O Captain Mercaptan - Quantitative methods for rating wines, part 2
I checked out Wines: Their Sensory Evaluation (Amerine and Roessler, 1976) from the Chemistry Library (!) at the University of Washington. This book is not only a fascinating primer on how to enjoy and taste wines, it also has a tremendous set of empirical wine rating systems in Part II - Statistical Procedures. Hot damn.
A quick side note: I went into the Vino 100 store in Bellevue, WA yesterday. I was excited to see how they arrange their wines; they have a group of tasters who decide how fruity/dry in flavor and how light/full in body each wine is compared to every other wine in the store. They call this tool their Wine Barometer™ and I think it’s a little pretentious to have the ™ in there, but still it seems like a smart marketing ploy…and I like how this Wine Barometer allows the store to avoid relying on external numeric ratings.
Anyway, the Amerine and Roessler book is absolutely riveting for someone like me. I love the prose style of these two scientists: “Between the frankly yeasty and the obviously mercaptan there is a range of odors that resemble each other” (36). I had never thought of anything as “obviously mercaptan” before I read this book, but now I think I’ll suddenly find many thing to smell “obviously mercaptan.” It sounds so…serious.
I am up to page 38 right now, but I’m looking forward to the discussion of rating systems and whatnot that comes in Part II. For example, it warms my heart to see that my instinctive wish for a smaller number of possible points and an ordinal scale has been fulfilled (121). More interesting, though, is the Davis score card (123), where aroma and bouquet are granted up to 4 points out of the 20 total possible points. Flavor only gets 2 points in this system; indeed, of the 10 scoring categories, 9 of them are worth up to 2 points or simply 1 point. Only aroma/bouquet gets more possible points, but that makes sense since much of what we think of as “flavor” is actually an olfactory experience that coincides with eating or drinking something.
Better still is the idea I had in an earlier comment about a golf-style scoring system where the best wines get the lowest scores. The Office International de la Vigne et du Vin Score Card (127) sets the perfect wine at a score of zero, with multiplying factors for characteristics such as odor intensity and taste quality. Interesting.
So, this book appears to be quite interesting but also quite dated (the most recent publication date is 1983) given the tremendous changes in the wine industry since the 1970s and early 1980s. Still, I look forward to reading their discussion of rating systems.
February 16th, 2006 at 11:17 pm
Another wonderful quote from page 40: “Table wines with an inappropriate degree of sweetness, particularly in relation to the acidity, have an undesirable ’sweetish’ taste. We find this a useful term.”
February 17th, 2006 at 11:19 am
I agree that there is an appeal to doing a golf-like scoring system, but I think that if you are trying to design a system that catches the interest of others a higher-is-better system may be the best way to go. A couple thoughts on why:
First, there is the basic experiential fact that a higher number is up and up is more and more is better. So to a certain extend with the golf-like scores you’re swimming against the tide and are going to have to do more explanation to establish how your system works. Not a lot more, but I think intuitively people respond to the higher is better type system.
Second, when doing a higher-is-better score, you’re basically looking for what is wrong with the wine rather than what is right. On one level there really is no difference between the two, but I think that, again, your system will have more appeal to other con
Of course, both of those reasons exist outside the purely quantitative concerns that you’re trying to get at.
February 17th, 2006 at 11:20 am
The last word in the second to last paragraph should read “connoiseurs.”
February 17th, 2006 at 5:15 pm
I assumed you meant “ex-cons.” *)
No, you’re probably right about the marketability of a wine that gets a perfect zero. Sounds awful to me! I guess you could invert the scores or something and call a zero the same as 100 for consumers, but that seems cumbersome.
I do think, however, that qualified judges may be better off looking for what is wrong with a wine of a specific varietal, but then you’re making, for example, Chateau Cheval Blanc the best Pinot Noir against which all others are judged until one surpasses the white horse. Not good….