I've heard this, and I would have been inclined to believe it. But then I watched the documentary Somm about the journey of a couple of friends reaching for the highest rankings of sommeliers. They could identify grapes, regions and year with striking accuracy. I just don't see how you could do that and then not be able to tell white and red wine apart.
I barely know what I’m doing with wine but am 100% sure I could at least tell you which are whites and which reds if you lined up a typical Chardonnay, a typical Pinot Grigio, a typical cab sauv, and a typical Pinot noir.
I am certain there exist weird wines that could fool me (I’ve had a few really weird wines) but typical shit from the grocery store, I’m gonna be able to tell at least that much. I might even ID them more precisely than red or white. It’s not exactly subtle…
Then again I don’t have a clue how someone could fail to tell which is coke and which Pepsi in the “Pepsi challenge”. They’re wildly different flavors. I can tell by smell alone.
I vaguely remember looking into this before, and it turned out that the tasters were being told (incorrectly) that it was a red wine, and asked to describe the flavour profile. They then used tasting terms more frequently associated with reds than with whites, and didn't question what they were told.
So it's less a case of "they cannot distinguish red from white" and more a case of "they went along with a suggested classification". I feel like this is a weaker result, although it's still a little surprising.
My feeling is there is the high level classification which is quite difficult to fuck up. After that it’s all adjectives and analogues, which is the fluffed up phoniness that inherently presents itself in the process of converting our subjective experiences of physical reality into abstract symbols.
I've given this map to half a dozen smart/well educated Canadians, who happily engaged in pointing out the states they recognized for several minutes, and not one of them noticed until it was pointed out.
I'm from the UK and would probably have fallen for this for several minutes as well. I hope that I'd eventually realise from the number of states down the West coast.
For anyone else who is geographically challenged, the map apparently has 64 states instead of 50. Here is an article with the extra states highlighted.
Yeah, but that still shows people's perception of wine is barely above noise level, if it can be so easily misled.
For comparison, imagine someone showing a piece of Picasso to art critics and saying "Could you please describe the artistic significance of this painting by da Vinci?" The critics won't start using terms commonly reserved for Renaissance era; they'll say "What the fuck are you talking about, this isn't da Vinci."
A lot of the biggest perceived differences come from temperature, since red wines are usually served at room-temperature. If you ever decide to do a blind test, make sure to control for temperature. I did it, and I had a very hard time picking out which varietals were red and which were white.
I rarely drink wine (less than 1x every few years) and I can tell the difference between a red wine and a white wine, and subcategories of red wines (and I do specifically mean the difference, so that means only when compared to another wine).
The hard part is identifying the type of wine, but many of my wine-drinking friends can do with ease. We've tried the "test," having me or someone else randomly purchase wines from the closest store and then serving random samples to them while they're blindfolded. They're able to identify the specific variety more than 4/5 of the time.
Yeah, I'm sure a lot of these tasters are overly pretentious. But some people are willing to go the opposite extreme and think people can't taste anything. Can anyone tell the difference between Coke and Sprite? Between Coke and Pepsi? Coke and Diet Coke? Of course we can. The difference between a typical pinot noir, syrah, or cabernet sauvignon is not something it takes magic powers to differentiate. Now specific years, wineries, etc, now that raises questions.
