Smells Like… Bullshit

Image via Wikipedia

Does that expensive wine really taste “elegant” and “smoky”? Or are you just elegantly blowing smoke out your ass? The question may not be entirely settled, but let’s just say: Where there’s smoke there’s fire.

Over at Blind Taste, Robin Goldstein looks at the research on “smell adjectives” having to do with the chemical senses. We’re pretty good at describing what we hear and what we see. Even what we feel. But when it comes to smell and taste, our vocabulary… sucks. And thus we’re left groping for ridiculous descriptors like “stalky” and “cat pee.”

But do the descriptors come from the taste, or does the taste end up coming from the descriptors? If you’ve spent any time at this blog, you know just how susceptible the human mind is to the merest suggestion, so you probably know where this is headed.

Goldstein quotes this nugget from On Wine Bullshit (PDF):

Two things have to be true before wine ratings can become useful for the average wine drinker. Since there are many wine writers, and there is a substantial overlap in the wines they write about (particularly Bordeaux wines), it is important that there be substantial agreement among them. And secondly, what they write must actually convey information; that is to say, it must be free of bullshit. Regrettably, wine evaluations fail on both counts.

Of course, no such agreement exists. And it’s not hard to see why, when one looks at the vocabulary of wine. Oh, heck, let’s quote some more from On Wine Bullshit, because it’s really, really funny:

There are many more words in Table 1 [a lengthy list of common wine descriptors] that we could talk about, but I want to expatiate on only one more, namely the word tannin. As one can see from the Table, tannins can be chewy, dusty, fine-grained, lush, silky, ultrasilky and velvety. All of these qualifiers of tannins need more precise definition, but I am particularly interested in the difference between silky, ultrasilky and velvety. Silky is pretty smooth, and ultrasilky is even more so; how would I know whether the tannin I am tasting is really ultrasilky or just plain silky? And then there is velvet, which tends to be soft (or even ultrasoft?); how would I know whether the tannin is silky or velvety? If I am given a choice between two wines that are described by identical attributes except for their textile quality, should I choose the one with silky tannins or velvety tannins? It is a problem to drive a person crazy.

A pair of new studies, however, might offer a bit of guidance through the murky world of wine writing — if one’s task were to look at a wine review and guess whether the wine in question were expensive or cheap. First off, if the review is long, you’re talking about an expensive wine. Secondly, according to another study, you can guess from the vocabulary being employed:

My findings indicate that wines priced in the highest category exhibit the following features in high proportion relative to cheap wines: expensive wines are described in terms indicating authenticity or exclusivity (versus accessibility), fullness of flavor (rather than lightness), and with specificity (versus generality). For example, old, elegant, and cuvee best predict expensive wines, while pleasing, refreshing, value and enjoy are associated with the cheapest wines. “Dark” words such as intense, supple, velvety, and smoky are highly correlated with expensive wine; bright, light, fresh, tropical, and pink predict cheap wines. Expensive bottles see more specific descriptors, including a higher percentage of single fruits and flavors such as tobacco or chocolate, while inexpensive wines are described in more generic terms: fruity, good, clean, tasty, juicy.

In addition, words with the same meaning are preferentially used for expensive over cheap wines: for example, vintage is six times more likely to describe an expensive wine; harvest is used for cheap wines. While pairing suggestions for expensive wines include steak and shellfish, inexpensive wines are thought to go better with chicken.

But while that’s a neat parlor trick, it won’t actually help you choose a wine you might enjoy.

Of course, it could be that quality wines are inherently better described by words like “old,” “elegant,” and “cuvee.” Or, it could be that the wine industry is basically full of it. I’ll leave it to you, dear reader, to deside which is more likely.

Meanwhile, Goldstein offers this final thought on why it’s unlikely wine bullshit can be combated with wine common sense:

What’s highly likely is that the descriptors are self-fulfilling—reading an expensive wine description primes the drinker to have a more typically expensive wine experience. That is, the adjectives and analogies we read in wine reviews fuse with our experience of drinking the wine in such a complete way that the liquid’s intrinsic and extrinsic properties become inseperable.

Is this why it’s so difficult to undermine the conventional wisdom that very expensive wine is worth the money?

Maybe we just synthesize whatever we seek, creating value as we go: search for chocolate, and it will magically appear.

When we spend money on a bottle of wine, in other words, the bullshit is what we’re paying for.