This is a bit like having a taste test of frozen vegetables. But, yes, you can taste differences, and often those differences correlate to a certain "kind" of wine.
If you give me a wine to taste, I may tell you "this tastes like a zinfandel". And maybe it's not a zin. Maybe it's a pinot that was grown and processed in a way that ended up tasting like zin. Of course I can tell when intense blackberry/blueberry fruit flavors are flooding my mouth, and all the dissolved solids fill the crevices of my mouth and weigh down my palette, just like you can tell the difference between strawberry jam and raspberry jam.
The question is not can you taste a difference. The question is, can you guess what it was supposed to be? Hell no. Grapes with red skin can be used to make white wine. Of course I may be wrong about what grape it was, or what percentages of which varietals, or from what region, or year, etc. But I know when something tastes strongly of blackberries and when it doesn't.
> But, yes, you can taste differences, and often those differences correlate to a certain "kind" of wine.
Is there any evidence for this? Whenever I've read looked into studies on wine tasting, they invariably find that people can't reliably distinguish what they think they can.
Almost all the studies I saw were about price or quality, and I'm not saying I can discern either. If the wines are similar, I won't be able to tell them apart. But if one tastes like blackberry, one like honey, one like coffee, one is sweet, and one is sour or acidic, those are clearly different qualities and easy to discern.
Sure, but that amounts to saying "if a difference can be discerned then there's a discernible difference". I'm saying if there's anything really to wine tasting, there's got to be something that can be reliably shown in experiments - e.g. that sommeliers were found to reliably determine a wine's X, for some value of X. I've poked around for evidence like that, and there doesn't seem to be any.
I don't know what you're searching for, but with conditions like that I'm pretty sure you won't find it. It sounds a lot like you're trying to look objectively at a subjective art form.
Lots of people claim that it's not just subjective, and that's what I'm asking about. You said as much in the post I quoted and replied to.
I mean: if someone says Bordeaus pair well with croutons, obviously that's an opinion. But if they say a wine's taste discernibly correlates to its region or vintage, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask if there's any evidence.
Those people saying it's not subjective are wrong, because wine is far too complicated for a human to decipher.
The fruit/veg is the output of a plant's function, whose input (simplified) is light, water, temperature, and soil. Two identical seeds will grow two slightly different tasting fruit if they have different access to those inputs. Most gardeners can attest to how many variables are needed just to grow a vegetable at all, much less get it to grow as well as it can.
On top of that, wine grape vines are often selected for the particular fruit they develop, but are often grown in regions they aren't suited to. So they need all kinds of complicated grafting techniques and treatments to survive the local climate, pests, bacteria and fungus.
Once you can actually get the grapes to grow, you have to harvest them when they are just the right ripeness for wine-making. Since a natural environment is variable, you never really know when this is, but good winemakers establish a good feel for when this is. Much like the above gardening processes it's still mostly unscientific, though it is informed by data and experience.
Then you get to process the grapes and ferment them. This unique grape that has gone through so much to be born is now subject to one of several processes to try to convert sugars into alcohols. The fermentation process used (typically yeast fermenting in barrels) depends on several dozen compounds and a hundred factors all being right for the yeast to thrive and convert the grape's sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
Just imagine: the land, air, water, temperature, pests, gardener's care, grape varietal, fermentation... all of these involve complex processes, and a single variable changed can throw everything off. All of this adds up to one unique bottle of wine.
If a person claimed that they could detect all of this from a single sip of wine, no matter how standardized the process of tasting, they're lying. The only thing they can hope to do is guess where this wine was from, what type it was, how it was grown, how it was fermented, etc. They do this by studying the above entire chain of events in every wine growing region in the world, and based on that information, try to deduce the origin of the wine, and judge its quality.
Considering how many wines there are and how many variables go into each wine, it's kind of insane to think you could decipher all of this with a human palette. So wine tasting is a weird guessing game/hobby. A lot of people do make a living off of accurately determining all these things, but there's no way you could call this a science. It's an art.
> If a person claimed that they could detect all of this from a single sip of wine...
Nobody's talking about anything remotely that grandiose. If someone simply says they can tell a red from a white more often than not, that's still an objective claim that can be tested. Just because nobody can know everything every time doesn't mean it's all subjective.
More to the point, if someone says "you can taste differences, and often those differences correlate to a certain "kind" of wine", that's also a testable claim - i.e. something I'd believe if there's evidence for it. Hence I asked if you knew of any. (At this point I'll take the answer as read. ;)
If you give me a wine to taste, I may tell you "this tastes like a zinfandel". And maybe it's not a zin. Maybe it's a pinot that was grown and processed in a way that ended up tasting like zin. Of course I can tell when intense blackberry/blueberry fruit flavors are flooding my mouth, and all the dissolved solids fill the crevices of my mouth and weigh down my palette, just like you can tell the difference between strawberry jam and raspberry jam.
The question is not can you taste a difference. The question is, can you guess what it was supposed to be? Hell no. Grapes with red skin can be used to make white wine. Of course I may be wrong about what grape it was, or what percentages of which varietals, or from what region, or year, etc. But I know when something tastes strongly of blackberries and when it doesn't.