Writing About Wine

Impossible to do without sounding like a total snob/douchebag.

My own favorite form of self-experimentation has to do with wine. It's pretty clear that we expect more expensive wines to taste better. (This expectation is visible in an fMRI machine.) But it's also clear that, at least for amateurs, this expectation is mostly false: when you give people bottles of wine without any price information, there is no correlation between the cost of the wine and its subjective ratings. A $8 bottle is just as enjoyable as an $80 one.

Every few months, I conduct a blind taste test. (In general, I think the most useful forms of self-tracking will be the tracking of our innate biases.) I trek to Costco and my local wine store and pick up several bottles at various price points. The wines are poured into cheap decanters. And then I taste the wines over the course of a lazy afternoon, being sure to eat lots of crackers in between. I smell, swirl, sip and swallow. (I like my wine too much to spit it out.) I'm no Robert Parker, but I take a few notes and render my judgement. What have I discovered? Mostly I've learned that my ratings are woefully inconsistent. The same $18 pinot that I loved last year might get low marks at a later date. A Tuscan blend that seemed so generic now seems like it would be a perfect foil for pasta with tomatoes.

Well, it must be horrible to subject oneself to the humiliation of buying wines and not knowing expensive from cheap. Probably similar to the humiliation one feels when misidentifying a Lamborghini Countach as a Lamborghini Diablo. Or mistaking the jet you are flying is as a Gulfstream III when in fact it is a Gulfstream V.
Perhaps Jonah could spare himself from humiliation and just drink Yellow Tail like the rest of us.


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