{"id":5176,"date":"2012-06-22T12:51:17","date_gmt":"2012-06-22T12:51:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/?p=5176"},"modified":"2012-06-22T12:51:17","modified_gmt":"2012-06-22T12:51:17","slug":"some-thoughts-about-the-judgment-of-princeton-tasting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/uncategorized\/some-thoughts-about-the-judgment-of-princeton-tasting","title":{"rendered":"Some thoughts about the ‘Judgment of Princeton’ tasting"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s been a fair bit of chat in the wine world about \u2018The Judgment of Princeton\u2019 (here<\/a>). This was a wine tasting organized by the American Association of Wine Economists (AAWE) along the lines of the famous Judgment of Paris from 1976 in which Californian wines gave some classic French wines a bit of a kicking in a blind tasting judged by French professionals. And this was at a time when new world wines were seen as distinctly inferior to the old world cousins.<\/p>\n

The Princeton tasting pitted French classics against wines from New Jersey in a blind setting, with nine judges from the USA, France and Belgium. The full set of scores plus analysis is here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I was fascinated to see that\u00a0Tyler Colman (the only one of the judges I know personally) gave his highest red wine score to a New Jersey wine, and gave 2004 Mouton and 2004 Haut Brion 11\/20 each, his lowest scores.\u00a0I\u2019m not saying he\u2019s wrong, because I wasn\u2019t there tasting alongside him, and don\u2019t know how the wines showed. It’s just interesting.<\/p>\n

As well as publishing the preferred wines in rank order, the AAWE also did a statistical analysis which showed that, with the exception of a couple of wines (the winning white and the losing red):<\/p>\n

\u2018the rank order of the wines was mostly insignificant. That is, if the wine judges repeated the tasting, the results would most likely be different. From a statistically viewpoint, most wines were undistinguishable.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This, rather than the fact that the New Jersey wines did quite well, was the take home message for many of the commentators on the tasting.<\/p>\n

Jonah Lehrer, writing in The New Yorker<\/em>, delves into the questions this tasting raises here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

While I agree with some of his conclusions, others I have a problem with.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat can we learn from these tests? First, that tasting wine is really hard, even for experts. Because the sensory differences between different bottles of rotten grape juice are so slight\u2014and the differences get even more muddled after a few sips\u2014there is often wide disagreement about which wines are best.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe results are even more distressing for non-experts. In recent decades, the wine world has become an increasingly quantitative place, as dependent on scores and statistics as Billy Beane. But these ratings suggest a false sense of precision, as if it were possible to reliably identify the difference between an eighty-nine-point Merlot from Jersey and a ninety-one-point blend from Bordeaux\u2014or even a greater spread. And so we linger amid the wine racks, paralyzed by the alcoholic arithmetic. How much are we willing to pay for a few extra points? These calculations are almost certainly a waste of time.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I would make the following points.<\/p>\n