“How Low can you Go?” the billing read — a search for true value through a blind tasting of great wines priced from $5 to $60.
Perfect. If you’ve ever been to a tasting where friends guess price, you end up confused, amused, or both. The most overheard remark is “it must be buried in the marketing.”
Bright and early Friday, at an opening session of the Food & Wine Classic, sommelier Joshua Wesson brought five other friends around to prove that experts get mixed up, too. A blind tasting would be a most “humiliating” experience, he guaranteed. What if you taste something worth $60 and you think it sells for $10?
“Fine,” Wesson said. “Go with what your tongue tells you.” Don’t worry about price. Taste is personal.” Those remarks were calculated to settle the audience before its members would feel like idiots for being unable to come anywhere close to “The Price is Right.”
For the tasting session, there were six wines. Each was from a different grape and different part of the planet. Tasters knew nothing about price and brand. They would have to guess, by nose, taste, and color.
A blind tasting at the feet of a master. Wesson is billed as “a brutish sommelier who reveled in the extravagance of princely pours” before he began working for a group of value-oriented wine shops. This was going to like the first class of freshman year, set at the foot of a massive staircase leading up to an unknown beyond (think “Beautiful Mind.”)
Arranged in order were two whites, three reds, and what we later found one writer described as “really brown.” That really brown one was clearly a sweet dessert wine, but how expensive?
The six were priced evenly from $10 to $60. Nobody knew the brand, price, type of wine, or region. At 10 a.m., an unfamiliar hour to drink wine, would you conclusively be able to tell champagne apart from a chardonnay?
Wesson narrated the session by dispensing lessons. Not surprisingly, most consumers recognize snob appeal. They’re more likely to place a higher value on a highly priced wine simply because it’s expensive. The California Institute of Technology ran a study, using students as guinea pigs. With their brains’ pleasure centers in control, according to Wesson, the students were shown each price and then asked to rank several wines by value. (For some reason, only schools get to do this sort of thing).
Not surprisingly, after tasting wines whose prices they knew to be between $5 and $90, the tended to adore $90 brands while ranking the $5 spreads as forgettable.
The Food & Wine program provided no advance evidence. Unlike some of the other sessions, no particular wines were listed for the Wesson special in advance. There would be no clues. What you see, taste and put to the nose is what you get.
The panelists, as blind as the audience began the guessing. They were all over the map. The highest-priced wine was a Chilean cabernet, at $60. It elicited two guesses at $60, but another at $10 and one at $7.99. Somebody didn’t like Chilean cabernet before they knew what it was.
Gary Plumley (founder of Aspen’s Food & Wine festival in 1983) will often point to bang for buck, and suggests patrons consider potions from South America or Portugal. We believe him, because we think they couldn’t possibly have the same marketing costs built into their prices as wines from the California or France.
Wesson promoted the same yardstick as a question of whether a wine exceeds expectations. That test suggests why Two Buck Chuck (Charles Shaw, often sold by the case at $1.99 a bottle from Trader Joe’s) sells so well. You judge it a $5.99 wine and it’s only one-third of that. Such a deal.
The first of the six-wine set was a plain-looking glass of white. That turned out to be a French Taittinger champagne, at $50 a glass. Panelists uniformly ranked it as a top choice, but was this because it was a champagne? The “very brown” sweet wine was an Australian Shiraz-plus, at $10. It drew an average guess of $35. Three panelists didn’t think much of wine #3, a Malbec from Argentina, but the fourth ranked the brew at $40 (it sells for $15).
A blind tasting is always revealing. Pit Kettle One vodka against “generic” Popov at one-quarter the price, and half the crowd will judge the Popov as tasting better. A cut below Popov are brands that give themselves away because they are remarkably similar to stomach medicine.
The audience at the Wesson session was similarly amazed. One confessed privately to ranking the Taittinger dead last, which occurred because he mistook if for generic white table wine. But that’s something he wouldn’t volunteer in public.
The session, a sort of pep talk for the rest of the classes that followed, would be repeated later in the Classic. Some of us will never come close to having seasoned palates, but if it’s a blind tasting, it will get interesting.
And that’s before they bring on the cold sake.
The writer is a founder of the Aspen Daily News and appears here each Sunday. Counsel, console or berate him at ddanforth@aol.com. Your notes will be kept private unless you ask that they be printed.
