I really wish this wine meme would die. Essentially every test done to ‘prove’ that there’s no difference between cheap and expensive wines has had two massive flaws:
1. The label of ‘wine expert’ is left undefined. True sommeliers have spent thousands of hours studying wine and are not the same thing as a guy that takes a weekend wine-tasting course and gets a certificate. Yet most ‘studies’ fail to mention this.
Just as importantly here, what literally every single source we could find not only leaves out when reporting this story, but in the vast majority of cases falsely states, is the actual qualifications of those being tested by Brochet. It turns out, the people he was using as taste testers were not experts at all, simply undergraduate students studying oenology (wine and wine making). While certainly probably more knowledgeable than your average person on the street, nobody would call an undergraduate mathematics major just learning the ropes a “math expert”, nor would their skills be indicative of what their professors who have vastly more experience and are actual experts are capable of doing.
2. The ‘experiments’ are done in a totally unscientific arbitrary way, with massive amounts of suggestion and psychological influence. If this were any other scientific study, it would be laughed out of the room for its total lack of rigor.
As the Master Sommeliers demonstrate by passing the taste test they are subjected to in the first place, with enough time and study, there are actually people who are exceptionally good at identifying and judging attributes of wines in the right circumstances. But overwhelm there sense with 100 wines or change their expectations about what they are tasting and their perceptions will change significantly, seemingly, making them little better than a random person off the street at telling anything definitive about the wine.
A simple flaw in your reasoning - none of the target audience of this comparison is actually a sommelier expert. The whole argument is about an average joe sampling say a wine costing say 15 euros in france and one costing 500. And the same average joe benefiting very little if at all from paying too much. Its like buying La Ferrari which all experts praise, when all you need is to drive 80kmh to next town.
I personally, by no means an expert in any way, can attest the difference is minimal and mostly comes down to one's own preferences / pairing of wine with food in given situation.
Its often one of those markets where you buy your own emotions with higher price rather than actual, measurable subjective added value.
But yes, if you use a wine costing 2-3 euros, quality of taste in many aspects will be incomparable even to that average joe.
> And the same average joe benefiting very little if at all from paying too much. Its like buying La Ferrari which all experts praise, when all you need is to drive 80kmh to next town.
But that isn't usually why these studies are often referenced, and certainly wasn't what the OP meant. The argument presented is often that there is no difference between high-end wines and low-end wines, which seems to be demonstrably false. That's not the same thing as unless you're an expert, you won't be able to tell the difference.
The reality is that wine appreciation, like any field, requires experience and knowledge to build "taste." This is pretty obvious when it comes to other things - no one would suggest that you could understand or appreciate the nuances of a WW2 film without knowing what WW2 was, but somehow when it comes to matters of taste in art, food, etc., the totally-ignorant person's opinion is equal to the expert's.
I'd say it's far more likely that contemporary culture is aesthetically/phenomenologically illiterate.
Is there a good study out there showing that an expert can reliably distinguish between average and expensive wine? It should be quite easy to prove, but all I ever hear about are studies showing the opposite. Because there's a huge financial incentive in making people believe that expensive wine really tastes better, I think it's reasonable to be more skeptical of wine experts than e.g. WW2 experts.
I mentioned prices in euro and France for a reason - there are wine in 2-3 euros category that can be bought there ie in Carrefour/Casino, that qualify as say 'table wine' and are perfectly fine for having say with lunch and dinner. No bad/sour aftertaste, taste is simple but very smooth.
The country I come from, this would be put in above-average quality (which isn't very nice to my home country, but that's my experience).
> Its like buying La Ferrari which all experts praise, when all you need is to drive 80kmh to next town.
Any car driver can easily appreciate the difference between a Ferrari and, say, a Ford. You can't say the same about wine.
Now, since you're making a utilitarian argument here - what is the point of becoming a sommelier when all it does is make you so sensitive to the taste of wine that you need to spend hundreds of dollars for "a really good one"?
On the surface, this sounds like a huge waste of time and money to me. Perhaps having such a fine taste is pure bliss. My suspicion though is that sommeliers are just bullshitters that use their knowledge of expensive produce to get into the company of wealthy people - and earn a decent living.
> Now, since you're making a utilitarian argument here - what is the point of becoming a sommelier when all it does is make you so sensitive to the taste of wine that you need to spend hundreds of dollars for "a really good one"?
Because not everything is about maximizing economic transactions?
I've met professional wine tasters. They are like human chromatographs. They don't just tell you how good a wine is. They can tell you which compounds are in excess, and which are lacking, they can guess what went wrong with the winemaking process and the growing conditions. They are an essential part of quality control and how wineries fine tune their process.
As for difference between cheap and expensive wines, the same wine tasters tell me that price does not always correlate with quality, it is mostly a marketing thing. In fact, the ones I know are more likely to serve you cheap (but good!) wine. They know enough not to rely on price as a proxy for quality.
They can tell you anything they like, doesn't make it true.
When put up against a real triangle/discrimination test, they just don't stack up. I'm not saying they don't do anything, but claims of being able to discriminate individual compounds in any sort of detail are not substantiated.
In other words, it is possible to tell the difference between cheap and expensive wines, but only if you’re so far along the hedonism treadmill that you’ve literally spent thousands of hours training for a career in it.
I've thought about what must happen to a master sommelier's "blind taste" skills once they've passed the exam and no longer need to practice that skill on a regular basis. My assumption is that, like with any specialist, that skill gets rusty if not used, and that the more important everyday skills in that job revolve around their knowledge of wine, ability to suggest good pairings, and customer service.
That's a good point. It's sort of a "problem of the expert" - as you become better at something, the number of people with your level of knowledge becomes smaller and smaller. Since you have less experts or challenges to go up against (or indirectly, exams), your skill level drops.
You don't even have to go that far. If it takes an expert to tell the difference then it stands to reason that the average person will never really taste the benefit above the average level.
I guess this is why it's called "a matter of taste". Anecdote: I can't stand vinegar in anything. So it's really interesting to see someone insist that I should use it because it makes this or that better.
Experts have to judge based (also) on objective criteria. You don't, you just like it more or less.
the wine director (the exalted sommelier who gets to buy the wine that is sold/served) in a high quality restaurant has both passed the exam and works every day literally tasting wines. They get better at it, not worse, and the best of them create lists of quality and diversity that offer them opportunities to taste that are simply not available to anybody else, especially not to a lowly student.
Just as importantly, don’t fall for fetishism. Neapolitan pizza is a very specific style of pizza that, while “authentic” and photogenic, is by no means a superior style of pizza. Especially made poorly, at home, in an oven that is 200 degrees colder than necessary!
You're right about oven temperature. Household ovens can barely hit 500F, that's not quite enough for proper pizza.
There are some workarounds that will make very good pizza at home.
My favorite is to use an outdoor grill instead of an oven. A hot grill with a pre-heated pizza stone is totally capable of reaching proper temperature. This can actually make neopolitan style pizza crust and works perfectly for other styles too.
If you can't do a grill, starting the pizza in a large preheated cast iron pan on the stove top will help. Finish it off in the oven. Not Neopolitan, but very good.
If you are using the recommended "00-flour" (finely milled high gluten bread flour), and you're not reaching pizza oven temperatures because you're using a household oven, add diastatic malt (powder) to the dough mix. This boosts yeast activity and also helps with coloration of the dough at lower temperatures. Otherwise, the pizza will be "done" before the crust has a chance to color properly.
There's a hack you can do where you use your oven's self clean function to reach high temperatures. Most ovens have a physical interlock preventing you from opening the door during a self clean cycle though, so to work around that you'll have to void your warranty and saw off the lock.
I have done it at my old (rented) apartment without physically destroying the latch. If I remember correctly (this was ~10 years ago), I was able to remove the latch assembly entirely, and then jump the wires for the sensor that detects the latch being engaged.
That said, cooking pizza on the clean cycle is difficult, and not necessarily worth it. Timing and vertical positioning in the oven is crucial, or you will end up with a burnt bottom or toppings. Make sure you have a long peel, and keep your face away from the heat when you open the door.
While I agree on your fetishism point, which is in my opinion a byproduct of both post-colonialist "exoticism" and capital-driven standardization of products: using a refractory stone allows your kitchen oven to reach the right temperatures.
Sorry - refractory stone is not enough for neapolitan pizza in home oven. You need something like the baking steel. And if you manage to get the infrared heater on during bake - you can get into the holy 2 minutes of bake time.
I feel that learning the classics on cooking is a good way to see how engineering mindset is close to cooking and food preparation mindset.
Talking about Italian food in specific, they're very opinionated about what's the best way to work each ingredient, how to work dough, how long to leave pasta resting, and what's the best blend of herbs and the best species for each recipe. On engineering we call it standardization not fetishism. That's what DOP, DOC and DOCG is about, and that's what the Neapolitan on Neapolitan pizza is about, you know that if you eat a Neapolitan pizza that follow the official process you will have a predicted flavor on your pizza, like it or not.
By reading the classics and asking yourself why they cook that way you will start to understand that you can use shortcuts where the output could be the same or close enough. For instance stone is a very bad heat conductor, that's why you need a very hot oven to deliver the right amount of heat to cook your pizza. But if you use a better conductor you could deliver the same amount of energy on a much lower temperature. On the "Modernist Cuisine at Home"[0] book they research this topic and arrive on the conclusion that a thick baking steel sheet arrives on much better results, they even sell their official baking steel [1].
DOP, DOC, etc are not about preference, they are designations for regionally protected products names with some production standards. Just like champagne is only champagne if it was made in champagne region from the right grapes in the right methodology.
These assure on the other hand normally a good quality standard as the regional producers' associations have every incentive to keep quality good.
Neapolitan Pizza is the poster child for fetishism, hipster cargo cult, worshiping a style that has only been deemed by the community as superior, not experienced individually to be so. At its absolute best it is significantly inferior to top American examples.
I had this fetishism about neopolitan pizzas for a while despite having never actually tried one. Mostly due to reading a lot of what Kenji-Lopez and others wrote on the web.
There's an annual pizza festival in the summer i nBoston, which brings a lot of Italians with their stone ovens making neopolitan pies. So I went there and finally got to try neopolitan pies which according to pizza aficionados are supposedly really good.
Man, I was in for a ride. Just not my taste. I'll admit that I may be a charlatan or have a pedestrian palate, but I can say now I'll prefer a slice of NY pie over an authentic neopolitan pie any day of the week.
I agree with you that your own judgement is what matters on things like flavors, as long as you don't close yourself off to certain foods that may take a few tries to appreciate.
But I think you've dialed down a very complicated issue too far when you say "one cannot tell the difference between good and very good". A better characterization would be that many factors go into the perception of taste, and it's not always straightforward to identify "good". Here's a decent article on wine tasting that explores the idea much more honestly than, "Haha, experts can't tell!": https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2019/07/can-profess...
Definitely not necessary to buy ingredients "certified" by the "Associazione Vera Pizza Napoletana" but following the traditional methods yields some really tasty pizza.
Technically you're right. But food is for many people more than the taste. It's a form of escapism, a little show that distracts you from the chore. For that to work you need this fantasy of the master chef and authenticity that allows you to enter a different culture mentally. It's kind of live action role play.
I mulled on this comment for a day - your comment saddens me. That said, your ultimate takeaway is sound - do whatever makes you happy, don't rely on others to validate what you should or shouldn't enjoy.
>Please ignore all these experts, all they want is to make you feel special because you drink/eat their stuff.
But if this isn't cynicism for effect and is your true outlook on life I would encourage you to spend some time with any master of something and have them describe in detail to you the things they are seeing in a fellow master doing the same thing.
This <thing> could be anything - sports, music, art, acting, chess, video games...
What you will probably see is the master picking up on all sorts of imperceptible details that seem so subtle that they seem like bullshit. Then try going deep on that same thing, learn it for yourself. Eventually you will reach a stage where you will suddenly discover firsthand how little you know about that skill and how big the world above you is in skill and detail.
Then eventually you will appreciate that this is true for almost every other disciplines and there myriad worlds of hidden detail that you never noticed or appreciated that creators have slaved over. Things that you only notice but can't put your finger on when you compare a pro to an amateur.
Is Monet just dabs on a canvas? Federer just hitting a ball? Is Daigo just a lucky guesser at Street Fighter? Is Mitsuko Uchida just more stuffy and pretentious than your street busker?
Granted, there's a lot of snake oil in food and wine because there's money to be made but don't let that theatre close you off categorically to the world of food (and wine).
Oh, I struggled this for so many years, and I still couldn't convince myself wine is tastier than grape juice. Maybe it's one of those 'street credit' things?
Maybe it's more about finding your own taste and let "experts" believe you can confine nature and culture (food/language/skintones) into imaginary boxes drawn on a map.
That threshold is very different for different people. I'm not a wine drinker so I won't comment but different people definitely have or have developed a much more refined sense of "what is good".
In general of course a person can eat whatever crap they want and it doesn't affect me except when that person is cooking or picking out food for me.
Above a certain threshold one cannot tell the difference between good and very good. Wine tasters know it and it has been very well documented.
When it comes to flavours, as long as it doesn't harm you, your judgement is as good as anybody else.