Iedereen heeft z’n eigen proefperceptie als het om wijn gaat. Daarom waarderen zelfs de bekendste experts wijn vaak verschillend. Er zit derhalve nogal wat subjectiviteit in wijnbeoordeling. Maar omdat professionals over meer informatie en proefervaring beschikken, zijn ze beter in staat wijnen naar kwaliteit en waarde te schatten dan gewone consumenten. Dat concludeert collega Jamie Good op zijn website Wineanorak. Een benadering waarin het voor en tegen van wijnwaardering evenwichtig tegen elkaar worden afgewogen. Conclusie: objectief proeven bestaat niet.
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Wine tasting: subjective or objective?
Exploring the nature of wine perception

I’m guilty of it. When I’m presenting wine tastings to consumers, I’ll encourage them to trust their own palates, and not to be deterred by the seeming mystical ability of some wine writers to detect a shopping list of flavours, spices and fruits in a simple glass of wine. ‘There is no right and wrong in tasting wine,’ I find myself saying. ‘Your views are as valid as those of the expert.’ Effectively, I’m telling them that wine tasting is totally subjective.

But then in my working life, my colleagues and I act as though wine tasting were anything other than subjective. We give wines a numerical score; we argue about the merits of particular bottles; we take part in competitions that award medals to some and not to others; we think that our expertise in wine assessment is of a level where we can charge others for it.

So which is it? We can’t really have it both ways. To suggest that wine tasting is merely subjective is not intellectually honest in light of the way that we, as professionals, work. This conundrum is highlighted by philosopher Cain Todd in his recent book.[1] Equally, anyone who has been around wine for a while can’t really argue that wine tasting is utterly objective. So the goal of this article is to begin to explore just how subjective or objective wine tasting actually is.

Assumptions

There’s a hidden set of assumptions underlying attempts at wine education, all the way from the most basic WSET (Wine and Spirt Education Trust) courses up to the tasting exams of the MW (Master of Wine) qualification. This nested set of assumptions concern the objective nature of wine tasting.

They begin with the assumption that the taste of wine is a property of the wine. They continue along the line that as we taste together, we are all experiencing pretty much the same thing as we taste, as long as we have a properly functioning nose and palate. There is the recognition that good tasters can have subjective preferences, but that these can be set these aside to facilitate objective wine assessments.

Then, when it comes to competitions and the act of wine assessment and criticism, this assumption of objectivity continues. Some notable wine guides and websites are in the business of charging readers for access to tasting notes and scores of wines. Because the wine world is now a large one, these sites involve teams of tasters. The belief underlying this is that this currency of a ‘professional tasting note’, when authored by a competent wine critic, is of some value because competent critics will read the wine correctly. It follows from this that it doesn’t really matter who authors the note from the team, as long as that wine is covered.

I’m increasingly convinced that there is no single correct way to read a wine. There are two reasons I have come to this conclusion. First, from working up from the physiology, psychology and neurobiology of perception, and second from working down from looking at wine assessment in practice.

Disagreement

I’ll start with the latter. It is plain to see that even the most experienced and acclaimed wine professionals disagree quite significantly in their assessments of wine. This is shown beautifully in the tastings section of the magazine The World of Fine Wine. Here we have teams of three experienced tasters looking at the same wines together. The great thing about these tastings, though, is rather than average out scores to reach some sort of consensus, the individual scores of each taster are given. Often there is a large variance.

If wine tasting were objective and there was one correct way to read a wine, then the only conclusion that could be made is that where tasters disagree significantly, one of them has got it wrong. But this is an uncomfortable conclusion that doesn’t chime well with experience.

Of course, there is such a thing as ‘getting it wrong’ in tasting wine, even if we are to take the view that there is a strong subjective element in wine tasting. Broad-brush categorizations of wine by quality level are appropriate and fairly robust among tasters.

For example, wine pricing varies dramatically, and such price differences would not persist if there was not such a thing as differences in quality levels. The word ‘quality’, however, needs to be used with care here, because we are entering the realm of aesthetics. Who gets to decide that one wine is great and one wine ordinary? Or that a wine is faulty? [After all it is quite common to find wines that are highly acclaimed by some but dismissed as faulty by others: for example, wines affected by Brettanomyces or with some reduction characters.]

Generalities

Certain characteristics of wine are regarded as positive attributes, and contribute towards a wine’s quality level. We have to tread carefully here, because we are dealing in generalities, not absolutes. Factors such as balance, concentration, elegance, purity and complexity are seen as positive attributes. You might reasonably expect professionals, when faced with an array of wines of rather different categories, to be able to separate these wines out according to their quality level, in a very general sense.

This is a level that is fairly objective, and one which is loosely reflected in the price of the wine. Take for example, a simple Bourgogne rouge available for