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Let’s address a big question: is wine tasting, especially blind tasting, really a nonsense and total hoax? Or is there actually a real science behind it?
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**CONTENTS OF THIS VIDEO:
0:00 Is Wine Tasting Nonsense?
1:06 Blind Tasting & Theoretical Knowledge
3:14 Practice Makes It Perfect
4:32 The Purpose of Blind Tasting
6:45 How To Evaluate Quality?
#winetasting #wineeducation #wine
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34 Comments
I think your dog wants to taste some wine 🍷🐶
You are just wonderful. Love your energy and your communication
Excellent.
Yourself and Konstantin are the best wine video producers on the interwebs!! I know Herr Baum is a MoW. Curious about your qualifications??
I have attended multiple blind tasting and paid wine tasting.
For blind tasting, we gather 3-4 friends who will bring 1 bottle each for others to taste. No limit budget or minimum price, just good wines. This is my most fav' one. There were few occasion where we got to blind taste, 2012 Grange, 2010 Chateau D'issan, 2009 Chateau Malartic, Super Tuscans and etc. its fun, its relaxing and we got to change our taste and share good wines.
For paid tasting or sampling, it is usually organise by wine importer in my country. Some are just not known wine maker and some are not exactlt premium as how they price it.
I have been trying to learn more about detecting the more subtle flavors/armoatics in wine and attend several blind tastings events. I find I am improving. I even started my WSET journey in order to improve my knowledge and force myself to drink wines I wouldn't normally drink. I don't want to be a "wine expert" or sommelier, I just love wine and want to experience as much as I am able. I marvel at the people who can detect and identify wines even down to the region. Being a computer programmer by trade I try to learn all the skills I can to improve my own skills. What I do for my enjoyment deserves the same level of dedication and interest. Keep up the good work. Love your videos!
You are 100% correct on time. I have opened a bottle (Bordeaux in particular) tasted it and thought, just awful, no faults, just bad, heading for the sink drain. But then giving it some time to open up and re tasting. Wow, should have bought a case. Patience is a virtue. Practice it. And as always:
Enjoy the sunlight held together by water🍷
sveiki, Agnese! once I tasted a Puligny Montrachet (J-M Boillot, "Champ-Canet", 2015) in the afternoon around 15:00 and I could still feel its lasting the next day, so I know exactly how you felt after tasting this champagne.
were you a ballerina when you were a little girl?
Try a wine you love in a nice glass then try a little splash out of the glass in a thick rimmed cup. One tastes great and the other will turn it into straight butt cheeks.
Another great episode by Agnes!
Great content. Blind tasting is unique to wine. I love to watch experts blind taste because I learn from their tasting notes and I apply them to my own. These tests also encourage me to try new styles. Loads of fun. Thank you
I can’t necessarily name the qualities in a wine. I can, however, sip a wine and if my reaction is “HOLY FUCK!” That’s a 96 or higher. “HOLY SHIT!” That’s a 93-96. “HOLY MONKEY!” That’s a 90-93.
Terroir, traditions of the producer (in vignoble + vinification), vintage , age of the wine , etc Lots of factors.. Grands Vins need time to open-up, to evolve , and to get alive in the glass. I often give 2 hours of aeration and then take the time to enjoy over several hours. Keep some for the next night even. So, to judge a wine in one minute beside several others, does not make justice to this wine. I totally agree with you. Of course ''professionals'' have experience , and knowledge and can take all those factors into account , but still … It's subjective. The best memory I have is of a Barton 73 , in 1980 , with a perfect match of food and special friends and ''ambiance'' Magic moment in time . Good memories also with Cheval Blanc ,Sassicaia , Yquem , HdB Corton, Bonnes Mares, Montrachet, Pommard, Palmer, Rauzan Segla , And VCC. ''Raiders of the lost Cellars'' coming soon in a theatre near you. À ta santé, Agnès de mon coeur.
Learning about wine should be fun. One can learn about wine by reading. Learning by tasting is a lot more fun, so it's a good idea to learn how to taste wine. Wine professionals have great tasting ability and the opportunity to taste a lot more wine than I do, so I like to use their expertise and experience to learn even more from them. It's why I appreciate what you and others in your field do.
About 15 years ago, I was talking to a few “somms “ at a restaurant. I posited a theory that, though the senses and goals are different, the “trick” to blind wine identification is an analog to ear training. The example I cited was this: when I was a student, we had dictation classes. In these we had to write down what we were listening to, without the benefit of an instrument- just pencil and paper- and all we were given was the tonic note of the key of the music. Mind you this was usually not music we knew- usually. I don’t have perfect pitch. And as a student though my ear was good, i was still a student. My approach was to immediately identify the style and period of the piece. This lets me exclude, several things that I may have thought I’d heard, but that wouldn’t be possible in a given style, or more likely things in a given style. This allowed me to join theoretical knowledge with aural training. As such, as my ear continued to improve over th years, very frequently the distinction between theory knowledge and hearing began to blur.
I posited to these “somms” that I’d hypothesise that blind tasting could be trained and improved in much the same way.
They were completely dismissive of the idea. Yet they could not convince me why I was wrong. They treated the notion like it was a stupid naive concept. I still stand by my belief on this
Such a serious topic. Good for you! Lots of opinions rolled up in this one. Definitely, knowledge plays a big part
Wine tasting is a tough job but somebody has to do it
I am extremely proud to say I got the Riesling.
The more I learn about wine the less I know! 🥂
People following you are not pretentious. You can bank on that.
One of your best sessions! Thanks for sharing. Also love your suggestions on glasses, etc.
Nah it's not. Like with all things it can be someone faking it, but the honest version is just someone with experience trying to communicate to you what a wine is and why they like or dislike it. To get something out of this, you actually need to be quite informed yourself. Not just in terms of understanding the lingo, but also because you have to understand the biases of the reviewer as well as your own taste to know in what way their take is relevant to you. If you get all of this down, a review can be incredibly useful to you.
I think that what often happens with regards to the title is that people are intellectually lazy and think that a score = how good the wine is universally. Then they get disappointed and call it pretentious nonsense. This kind of fallacy can be found in surprising places. I once saw a wine program presented by none other than John Cleese, where he makes this exact mistake. And that's someone who has been around a lot of good wine and is above average knowledgeable through his station, if not personal interest.
Agnese 🎉 ❤ you will always be my Bacchanal Queen ❣️👑 You're essential not snobby. ❤❤ A bright light in the wine 🍷 world you definitely are ❤
It is a truly wonderful and relaxing moment that people could speak freely about what they taste in wine and what the taste reminds them of. Doesn’t have to be like “stone pavement after a spring rain”, it could be “fabric softener on clean clothes”.
For me, blind tasting, is just furthering my knowledge of wine
"Most" of the time I stock wines I have consumed / encountererd. Sometimes the encounter will be at a restaurant. If I find myself, or my partner, suitably impressed I will try to hunt the wine down. I have a good friend who 'almost exclusively' makes his purchasing decisions based upon wine magazine reviews. At my favourite wine store the staff test everything presented to them and about 28% of that makes it to their shelves so yes – wine testing is important.
I salute your presentations. They are always thoughtful and informative. For us amateur aficionados they are very helpful. I prefer a non blind tasting as I am less interested in comparing than I am in analyzing the wine before me. Do keep up your excellent programs. Thank you.
5:00 – OZ!!! The person who got me into the wine hobby. I actually thought about him, in the context of this video – how he gave James May to smell different fruits (and other stuff), to get a context of smells and then identify them later in the wine glass.
Great points philosophically, Agnese:
– It's wrong to think of blind tasting as a supernatural power: it's an interplay between perceptual and conceptual knowledge.
– The form of perception varies over people and over context, and vocabulary designations are also a factor.
– We don't taste for price but for quality. If a cheap wine is good and an expensive one disappoints, then there may be fraud, but not necessarily on the taster's side
👀
One big battle I keep fighting over: by the end, you say "we can never be […] 100% objective, since we taste through our own personal senses and judge wine on our own experiences". While the latter is of course very true, I don't think objectivity relates to that (radical view here):
I see objectivity as an attitude to be vigilant about what the facts are and what you are contributing to the processing, and assessing both within the relevant context. If you're committed to doing that, then you're being 100% objective in my book.
Why do I think that our personal senses and experience are not part of the equation? Well, because there's no concept for an alternative! There can't be such a thing as tasting through "no specific senses" or judging on "no particular experience"; anything is specific in actuality, including us and our minds (that's a feature, not a bug!). So a concept of 'objectivity' that cannot exist by its own definition is putting an unfair burden on it: it's defining it in an impossible way for it to exist. Poor thing! Jokes aside, I hold that if a concept is formed in such a way that it can't possibly ever have any actual instances (in a sense, the definition is self-contradictory), then something's not quite right about it.
There's my drink for thought! Or something to drink over 🍷 Cheers!
Your my mentor, such an inspiration. Exciting anticipating Latvias new MW 😊
Not pretentious, wine is glorious, and your videos are invaluable in helping me understand and describe what I am seeing, smelling and tasting. Thank you again 😊
Hi Agnesse, thank you for explaining that it is not NONSENSE, at least if the wine tasting is done by a professional…..
I have a question, some friends assist on just drinking Bio Based Wines, most off the time for the reason that it is less harming for health and better taste. According to taste, i don't agree in multiple occasions. What is your opinion about taste and health according to Bio Based wines….?
Great video as always! I was a member of the Commaderie de Bordeaux for a couple of years, and we blinded multiple wines (6-8) at every dinner. Whether doing verticals of the same wine or various wines of the same appellation, blinding took out the mental predisposition of the label for me. I taught me what I liked.
MW/MS blind tasting is a party trick. Professional tasting is either for ranking wines or keeping a meal running smoothly by identifying flaws before the guests get the wine. Tasting skills are also essential as you make wine, or reverse engineer a wine by tasting it.
For example in a tasting menu in a fairly fancy place last week in the wine paring I received a glass of corked Barolo. Nobody bothered to taste it before I received it. So I sat there waiting for a new bottle.