Do wine tasting notes actually help you?

While doing my little research into whether Australia's major wine companies take any notice of Wine Australia's absurd rules about describing where their wines come from, I inevitably came across that strange thing called the tasting note. These descriptions presumably are intended to tell we consumers what we can expect if we buy and drink. But do they actually do so?

To help you judge I did a brief survey of what some of the "experts" had to say about Penfolds St Henri 2013. It presented a confusing picture.

Take colour for a start. Penfolds reckon their wine is "magenta" with a "purple core." Huon Hook, writing for Fairfax, saw "deep, dense, dark red/purple colour". But for Master of wine Andrew Caillard there was nothing deep and dark about it - just "medium dense."

Still, we do not taste the colour. But when it comes to taste we are influenced bya wine's aroma. So what do the experts think abut that?

The official Panfolds tasting note waxes almost lyrical.

A heightened ethereal/subliminal fruit lift... hovering above, cleverly propelled by just the right amount of formics and V.A. Black jelly-bean and star anise notes arise, augmented by fig paste, dried herbs and spice – cinnamon and thyme..With air, scents of freshly-cured corned beef with a carpaccio-like freshness, replete with capers/vinegar/brine.

Australian retailer First Choice just goes in for a little plagiarism noting the"aromas of black jellybean, star anise, fig paste, dried herbs and spice." For Huon Hook "the bouquet is subdued and discreet, with fresh earth and discreet spice notes" while Andrew Caillard's nose detects "inky espresso aromas" but it is "intense blackberry" not Decanter's "full bodied blueberry." Everyone to his own nose I suppose.

When it comes to describing the taste - or the palate as the reviewer csll it - Penfolds reckons its wine is "Youthful. Structurally expansive – large-framed/amply-dimensioned! St Henri aims to please - pickled beetroot for the vegetarians; gamey venison and the blackened crust of roast beef for the carnivores. Wild blackberry and a dark-fruited compote benevolently offer a generosity of fruit sweetness.An almost silky tarriness coupled with mouth-watering acidity create a texturally appealing and integrated mouthfeel. Voluptuous/Voluminous/Velvety."

Taking the company view is again good enough for First Choice. It tells its customers about the "pickled beetroot, gamey venison and the crust of roast beef with wild blackberry and dark-fruit compote for sweetness. Voluptuous, voluminous and velvety." The Decanter review writes how "this multi-regional blend of 96% Shiraz and 4% Cabernet Sauvignon boasts a seductively sweet fragrance of herbs and spices followed by a full-bodied blueberry-like opulence, with a note of tar and balsamic complexity behind a firm acid spine."

Huon Hook prefers to tell us that  "the palate is where the fireworks really happen. Its silky smooth, supremely elegant and fruit-sweet within its casing of fine powdery tannins. Soft and fleshy, elegant and not as full-bodied as other Penfolds reds this year. A lovely, lovely wine."

The Master of Wine, who advises the Dan Murphy chain about such matters, is not to be outdone. Andrew Caillard finds:

Inky textured wine with lovely fruit complexity and balance. Well-concentrated yet modulated blackberry pastille espresso flavours, looseknit graphite/ fine-boned chalky textures and roasted almond notes. Finishes chalky firm with blackberry pastille, inky notes. Delicious and classic in style with superb vinosity and fruit complexity. Should develop very well over the next ten years or so.

Now how all those words help tell you what the 2013 St Henri is actually like is beyond me.

I guess you just choose your reviewer, pay your money and take your chance.

Why don't we try the 1775?

There were five bottles of the 1775 Jeres de la Frontera gathering dust in the Massandra wine cellars when Russia's Vladimir Putin and Italy's Silvio Berlusconi dropped by for a tour. Now there are four.

The two old friends apparently were quite taken with the 500,000 bottles remaining of the collection founded by Prince Lev Golitsyn who started the first winery in Crimea in 1894. In the footage above, Mr Berlusconi is seen picking up a 1891 vintage and asking “Can we drink them?”
According to a report of the visit the two leaders apparently had such a good time at the winery that Mr Putin even joined in for an uncharacteristically lighthearted photo, raising his hands above his head with Mr Berlusconi and the winery employees.
And, as you do after a winery tour, there was a tasting to follow where the cellar Director Yanina Pavlenko was apparently the one who uncorked the 240 year old bottle for Messrs Putin and Berlusconi.
No tasting note is available that I can find but the prosecutor general of the former Crimean government, which has been operating in exile since Russia annexed the peninsula in 2014, didn’t find the VIP degustation amusing. He has opened a criminal case for large scale theft over the incident, estimating the loss at 2 million hryvnia, or about €80,000, the Centre of Journalistic Investigations reported.

Taking wine tasting to a new level - measuring brain reactions with functional magnetic imaging

Wine tasting has now gone to a whole new level as scientists use brain imagining to try and work out what styles people really do like. And some initial research suggests that despite a trend towards increased alcohol content it is wines with a lower alcohol level that consumers prefer.
Spanish researchers from the Basque Centre of Cognition, Brain and Language in Donostia-San Sebastian this month published in the on-line journal PLOS ONE their paper What Can the Brain Teach Us about Winemaking? An fMRI Study of Alcohol Level Preferences. It notes how, over the last few decades, wine makers have been producing wines with a higher alcohol content, assuming that they are more appreciated by consumers. To test this hypothesis, they used functional magnetic imaging to compare reactions of human subjects to different types of wine, focusing on brain regions critical for flavor processing and food reward. Participants were presented with carefully matched pairs of high- and low-alcohol content red wines, without informing them of any of the wine attributes.

As the abstract of the article puts it, they concluded:

Contrary to expectation, significantly greater activation was found for low-alcohol than for high-alcohol content wines in brain regions that are sensitive to taste intensity, including the insula as well as the cerebellum. Wines were closely matched for all physical attributes except for alcohol content, thus we interpret the preferential response to the low-alcohol content wines as arising from top-down modulation due to the low alcohol content wines inducing greater attentional exploration of aromas and flavours. The findings raise intriguing possibilities for objectively testing hypotheses regarding methods of producing a highly complex product such as wine.

A different kind of Oxbridge boat race

A Sophisticated Version Of Guess The Grape — But Is It A Sport?

Oxford and Cambridge have academic awards to see which school is smarter, and boat races to determine which is stronger. And for the past half-century, their blind wine tasting societies have held competitions. It's all part of an epic rivalry that dates back to the 13th century.

Now, these tasting teams are hoping to be recognized as an official sport.

As practice gets underway, wine is the only topic of conversation. Students list the regions they've visited: Bordeaux, Champagne, Alsace. ...

Oxford's ultimate goal is, of course, beating Cambridge. Historically, Oxford has the edge, but Cambridge is the defending champion. 

"It's very tense. People get jolly nervous. We go to the Oxford and Cambridge Club in London, so it's on neutral territory," Wilson says. "And the match happens in total silence." 

Developing objective wine tasting tongues

Get ready to move aside Jancis Robinson, James Halliday, Michael Broadbent et al. Artificial tongues are being developed apace that promise to bring some objectivity into that arcane art of wine tasting.
The latest contribution to the science of taste comes from researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark. Their study published in ACS Nano describes an artificial tongue that detects the effects of tannins, the molecules that give wines their astringency, in the mouth. To do that, the machine uses proteins found in human saliva.

The abstract of the article is almost as incomprehensible to me as most wine tasting notes but here it is for more scientifically literate readers:

We report an optical sensor based on localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) to study small-molecule protein interaction combining high sensitivity refractive index sensing for quantitative binding information and subsequent conformation-sensitive plasmon-activated circular dichroism spectroscopy. The interaction of α-amylase and a small-size molecule (PGG, pentagalloyl glucose) was log concentration-dependent from 0.5 to 154 μM. In situtests were additionally successfully applied to the analysis of real wine samples. These studies demonstrate that LSPR sensors to monitor small molecule–protein interactions in real time andin situ, which is a great advance within technological platforms for drug discovery.

The IEEE Spectrum website helps with an explanation

The Danish researchers report having developed an optical sensor based on surface plasmon resonance, which is based on the collective oscillation of electrons that occurs on the surface between a metal and a dielectric when stimulated by light.
Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) is attractive to sensor designers because the resonance wavelength is very sensitive to conditions at the interface. Because of this sensitivity, SPR has been exploited, for example, to detect biomolecules (blood glucose, for example) clinging to the conductor surface.
The design of the SPR-based nanosensor in this case involves a small plate coated with gold nanoparticles. The researchers then put some of the proteins found in human saliva on the plate. When the wine comes in contact with the plate, the gold nanoparticles act like a lens that can focus a beam of light below the diffraction limit so that it becomes possible to measure down to 20 nanometers. This makes it possible to follow the salivary proteins and see how the interaction with the wine impacts them.
In effect, the SPR-based nanosensor is using salivary proteins to measure the sensation of astringency we have when we drink wine.
Joana Guerreiro, first author of the paper, explained in a news release:
“The sensor expands our understanding of the concept of astringency. The sensation arises because of the interaction between small organic molecules in the wine and proteins in your mouth. This interaction gets the proteins to change their structure and clump together. Until now, the focus has been on the clumping together that takes place fairly late in the process. With the sensor, we’ve developed a method that mimics the binding and change in the structure of the proteins, i.e. the early part of the process. It’s a more sensitive method, and it reproduces the effect of the astringency better.”
First applications for such a nanosensor would clearly be in the production of wine, allowing winemakers to control the development of astringency from the beginning of the process. However, the researchers point out that it could be used in the development of targeted medicine as well as diagnostics.

Judging the methods of a wine magazine's wine judging

Reprinted from Glug website - the recommended place to buy wine on the web
Monday, 21st July, 2014  - David Farmer 

In my note Applying financial analyst John Moody's rating system to wine show judging I discussed how the judging or grading of wine is fraught with difficulties. I then pondered if a better system was possible and found encouragement in the methods of John Moody in his rating of financial paper.

To restate the problem in a different way, consider two teams tasting the same set of wines in different rooms at the same time. What we know is they will come up with different results. The results will diverge further if the wine classes do not have a narrow focus; and for example included wines from all countries, many varieties and many vintages.

That Moody article mention was made that knowing such things as the region, the provenance, the lineage or the length of history of the wine, its ability to age and the maker, would give an extra dimension to the tasting and such factors need exploring.

Great wines have taken their position in the wine hierarchy after countless assessments by the market place over many years and such considerations cannot be dismissed.

So let us return to the Winestate tasting. 'World's Greatest Syrah and Shiraz Tasting', of 582 wines.

I have been reading Winestate for decades and know its style pretty well. I confess though that despite the process of judging and scoring wines being clearly set out I have always thought something was missing, no doubt because of my sceptical view of most things.

Winestate say: " ..the wines are not know to judges. The three judges taste the wines blind and assign a score without reference to each other. Only then do they compare scores, and if there is dissension they re-taste the wines and come to an agreement. Scores are compiled using the 20 point international system... These final 'medals' are then converted into a star rating system... A gold medal means 5 stars, silver is 4 stars and bronze is three stars."

The star rating also includes 3.5 stars and 4.5 stars, which in my view mean it is a ten point scoring method. It is worth remembering that Winestate is a buying guide and to my knowledge they do not review wines with scores lower than three stars, presumably because these are not worth drinking.

It worries me that judges use the 20 point system to make assessments and this is converted backwards into the published five star system. Doesn't it make more sense to judge from the start using stars, or publish the score out of 20.

It is also stated: "Wine judging is an inexact art, not a science-even at the highest levels of proficiency. Accordingly, Winestate uses the star rating system which reflects a range, rather than a specific point score. Point systems indicate a level of accuracy that simply does not exist."

Then to clarify a star versus a point score, Winestate produce a table which shows for example a 4 star wine equals, 17 -17.9/20 which becomes 94-95/100.

Here is the Winestate comparison table.

This triggers another worry. Scaling up a 20 point system to 100 points means 4 stars equalling 17-17.9 should become the range 85-90. As I understand it the Winestate comparison table illustrates how the stars compare to magazines which use the 100 point method. Thus four stars undergo a correction factor and become 94-95.

Further clues about the judging process were set out in the Winestate editorial by Peter Simic.

"Of course the problem we face at Winestate, and the reason why our scores tend to be lower, is that we use the International 20 points judging system with three judges tasting each wine blind. Then we use the Winestate \'majority rules\' system where rather than averaging scores, two judges have to recommend the wine and the closest two scores go through. So, for example, if two judges give a wine 15/20 and the third gives it 18 points it is out because two judges have said it is out, rather than averaging up."...

I see no logic in the 'majority rules' method which does at least confirm my suspicion that the results instead of being fearless are massaged. Why not average the three tasters, and where is the case that this 'majority rules' leads to more accurate judging? It strikes me as the opposite as if the judges are equal how can one judge be dismissed even if that score is at a large variant to the others. [Note: Similar pressure or correction is used in Show Judging as well.]

All this confirms is that stars and numbers are a useful buying guide but customers must remain wary. I also have the view that for the five stars rating to offer 'a range, rather than a specific point score' the divisions of 3.5 and 4.5 stars should be excluded as the divisions between 15.5 and 20.00 are not stepped evenly when they are re-calibrated to stars.

The editorial also says:

..."At the higher priced level it is like 'taking the Rolls out on a dirt track for a spin', ...without giving extra points for the provenance of history and reputation. But of course we cannot make allowances for some iconic brands when all our wines are judged blind."

I have already offered caution that not taking into account the pedigree of the best wines can lead to very odd results and I often remark that at the top level it is not the wine being judged so much as the judges themselves.

So a total of 17 different judges worked their way through 582 wines over 6 days. The large number of judges also worries me and adds another random factor to the final result. For example did each panel taste a random selection across all price points or did they know the price category they were judging. We are not told.

My difficulty over decades of reading Winestate is a simple one and revolves around the wine price. Surely a four star wine at a low price cannot be better than a three star wine selling for say ten times the price, yet we are told this is not so.

So what do we find? A few bargains were unearthed at the low price end with 4.5 stars going to Brookland Valley, Taylors Promised Land and Red Knot McLaren Vale while 4 stars were given to Shot in the Dark, Johnny Q, Wolf Blass Red Label and a few others.

Going back to the Winestate table I read 4.5 stars equates to 18-18.4 and 96-97 on the 100 point scale. These are indeed bargains, but what room is left for the far more expensive great wines of this challenge?

So I turn to the eight wines priced over $200 to find two with 5 stars, one with 4 stars and 5 with 3 stars. The 3 star bracket caught some beauties including Guigal (France), Penfolds Grange 2008 and Hill of Grace 2008.

So as a consumer I am expected to believe that Grange, which the Wine Advocate for example gave 100/100, is a lesser wine than a humble Wolf Blass Red Label.

As Winestate has said all wines are judged equally I graphed the results.

Much of the towering edifice of the wine business is built on the basic idea that expensive wines will taste better. Thus the graph should rise as the wines increase in price.

Thankfully I am saved from having to offer a detailed view of the results as my experience allows me to take the easy path by saying I do not believe the results of this tasting.

I turned back to John Moody to see what he might have advised. Moody charged the investors of financial paper for his company's opinions; advice worth paying for if it helps in avoiding losses. Built into the grading is another useful feature as it can assist in deciding your appetite for risk. In 1970 Moody's joined similar firms in also charging the issuers of financial paper for their helpful ratings.

To walk both sides of the street is very hard and I am ever mindful that Moody's with a bunch of others had some role to play in the recent GFC debacle. Collecting money from the issuer and the investor it seems can lead to the corruption of ratings.

Thus I will be very careful about how I use Moody in thinking about wine tasting.

I have the increasing suspicion that some large International tastings are beginning to walk both sides of the street. Tastings have evolved from a service to wine makers, to being offered for a small charge to assist consumers, to the current vision of a global event that can be a useful money maker, with fees being gathered to enter while charging for the use of the results.

Winestate of course has always been scrupulously fair with their assessments but whether the results of this Shiraz tasting are helpful is what this article is about.

I recall that the Winestate results came out about the time Wine Australia ran its Savour Australia 2013 programme with guest arriving from overseas to listen to experts explaining why they should buy Australian wine. I wonder if any visitors stopped to think why two of our most famous wines, Penfolds Grange and Hill of Grace, had put up such a miserable showing in the country's premier wine magazine.

I have wondered for a long time about the point of large omnibus wine tastings and those saying 'we assess all wines equally and masked', seems to offer no better approach than that of the marketing genius Robert Parker and others who knew it made sense at the top end to know what they were tasting.

As you move from agricultural shows which helped instruct amateur makers how to avoid faults to shows becoming part of marketing so they must constantly evolve. I have also learnt that having forthright opinions on wines can leave you badly exposed and to stare down the market place is very risky.

Keeping things in proportion is often hard to do and I do this by reminding myself that wine is just a drink.

Applying financial analyst John Moody's rating system to wine show judging

Reprinted from Glug website - the recommended place to buy wine on the web
Thursday, 1st May, 2014  - David Farmer 

John Moody age 88 in 1956

Can you make a living out of the salmon that John West rejects? I think so as while I know nothing about grading salmon I find I can discover and buy plenty of interesting wines that never make the grade in the show judging.

I have a high opinion of scientists as they place numbers on things which can be duplicated and because of that their theories and opinions make sense. As you move away from measurement by instruments and enter fields where experience and 'feeling' take over from hard numbers I get increasingly nervous.

Tasting and grading wines seems pretty simple. Presented with a long line of wines the idea is you pull forward the good wines and push back the poor ones. Then you further sub-divide the good ones. If required you then give a number to the good wines based on the system being used at that tasting. In essence this is how grading wines has developed over the last 100 years.

I developed a cautionary approach very early in my career. The light went on a great number of times and I vividly remember one moment at the National Wine Show in Canberra in the early 1980s. I was closely comparing wines in a Chardonnay class with the judging results and kept coming back to the number 3 wine which did not even rate a bronze but was my best. The wine was from the Neudorf winery, Nelson, New Zealand, a new region making wines with unfamiliar tastes.

As any winemaker knows entering shows is a lottery and being awarded no medals in Brisbane does not mean you will not do well in Adelaide. I was having a coffee with a local winemaker in Tanunda the other day and he related that at the local Barossa Show he was awarded zilch but a few weeks later and 100 kilometres away at the Adelaide Wine Show the same wines collected three gold medals.

Even so while we accept that well trained professional will make mistakes and lots of them, on the whole a group of judges should be able to indicate the better wines. It helps if the judges are given some clues such as the vintage or the variety and wines are generally grouped such that like goes with like. Without these hints the difficulty barrier is raised to high.

So a judging is seen as the best result on the day, by dedicated experienced professionals, and you must expect the results will vary between tastings.

Tastings of this nature are what I call flat tastings as they are one dimensional. Like many others I have wondered if a better method of grading is possible, one perhaps bringing in other dimensions about a wine.

This issue needs to be debated as no matter how you view judging, the results of numerous statistical studies now question whether results can be duplicated and indeed how expert are the experts.

Searching for a Three Dimensional Judging System

Here are some factors, all well known, which cause concern and might be considered in a more complex judging system which expands the ratings of a few judges. I have added a short note to clarify what is suggested though many of these points could be expanded into an essay.

1. Judging the judges. I came across this quote the other day; "A panel of 13 expert wine judges started to swirl, sniff, sip..", which tells us it is considered some tasters are rated as experts judges while others presumably have the lower rating of judges while the rest of us are amateurs or worse.

2. Comparing like with unlike wines. When appraising different styles together it is incredibly hard to have a just result. Who can say the Champion wine of a show is an old port or a young chardonnay.

3. Comparing wines from different regions or countries. Should wine from Lebanon be judged against wine from France?

4. Comparing different varieties. Can you compare a tarrango with a cabernet?

5. What is the tasting trying to achieve. Is the tasting narrowly defined or does it judge the wines of the world.

6. Comparing the ages of the wines.

7. Comparing the vintages of wines. Some vintages are better than others and if a wine from a poor vintage is judged as better than that of a greater vintage should we be concerned.

8. Should you compare wines from regions with little history with those that have a long history? In my experience it takes a long time for wines from new regions to reach a satisfactory level.

9. Does the wine already have a medal history?

10. Is the wine from a family or lineage with a long history of making great wines?

11. Does the wine have ability to age?

12. The price of the wine. This is a very contentious issue with no easy answer. Alas it must be considered as if the public are constantly told that experts cannot tell the difference between cheap and expensive wines, which is what they are now regularly told, there will be consequences.

The price the wine is sold for must be considered an important clue to wine quality though this is such an important topic it is best covered in separate articles.

13. The wine price also intermingles with the investment grade of the wine and can it be readily turned into cash.This relates back to the provenance of the wine

14. The ability of the winemaker or respective entity of the maker. Here I ponder whether a Penfolds or Guigal wine should have a rating added to the final score i.e. the issue of provenance.

15. The fashions of judging. Certain styles may be favoured which down-grades others. To think judges are unaffected by swings of fashion and practice their craft at a level floating above market swings is to not consider the problems we have in making decisions.

16. Should judges only judge what they know? I believe we all develop easily a cellar palate no matter how hard we try not to. Thus I am not a believer that all judges are equal and can be called up to tackle any wine style without fear or favour. To ask judges from Central Otago to judge Barossa wines asks for trouble.

Examples of Three Dimensional Judging

The Royal Adelaide Show has a Trophy called; the Gramp, Hardy, Hill-Smith Prize for Outstanding Wine of Provenance which was created in 2009, to recognise wines that reflect their region, lineage and longevity.

Another judging system is the Langton's Classification of Australian wine which links a lengthy history of excellence with the interests of consumers in buying the wine.

A further example is the interesting innovation of an eastern states show, from I recall the Southern Highlands, where wines in one class were from vineyards above a certain height, I think above 500 metres.

It is true that a competent judge is meant to take all of these factors into account and no doubt a good judge after a long apprenticeship can and does consider many complex factors.

Looking for a Better Way

Questions such as those listed from 1-16 illustrate some of the problems while the examples above offer imaginative ways forward. There may be a better way to explain to customers the grading of wines by moving beyond the current flat one dimensional way. This in turn made me ask did a better system of grading already exist, perhaps in education, business or science, which could be applied to wine.

After a bit of searching I stumbled across the inventiveness of John Moody who in 1900 developed a rating system for financial paper. I found his ideas had a three dimensional character to grading which offered, if not solutions for wine judging, a display of technique which could perhaps be adapted.

The Thinking of John Moody and Judging

Moody tackled the task of rating the likelihood of a borrower paying the agreed interest and the principle back on a loan. This is a grading system with money on the table and the judgements lead to real gains or losses.

Moody divides the ability of an entity to repay debt with a simple ABC rating but added lower case letters and numbers for the many sub-divisions needed to highlight variants to the basic risk.

A good example is classifying the difference in the likelihood of repayment of short term versus long term obligations.

Moody's system evolved into this grading: 

Aaa Aa1 Aa2 Aa3 A1 A2 A3

Baa1 Baa2 Baa3 Ba1 Ba2 Ba3 B1 B2 B3

Caa1 Caa2 Caa3 Ca C

As I studied the Moody system I found it offered many parallels to wine judging and I list some of the striking features. Moody offers hundreds of indicators which he used in his rating system and below I offer seven to illustrate the complexity of his rating system.

1. Short term versus long term debt. This reminds me of the ability of a wine to age.

2. The rating of the issuer of the debt. Some issuers of debt have a poor record and I see parallels in the divergence of winemaker's abilities.

3. A sovereign state has a different ability to pay to municipals. As the classified growths and other Bordeaux's differ should we have a base rating of some regions over others?

4. The investment manager rating of the advisor to the offer. This of course points at the quality of judges and asks if they should be graded.

5. The rating of the country which considers its past history of servicing debt and outstanding debt levels. This is harder but all things being equal I would sooner cellar Australian wine than Argentinean, at this moment, on a risk reward assessment.

6. The corporate rating. This goes right to the heart of grading as a Penfolds wine is safer to buy and cellar than other companies no matter how they have been judged.

7. A speculation grade liquidity rating which is a punt on a new entity with no history. I particularly like this idea as it asks should we invest in the new region or the new wine maker.

I had these thoughts in my mind when I opened the Winestate September/October, 2013 edition and turned to 'The World's Greatest Syrah and Shiraz Challenge' with 582 wines tasted.

To say the result puzzled and disturbed me is an understatement and I will explain why in another posting - Judging the methods of a wine magazine's wine judging.