Would it please you to know that you may well be a better judge of wine than you imagine? That you — as an enthusiastic but likely untrained amateur — may even, in some contexts, perform as well in a test of skills as a bona fide expert?
There’s at least one serious study of such things that says you probably could. It involves a single test: accurately determining the color of wine (red, white, or pink) with just a sniff. No peeking and no tasting.
The research I cite was undertaken a few years ago in France, by a team from the University of Burgundy and published in the Journal of Chemosensory Perception. I originally stumbled on it while preparing one of the radio spots I was doing for America’s Test Kitchen at the time.
For one such segment, your correspondent brought six opaque black wine glasses into the WGBH studios, surreptitiously poured a bit of red, white or rosé into each, and challenged the host to say what kind (i.e. color) each glass held. Both sniffing and tasting were allowed.
The task set to the participants in the university experiment was more difficult, since only sniffing was allowed. The subjects consisted of three groups: one of “experts” (winemakers, teachers in oenology schools or wine researchers, all frequent wine drinkers); one of “trainees” (a group that had an average of 16 months of wine tasting education); a third of “novices” (people with no formal wine tasting experience whatever and infrequent wine drinkers).
The subjects proved surprisingly adept at sorting reds from whites by smell alone (rosés proved more problematic); but the real eye-opener here is the performance of the novices compared with the experts. As you can see from the graph above, the know-nothings vanquished the know-somethings (by a nose, you might say). One has to wonder how such an outcome is possible.
I don’t have a clear answer to this seemingly non-intuitive outcome , but I have something to offer. It’s that having a lot of experience at anything puts you on your guard against quick-draw judgments, alerts you to the possibilities for error, prepares you to encounter anomalies and the areas where one category imperceptibly shades into another, teaches caution. Add to these the expert’s fear of being shown up, and you have a recipe for hesitation and doubt.
On the other hand, non-experts, being unencumbered by an overwrought thought process, are more likely to just go with their instincts.
In partial defense of those experts who may have felt rather abashed at their performance, I’ll just say that, in my experience, there isn’t a single person involved professionally with wine either in the retail trade, as a journalist or critic, or even someone who actually makes the stuff who hasn’t at one time or another been embarrassed, caught out, made to look foolish or downright dense by it. And although deep, even astonishing expertise is possessed by a few, the all-knowing, all-recalling, all-identifying, infallible wine hero is a miraculously persistent, seemingly deathless trope. Nothing more.
Over the years, wine has embarrassed me more times than I can count— to the point that I became momentarily convinced wine had it in for me. But I’ve changed my mind. The occasional humiliation comes with the territory.