Has wine gone bad?

Re:Has wine gone bad? by cycrutchfield on Tuesday May 15, 2018 @07:38PM (#17078825)

If you're open to trying new experiences, go to a group blind wine tasting event with actual trained sommeliers (you can find such events on meetup or elsewhere). It's a very interesting learning experience and it teaches you a little bit about how trained professionals methodically determine by taste, smell, and sight how to identify what a wine is. Now, they are very unlikely to be perfect, given that our palates are very unreliable and noisy sensors, and a given bottle of wine is itself a very noisy expression of the grapes it was made from. But there is a process to it, and it's not just a made-up pseudoscience.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Has wine gone bad? by fenomas on Wednesday May 16, 2018 @05:53AM (#17081143)

> and it's not just a made-up pseudoscience.

Meaning no offense, do you know of any evidence for that?

Every time I've ever read about wine-tasting getting examined (i.e. by an academic study), the results invariably turn out to be that people can't distinguish what they think they can. If there's something to wine tasting, shouldn't one expect there to be studies of the "sommeliers were able to consistently distinguish X from Y" variety, for some X and Y?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Has wine gone bad? by cycrutchfield on Wednesday May 16, 2018 @11:18AM (#17083074)

If you have a link to such an academic study then we can discuss it in more detail. But sommeliers can absolutely taste a wine and produce fairly reliable estimates of country, region, appellation, variety, etc. That's essentially what they are trained to do, their exam is literally that.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Has wine gone bad? by fenomas on Wednesday May 16, 2018 @12:31PM (#17083737)

> But sommeliers can absolutely taste a wine and produce fairly reliable estimates of country, region, appellation, variety, etc.

This is what I'm asking if there's any firm evidence of. Do you know of any?

> That's essentially what they are trained to do, their exam is literally that.

One can equivalently say that healing the body is what acupuncturists do, and what their exams cover. That's all well and good, but if they can actually do it one should expect there to be research to that effect, right?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Has wine gone bad? by cycrutchfield on Wednesday May 16, 2018 @12:41PM (#17083856)

>This is what I'm asking if there's any firm evidence of. Do you know of any?

Yes, it's simply the sommelier examinations that they must pass in order to become a sommelier.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Has wine gone bad? by fenomas on Wednesday May 16, 2018 @12:58PM (#17084031)

Are the relevant details of those examinations public? What questions are asked, how they're graded, pass/fail rates, etc.?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Has wine gone bad? by cycrutchfield on Wednesday May 16, 2018 @01:17PM (#17084267)

I'm not sure, but my brother in law is somewhere along the progression of the master of wine exams and they do tell you how many of the wines you classified correctly and how many you did incorrectly. Obviously, if you are no better than random then you are not going to pass the test. He generally gets most of the wines right on the exams.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Has wine gone bad? by fenomas on Wednesday May 16, 2018 @02:13PM (#17084935)

I understand that the exams are very rigorous, but that doesn't in and of itself prove any particular thing. Somewhere some other guy's brother is studying for a master acupuncturist exam and he probably believes it's just as rigorous.

What I'm asking about is evidence of the usual sort - published results that can be duplicated, and whatnot. That doesn't seem like an unreasonable standard for believing something is real.

[ Parent | on HN ]