"Experiment" #4 - Lies, Damned Lies, and Wine Judgings

I recently had the distinct pleasure of reading about someone doing the same thing I'm doing here, except much better, in the Wall Street Journal, of all places. An illuminating essay about how wine ratings are largely bullshit, A Hint of Hype, A Taste of Illusion, focuses on a series of studies about the fallibility of so-called wine experts.

Below are some of the more salient and startling points from this essay, for your reading pleasure:

• Researchers secretly added red food coloring to a dry white wine to simulate a sauterne, sherry, rosé, Bordeaux and burgundy and asked experts to rate the sweetness of the various wines. The ratings corresponded to the type of wine the tasters thought they were drinking.
  
• Two identical Bordeaux wines were served to a panel of experts, one in an expensive Grand Cru bottle, the other in what looked like a cheap table wine bottle. The tasters showed a significant preference for the Grand Cru bottle, describing it as "excellent", while calling the contents of the table wine bottle "unbalanced" and "flat".
• An experiment where the same wines were poured 3 separate times for a panel of wine judges showed that the judges' ratings of the same wine varied wildly between tastings. Only about one in 10 regularly rated the same wine within a range of 2 points.
• After some data manipulation of the results of wine competitions over several years, it was determined that the odds of one wine winning a gold medal in a competition were at about 9% for any given wine. In other words, a wine that won the gold one year was just as likely to win a gold the next year as any other wine in the competition.

I didn't find these results too surprising. If you're an established wine critic, you have a reputation to uphold, and thus your rating heuristic is going to be a little bit different from that of an average wine drinker. You cannot be too extreme or drastic in your reviews because you will probably lose credibility when your peers rate the same wine highly. Chances are, most of the wines you will be trying will be at a high enough level where saying that they have colorful overtones of dog shit or a mild hint of battery acid on the nose will only paint you as an ignorant newb. And, given that most of the tastings you do will not turn out to be experiments in disguise, your heuristic probably works well more often that not.

But what about the average wine drinker who does not have a reputation to protect? Can we tell a cheap table wine from a more expensive label? And so, inspired by and riding on the coattails of the WSJ essay, I bring you "experiment" #4, the wine battle.

In this experiment, I procured a bottle of Charles Shaw, aka Two Buck Chuck, Cabernet (2008, $2) and pitted it against a Cabernet from the Napa Valley winery of St. Supéry (2003, $20). The vintner describes the St. Supéry Cab as:
"Luxurious, rich and concentrated with aromas of cherry, currant and blueberry these are just the start of this 2003 Cabernet Sauvignon. The harmonious flavors of black cherry, anise and plush cassis explode upon tasting. This is a classic Napa Valley Cabernet which is wonderful young but has everything it needs to age beautifully. Enjoy now through 2011."

Not surprisingly, I couldn't find a vintner's description of Chuck online, and I regrettably threw away the bottle, which I think had some writing on the back, during a drunken stupor brought on by chugging everything that was left after the conclusion of the experiment.

PROCEDURE:
The experimental design was very simple. I marked the base of a bunch of paper cups with the letters P or Q. P was the St. Supéry. Q was the Chuck... because Q stands for Quality. Then I gave each subject a P cup (ha ha) and a Q cup and asked which letter of wine they preferred.

I also tasted both wines, having someone else pour them, of course.

RESULTS:
Out of a total of 14 subjects, the results came up dead even. Seven people preferred Supéry, and seven preferred Chuck. I asked the subjects if they were frequent wine drinkers, and though I didn't do any formal statistical analysis, it seemed like both groups consisted of both connoisseurs and casual drinkers.

WHAT I THOUGHT THE WINES TASTED LIKE:
I drink wine a lot. I don't know too much about it, but I think I know enough to wow people who don't know jack shit. (The same goes for how well I speak any number of foreign languages.) I found the Supéry to be almost undrinkable, ie I would drink it but only to get wasted. It was very tannic and had a definite battery acid/vodka nose. The Chuck, on the contrary, was quite pleasant. It didn't have too much going on, smell or taste-wise, but it was delightfully inoffensive.

WHAT OTHER PEOPLE HAD TO SAY:
One of my favorite comments came from a guy who was a member of the St. Supéry wine club. After the tasting, but before being told which wines he had tasted, he said that he preferred P (the Supéry). I asked if it was by a huge margin. He said that it wasn't and that, frankly, he didn't really care for either one. When, later on, I told him which wines he had tasted, he started laughing and, after telling me he was in the wine club, he admitted that, had he known he was tasting Supéry, he would have been much more enthusiastic about it.

Another guy, after tasting the wine, correctly placed the P wine (Supéry) in Napa. I was suitably impressed... until he informed me that the Q wine (Chuck) must have come from Sonoma.

CONCLUSION:
The fact that a $2 wine and a $20 wine tied is compelling enough. It is interesting to note, as well, that of the people who preferred the more expensive wine, only ONE person preferred it by any kind of margin. Most people, regardless of which wine they preferred, said that neither was that great.

So, where do we go from here? By no stretch of the imagination does this study mean that you should always buy Two Buck Chuck while self-righteously snickering at the morons buying a $12 bottle of wine one aisle down. However, I do think that you shouldn't buy a bottle of wine just because it's highly rated or expensive... unless you're trying to impress someone because then all logic and reason goes out the window anyway. I guess, if there's any overarching take-home message to be had, it's this. Don't trust anyone but yourself when it comes to wine. And don't trust yourself either, unless you're blindfolded. And it's probably a great idea to buy one expensive-looking bottle of wine, pour out what is probably shit-swill, and then buy a case of Chuck and funnel it into the bottle whenever you have company.

"Experiment" #3 - Niman Ranch vs. Safeway

I love steak. I really love steak. There are many reasons for loving steak. It's delicious. It's primal in a way that only a slab of bloody meat can be. Unless you're one of those douchetards who likes to your steak well-done (and at that point, you might as well be one of those toothless old hags who chews animal hides to soften them before dyeing), it's quick as hell. And, yeah, knowing how to properly cook steak is great for getting laid. Unless, of course, you're a douchetard who likes your steak well-done because NO ONE wants to fuck a toothless, old, animal hide chewing hag. NO ONE.

I also love steak because it's cheap. Gone are the good old days where a steak dinner was the main event in an expensive evening out. Today, you want a steak, you go to the supermarket, and you get one for something like $5. Or do you? In San Francisco, things are not always that simple.

In the land of the organic, sustainable, local, and keyword-ridden, you might be tempted away from the supermarket steak, especially if you've seen that, like, every seemingly self-respecting restaurant gets its meat from Niman Ranch. You wouldn't be able to avoid seeing that, of course, because, like, every restaurant puts at least a few purveyors on their menu. And, apparently, this has been going on for a while:

"Growth of Niman Ranch is credited to restaurants that list it by name on their menus. From nearly the beginning, Niman was unique among small farms in that it sought to create a consumer product brand. The invention of California Cuisine, and by extension most modern American cuisine, is often attributed to celebrity chef Alice Waters. When Waters opened her iconic Chez Panisse restaurant in 1971, Bill Niman sent her pork for evaluation. Waters agreed to buy pork from Niman, and included both the name and company logo on her menus." ("Niman Ranch", Wikipedia)

So, how much of this is about marketing bullshit, and how much of it is about delicious steak? I decided to find out. Enter "experiment" #3, where I pit Niman Ranch against generic supermarket steak. As always, note the price difference. Also note that I'm getting pretty good at photoshopz. DO NOT note that I do not deserve to even hold the expensive DSLR I got for Christmas. In other words, the Niman Ranch steak is glistening unnaturally because I haven't yet learned how to properly use the flash.

Niman Ranch New York Steak	Supermarket New York Steak
$17.99/lb	$5.49/lb

This "experiment" is even more scientifically dubious than the previous two because there were only 2 subjects, but I couldn't invite the starving barbarian hordes into my home; it just wouldn't do. Our first impressions were a distinct gaminess emanating from the Niman Ranch specimen and no scent whatsoever from the supermarket variety. Had my eyes been closed, it could have been crown molding.

Then I cooked them, trying my best to stay consistent.

Salt and pepper both sides. Sear on one side until it's a lovely brown. Hold with tongs and render some of the side fat until it's golden. Flip and stick into a 450 degree oven. Poke with finger in a few minutes. Decide it's time. Let rest. Cut and admire the perfect medium rare red to pink within.

Here's the kicker, folks. After cooking, the steaks were pretty much indistinguishable, according to both subjects. They had tender parts. They had juicy parts. They had chewy parts. They had fatty parts. Neither was out of this world, but they were both meaty and primal and well-seasoned and tasty. Except that one had a brand that Alice Waters decided to stick on her menu years and years ago. And a price tag to match.

And, oh yeah, the steak got me laid.