What you don't mention, but which seems relevant, is that even though wine tasters claim to not get drunk at these tastings they almost certainly end up drinking some wine. There's no doubt that drunk people are bad at actual taste issues, a fact known at least 2000 years ago since it's mentioned in the bible. Chances are that in the larger wine events where testers have to rate dozens of wines they simply lose their ability to discriminate properly, assuming it was there in the first place.
Regarding wine scandals, there have been many wine scandals detected by wine sellers selling more wine than they could possibly make from the vineyards the grapes allegedly come from. This included the monks on the island just off Cannes who have a tiny vineyard but sold more wine than several wineries on the mainland...
In some cases in the EU the prime sucker for the scam seems to be the EU's agricultural subsidies rather than consumers, and in many of those cases it seems likely that the wine simply did not exist, but there were others I recall where the same wine was counted as two different wines through careful use of unlabeled bottles.
Thanks for unmasking the BS. Hey I though I might as well make wish list for your next destruction - is there any substance to the sulphite issue? I do feel like they´re no good for me the next day, but, you know... placebos dominate any real signal. So we should exploer the power of placebos instead of real stuff, perhaps.
I enjoyed this essay but was slightly confused by the target: is it that sommeliers can judge good wine from bad? or is it whether sommeliers can identify wines in their particulars? It seems that they cannot do the former, but can do the latter. But then the results of the latter don't necessarily bear on the former.
There's also the confounding fact that as a rule, wine producers now make good wines. Don't you think it was possible that the French were some of the only *consistent* winemakers in the olden days? Especially in the pre-industrial era, or worse, the early industrial era? Good wine exists, as your essay suggests, but it might have once been a gamble whether your wine would be good. French provenance might've been a guarantee of quality for various reasons.
A sommelier in the old days, you could suppose, had the job of just enforcing a certain meagre standard, like a health and safety official. (c.f. the etymology: 'Earlier it meant the person in a large household, convent, hospital, etc. who was in charge of wines, (1680s) in French contexts, and was regarded as akin to an English butler (q.v.). The original French sense was of an officer who had charge of provisions (13c.)')
Setting aside the historical part of this point: the conclusion is something like the 'the best wine is the one you like' and yet the sommeliers aren't very good judges... of something. I'm assuming that these days, the competition is fierce: every wine they encounter is good, rather than bad (think: backyard rocket-fuel.) So you'd think that discerning the particulars of what makes a good wine good is much harder than discerning good wine from bad. You'd think that the winemakers today also overdetermine sommelier judgements: the vintner culls bad wines before they even reach the judges. Yet the judges must still judge 'good' from 'bad' within a selection of good wines: a doomed task.
Another way of putting it: Are you getting at whether sommeliers can enforce 'standards of taste' or just whether they have delicacy of taste?
I'd take the opportunity to refer to that wine bit of Hume's The Standard of Taste if I wasn't already going approaching tl;dr.
A relative used to tell me this all the time growing up - about how with blind testing the cheapest wines can taste as good as the worst.
On retirement, the same fellow dragged out every bottle of wine he owned, googled it to see the ratings, and classified each wine he owned 1, 2, 3 depending on how 'good' it was, and that determines which guests get which.
New suggested name for your substack: “Cremieux Ruins Everything.” Like the old show but better, and with less snark.
What you don't mention, but which seems relevant, is that even though wine tasters claim to not get drunk at these tastings they almost certainly end up drinking some wine. There's no doubt that drunk people are bad at actual taste issues, a fact known at least 2000 years ago since it's mentioned in the bible. Chances are that in the larger wine events where testers have to rate dozens of wines they simply lose their ability to discriminate properly, assuming it was there in the first place.
Regarding wine scandals, there have been many wine scandals detected by wine sellers selling more wine than they could possibly make from the vineyards the grapes allegedly come from. This included the monks on the island just off Cannes who have a tiny vineyard but sold more wine than several wineries on the mainland...
In some cases in the EU the prime sucker for the scam seems to be the EU's agricultural subsidies rather than consumers, and in many of those cases it seems likely that the wine simply did not exist, but there were others I recall where the same wine was counted as two different wines through careful use of unlabeled bottles.
Thanks for unmasking the BS. Hey I though I might as well make wish list for your next destruction - is there any substance to the sulphite issue? I do feel like they´re no good for me the next day, but, you know... placebos dominate any real signal. So we should exploer the power of placebos instead of real stuff, perhaps.
I enjoyed this essay but was slightly confused by the target: is it that sommeliers can judge good wine from bad? or is it whether sommeliers can identify wines in their particulars? It seems that they cannot do the former, but can do the latter. But then the results of the latter don't necessarily bear on the former.
There's also the confounding fact that as a rule, wine producers now make good wines. Don't you think it was possible that the French were some of the only *consistent* winemakers in the olden days? Especially in the pre-industrial era, or worse, the early industrial era? Good wine exists, as your essay suggests, but it might have once been a gamble whether your wine would be good. French provenance might've been a guarantee of quality for various reasons.
A sommelier in the old days, you could suppose, had the job of just enforcing a certain meagre standard, like a health and safety official. (c.f. the etymology: 'Earlier it meant the person in a large household, convent, hospital, etc. who was in charge of wines, (1680s) in French contexts, and was regarded as akin to an English butler (q.v.). The original French sense was of an officer who had charge of provisions (13c.)')
Setting aside the historical part of this point: the conclusion is something like the 'the best wine is the one you like' and yet the sommeliers aren't very good judges... of something. I'm assuming that these days, the competition is fierce: every wine they encounter is good, rather than bad (think: backyard rocket-fuel.) So you'd think that discerning the particulars of what makes a good wine good is much harder than discerning good wine from bad. You'd think that the winemakers today also overdetermine sommelier judgements: the vintner culls bad wines before they even reach the judges. Yet the judges must still judge 'good' from 'bad' within a selection of good wines: a doomed task.
Another way of putting it: Are you getting at whether sommeliers can enforce 'standards of taste' or just whether they have delicacy of taste?
I'd take the opportunity to refer to that wine bit of Hume's The Standard of Taste if I wasn't already going approaching tl;dr.
A relative used to tell me this all the time growing up - about how with blind testing the cheapest wines can taste as good as the worst.
On retirement, the same fellow dragged out every bottle of wine he owned, googled it to see the ratings, and classified each wine he owned 1, 2, 3 depending on how 'good' it was, and that determines which guests get which.