Dr Vino's wine blog

Over Thanksgiving, I finally read Raffi Khatchadourian’s 10,000 word essay in the Nov 23 issue of the New Yorker. Entitled “The Taste Makers,” Khatchadourian tracks a flavor scientist at a company called Givaudan, which makes such flavorings such as acai, pomegranate or kiwi-strawberry for bottled drinks. The author follows the Givaudan team to various locales where they smell, taste and capture molecular readouts of exotic fruit aromas. The team seriously geeks out over smells. The flavorists had this to say about wine tasting:

During a meeting with several flavor professionals in New Jersey, I compared a flavor chemist’s ability to break down the structure of a soft drink to the skills of Robert Parker, the wine critic. I was quickly corrected. “That’s kind of like hocus-pocus,” one of them said. “Parker may say that a wine has a nutty note or is oaky, but a lot of things can be behind that, and I don’t think he’s matching aspects of the flavor to a chemical compound and going, ‘O.K., this note here, it comes from methyl isobutyrate.’ ” And yet controlled experiments show that, no matter what a person’s professional vocabulary or expertise, aromas remain a blur: the average person, with minimal training, can perceive about three or four distinct components in a given aroma; professional flavorists-without leaning on their chemical knowledge of particular types of food-can do no better.

The article also provided a primer about sensory perception and brain function, noting that unlike sights and sounds, smells bypass the thalamus. So maybe our hard wiring is why we will never be wine-tasting robots, with pesky things like emotions and context getting in the way.

Smells, for the most part, are fed directly from the nose to a “pre-semantic” part of the brain where cognition does not occur, and where emotions are processed. The bypassing of the thalamus may be one reason why smells can be so hard to describe in detail, and also why aromas stimulate such powerful feelings. The smell of rotten meat can trigger sudden revulsion in a way that merely looking at it cannot.

Related: “WSJ: wine-rating system is badly flawed“

When Gary Vaynerchuk asked me on the “thunder show” I was afraid. Not of him even though he’s an entrepreneur, wine retailer, dynamo, and internet phenom. No, I was afraid he would make me eat dirt. (As he made Conan do.)

In the end, that didn’t happen and there was nothing to fear. Not only is Gary a very nice guy, we had a fun conversation too. So if you have 33 minutes that you are wondering what to do with, check out the segment where we talk and taste three wines. (Or see it on his site.) Gary also has a couple of books out, 101 Wines and a business book called Crush It. If you don’t know about Gary you can check out profiles of him in Slate and NYTimes.com.

Feel free to post your thoughts in the comments as well as your answer to The Question: will you be pouring a magnum on Thanksgiving?

Saturday’s WSJ catches up with Robert Hodgson’s research on the randomness of gold medals in wine competitions. In case you missed our discussion here and many others on them there internets, you can check out the WSJ article for a recap. The story also applies the discussion to wine ratings and scores, underscoring their inherent subjectivity even though pallets of wine are bought and sold every day on these snapshots.

The author, Leonard Mladinow, wrote a book last year called “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules or Lives” (amazon; aff). In it, he has a brief section on inherent subjectivity and variation in wine descriptions and ratings. He points out the importance of aggregating several reviews and then expressing the standard deviation with the final score, as in “90 points, plus or minus 6.” Think that would fly in a sales email? Yeah, me either. But a site of user-generated reviews, such as cellartracker, could easily calculate a mean score and standard deviation from the reviews on any given wine in their database. It may not be ever-so-slightly more difficult to read than a single number but it would be a big score for accuracy in reflecting user experiences across diverse settings.

Anyway, check out the article. Here’s one quote for the candor file, from the publisher of a magazine that uses scores: “It is absurd for people to expect consistency in a taster’s ratings. We’re not robots.”

“A Hint of Hype, A Taste of Illusion” WSJ
(Image: a reduced size crop of an image credited to Chris Wadden that ran with the story)

SIPPED: the hard question; SPIT: advertorial
During what looked like an innocuous segment on Thanksgiving wines, Evan Dawson, a local TV news anchor, asks Leslie Sbrocco, wine book author and TV host, some tough questions. And they’re not about the turkey. Tune in to about 1:50 when he asks her about the Beringer wines she recommends: “Do you have a relationship with them that involves any sort of compensation?” Her reply: “Yes, this media tour is with the Beringer portfolio of wines.” The FTC would be proud of Dawson! [13WHAM]

SPIT: double standards
Speaking of the FTC, Blake Gray, former wine columnist for the SF Chronicle, has a lengthy post decrying the fact that the new FTC regulations come down harder on blogs than they do traditional media. [Gray Market Report]

SIPPED: funding freer trade
Frustrated by interstate shipping laws that thwart the ability to purchase wine out of state for 47 states? Consider bidding on wine lots in an auction to benefit the Specialty Wine Retailers Association, which fights legal battles for freer trade.

SIPPED: red wine
Chocolate milk, of all drinks, tries to muscle red wine out of the health news headlines: According to recent research as reported in the NYT, “flavanoid-rich cocoa” found in chocolate milk appears more effective at reducing inflammation that leads to atherosclerosis than regular milk! But the effects still aren’t as pronounced as with red wine. I can see it now: the choco-cabernet smoothie!

SIPPED: symbolic pricing
Joe Montana’s 500 acre estate that spans the Sonoma-Napa county line, is up for sale. The former 49ers QB, who also has a wine label, listed the property at $49 million. [WSJ]

SPIT: symbolic pricing
7-Eleven, the chain of 15,000 convenience stores, has announced their own wine label, Yosemite Road. Instead of pricing it at $7 and $11 a bottle for symbolic purposes, it will retail for $3.99. Aha! Maybe this will be the home of the choco-cabernet Slurpee? [AP]

SIPPED: another city winery
Hong Kong eclipsed New York City as the wine auction capital of the world this year, that we know. But this just in: Hong Kong has had a winery in the city limits since 2007. [CNN]

SIPPED: web voting
The website Foodbuzz recently distributed some blog awards and this blog won the category “blogger you would most want to be your personal sommelier.” Thank you for your votes but my question is, true to blogger stereotype, does that mean I have to pour wine in my pajamas? [Foodbuzz]

A great piece of wine writing has just become accessible: oddly, with the closing of Gourmet magazine, Gourmet.com has made the classic article “Shattered Myths” available for free.

Written by NPR contributor Daniel Zwerdling back in 2004, the story starts at a tasting with Riedel stemware, which the attendees loved and bought $1,000 worth of the crystal afterward. Then the author reviews some scientific studies about taste and olfactory analysis of wine in different vessels, which clashed with the what he had seen at the Riedel demonstration. So the author put the question to Georg Riedel. Click through to see Riedel’s reply.

The article then turns to a fascinating and important discussion about perceptions and wine, much of which we have discussed since 2004 in various ways here and elsewhere. The now-available article is an oldie but a goodie and well worth the read if you haven’t already seen it.

Related: “Shattered Myths” [Gourmet]
“Varietal stemware: genius or hucksterism?”
“The Tongue Map: Tasteless Myth Debunked” [LiveScience]
“Wine’s Pleasures: Are They All in Your Head?” [NYT]

Back in March 2008, when word leaked out about Amazon’s possibly selling wine, Mike Steinberger asked, hopefully, whether Amazon.com could end the war over direct wine deliveries. He continued: “the entry of the Internet retailing colossus into the business seemed just the thing to finally break the logjam over interstate wine shipping.”

Instead, the logjam crushed Amazon (AMZN). Late Friday, winebusiness.com ran a story that Amazon was putting its wine retailing business on hold, citing correspondence between amazon and wineries. I contacted members of the AmazonWine team for comment and they were either away on vacation reply or said that they could not comment. The Wall Street Journal got through to a spokesman who confirmed the wine trial was over.

The intractable logjam was the interstate shipping laws that govern interstate wine shipping. You can get 200 pages or so on it in my book Wine Politics: How Governments, Environmentalists, Mobsters, and Critics Influence the Wines We Drink. Or you can check out Tom Wark’s post for a more concise background on the logjam known as the three-tier system. Further, California law on unlicensed “third parties” may have affected the group’s plans.

I look forward to the final analysis of how exactly Amazon attempted to achieve a different structuring of interstate wine retail and why, sadly, it flopped. While AmazonWine kept program was kept under wraps, conventional wisdom is already blaming the bankruptcy of New Vine Logistics, which put the domestic wine component in jeopardy (imported wines were also to be available).

Given the economics of shipping wine, the company may have been targeting higher-priced bottles. In that regard, the economic backdrop didn’t help the plan as high-end wine sales have softened in the past year even though overall consumption of (lower-priced) wine is slightly higher.

In other news, Forbes.com ran a piece late Friday piece entitled, “Must-read wine blogs.” It’s a must-read itself and will give you some tips on some more blogs to add to your feed reader, if those good ones mentioned are not in yours already.

I recently posted about blind tasting Bordeaux 2005 with Robert Parker. Last week, via the “inaugural edition” of his monthly e-newsletter, he produced his own summation of the public tasting, which included new, “official” scores for all the wines tasted. At the event, he had not scored any of the wines. But when a member of the audience asked him, “Bob, what were your three votes,” he stated:

“I went back and I was a big fan of 9 and 8 and 3. And then I think 13 and 14 are right up there…I can’t forget eight and nine. I had six wines that blew me away tonight: 1, 3, 8, 9, 13, and 14.”

To recap from the other post, those wines were Le Gay (9), L’Eglise Clinet (8), and Pape Clement (3) as his top three wines of the night, followed closely by Lafite (13), Troplong-Mondot (14), and Pavie (1). I’ve uploaded my own audio recording of the event to the right.

Yet in the e-newsletter, there were some surprises among the ratings. Le Gay, one of his top three wines of the night, received a score of 99 points, certainly outstanding but, oddly, only fourth that evening. L’Eglise Clinet received “99+ points.” But two wines scored 100. One was Troplong-Mondot. And the second was La Mission Haut Brion, which was not among the six wines that “blew him away” that evening.

What makes a wine worth 100 points? A couple of years ago, Parker told a Florida newspaper the key to difference separating a 100-point wine from a 99- or a 98-point wine. He said, “I really think probably the only difference…is really the emotion of the moment.”

Obviously, anyone could and perhaps should be influenced by emotions during a tasting of excellent wines. But doesn’t it undermine the pretense of (psuedo-)objectivity that scores represent? Isn’t scoring wines meant to “call it like you see it” and dispense with extraneous information such as labels and context?

How can a professional taster explain such a change in rankings from a public event to subsequent write-up? In the case of 05 La Mission, the wine clearly did not send a chill up Parker’s spine that evening since it was not in his top six. In a thread that emerged on his site about the discrepancies, Parker concluded one of his comments with a plea to “KEEP IT REAL.” Indeed.

Read more…

In July, Michael Broadbent brought legal action against Random House, the publisher of The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery Of The World’s Most Expensive Bottle Of Wine. News of the settlement broke on Decanter.com, which called it a “victory” for Broadbent.

Author Benjamin Wallace has just sent this public statement to DrVino.com:

This statement is authorized for publication in the U.S. only: It is unfortunate that Michael Broadbent has chosen to blame the messenger, and doubly so that he is blaming the messenger for something the messenger is not actually saying. I have never felt that Mr. Broadbent acted in bad faith, and contrary to his claims, I maintain that The Billionaire’s Vinegar does not suggest that he did. In any case, while I believe that my book speaks for itself, I do want to point out a few things: I was never personally sued by Mr. Broadbent, and I am not a party to the settlement or apology negotiated by him with Random House. Because of the U.K.’s notoriously plaintiff-friendly libel laws and conditional fee system, the company made a business decision to settle with Mr. Broadbent in order to contain its legal costs and exposure in the U.K. Since the claim was always confined to the book’s availability in the U.K., the settlement does not prevent the book from being published anywhere else or require that a single word be changed. So, while Random House has agreed not to distribute the book in the U.K., the book remains available in the United States, where the libel laws provide greater protection for freedom of speech and where British libel judgments are almost never enforceable, thanks to the First Amendment.