“Everyone has the ability to taste and analyze wine, you just need to have the vocabulary and focus to do it,” said Ann Noble, a retired UC Davis professor of Viticulture and Enology. With that, we launched into two days of Sensory Analysis classes, an overview of the sensory properties of wine (appearance, aroma, mouthfeel, flavor, aftertaste) and some of the psychological factors that influence the perception of wine. And though her appearance was unassuming, Noble turned out to be a colorful, crusty character full of dry, sarcastic comments such as “You just have a pinot fetish” and “You’re a prostitute when you’re a researcher because you need money!”

Indeed, Noble’s presentation on her research was impressive. Up till now, I had always been skeptical of professional wine tasters. First off, there have been lots of reports that wine ratings are inconsistent, even with repeated ratings from the same judges. Supposedly, lots of experienced wine drinkers can’t even tell red from white wine. Secondly, wine writers and aficionados tend to use ridiculously flowery languages to describe wines, like “Now, that’s a little girl from Morey-St.-Denis! A virgin. She needs to air a bit. Then we can all prod it, taste it and love it as we truly deserve, as God appointed us.” Yeah, okay.

Noble argued that wine experts who conduct labeled tastings are necessarily biased, and that results based on a few individuals are invalid. On the other hand, using a sensory panel of people trained to describe and quantify attributes of wine under ideal conditions (blind tastings, quiet room, no interfering odors) generates in statistically valid results. The panel provides objective, accurate and repeatable measurements. You can then use statistical techniques like principal components analysis to weight the importance of the descriptive variables, or partial least squares regressions to relate sensory data to chemical or consumer preference data. I am pretty sure the rest of the class was tuning out this section, but my inner stats nerd was in heaven. Who knew my stint at the Fed would be useful in oenology??
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