Valley and tasted some great wines. At each stop we asked about how the wines were rated. Numerous times we were told that ratings of the major publications were not based on blind panel tastings. From there, the vintner and I would go into a rant about how arbitrary non-blind taste testing is. If you hear the same story 10 times, I am told it gets a little annoying.
To make it simple, blind tasting is where you don’t know anything about the product. You don’t see the bottle, package, origin, blend components, producer etc. When you know the bottle, package, origin, blend components, producer etc. it can have a huge impact on how you rate the wine or anything that you taste.
A lot of us have a favorite wine. I love Joseph Phelps wines. We fell in love with the Phelps vineyards back in the 1980’s when we moved to California and would visit the Napa Valley regularly. To this day if I see a Phelps Cabernet on the wine list I will dig deep into my pocket to buy it. The Phelps wines bring back fond memories and I consistently enjoy their wines. I AM BIASED!
(Emma Kenny with her 3 liter bottle of Phelps Cabernet)
My experience is that taste is somewhat subjective and can be influenced. I used to work at Kraft with the guy that invented Kraft Mac & Cheese. This might be a bit of an embellishment as Larry didn’t really invent it, but he did develop the cheese sauce that was used for over 25 years. There is no hyperbole behind the statement that Larry was a cheese expert. We used to do blind taste testing of cheese sauces on a regular basis. The way it worked most days was you were given 3 samples marked A, B, C. Larry knowing which sample he wanted to approve would come in and whisper “You are really going to like sample B”. Of course B would be the winner. If the guy that has forgotten more about cheese than you will ever know likes it, it must be good.
There is a cute movie called Bottle Shock that tells a powerful story about Blind Panel tasting. The story is about the blind tasting French experts did in 1976 where shockingly, American wines rated higher than their French counterparts. As you could imagine this shocked the wine world and really annoyed the French.
Check out the trailer
In doing research for this blog (No wine was consumed) I checked both Robert Parker of the Wine Advocate and Wine Spectator’s statements on how they develop their ratings. Contrary to what I had been told during our Napa tour, they claim that their ratings were based on blind tasting (?). It leaves me not knowing whom to believe.
The moral of this story for supper clubs is that the host should talk up the menu. Tell people about the dishes. Tell your guests that they will like it. The chances are they will like it. Certainly don’t ask them to do Blind Panel Taste Testing…
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