Drink the Cheap Wine

I was born with one of the world’s worst palates, and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.

Gourmet pasta with my wife on Friday evening? Superb. Chef Boyardee with my daughter for Saturday lunch? Delicious.

Some of my friends have very strong opinions about pizza, to the point of driving past four or five pizza places to reach the promised land; it’s all good to me. Some have equally strong opinions about beer; not I. (In fact, some years ago I was involved in a beer tasting competition and finished dead last. My prize: a case of Diet Coke.)

You ridicule me, I know. Serious, informed dining is supposed to be one of the great joys of life. But when global warming destroys all the ingredients for your Trout with Salmon Mousse in Puff Pastry and my Roasted Duck Breast with a Black Mission Fig with Red Port Demi-Glace, I will get by just fine on Beefaroni and Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop Tarts.

In a world of airline food and waxed tomatoes, a muted palate is a blessing.

Of course, those few times when I do run into a lunch or dinner that’s less than satisfying (my mother had a gem called “baked-stuffed bluefish,” the thought of which still makes me gag), I take great comfort in knowing that there will be another meal coming along just a few hours later.

Consequently, with a palate like mine, the subject of fine (high-priced, sanctimonious) wines is fertile ground for skepticism.

Even as I sit here writing, I can see in the corner of my eye the Wall Street Journal ad for WSJwine, promising me a “seductive Monterey Pinot Noir, cherry-laden estate Chianti Riserva, and two Sauvignon Blancs of rare intensity.” Whoa. Seductive, cherry-laden intensity? Who wouldn’t want that?

Consequently, it was with great satisfaction that I picked up a copy of Leonard Mldoinow’s The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives and just happened, on first glance, to open it to the pages in which he takes on the wine industry. (In fact, the great thing about this book is you can open it almost anywhere and get immediately drawn in. He is a smart, funny writer and the content is terrific.)

In the section I read, Mlodinow is writing about measurement, and he chooses as one of his targets the significance of wine ratings.

Step away from the door of your finely-assembled wine cellar, seat yourself comfortably, and read on:

In one study, three researchers secretly added a bit of red food color to white wine to give it the blush of a rosé. They then asked a group of experts to rate its sweetness in a comparison with untinted wine. The experts perceived the fake rosé as sweeter than the white, according to their expectation.

Old Smokey 1968 has been compared favourably to a Welsh claret, whilst the Australian Wino Society thoroughly recommends a 1970 Coq du Rod Laver, which, believe me, has a kick on it like a mule: eight bottles of this and you're really finished. At the opening of the Sydney Bridge Club, they were fishing them out of the main sewers every half an hour.

Wine experts were given a wine triangle—3 bottles of wine with two the same and one different—and were asked to choose the odd sample. They were right, but only 2/3s of the time. (I hope those with three or more children went home with the right ones.)

Another good fighting wine is Melbourne Old-and-Yellow, which is particularly heavy and should be used only for hand-to-hand combat. Quite the reverse is true of Château Chunder, which is an appellation contrôlée, specially grown for those keen on regurgitation; a fine wine which really opens up the sluices at both ends.

In 2008 a group of volunteers asked to rate five wines rated a bottle labeled $90 higher than another bottle labeled $10, even thought the researchers filled both bottles with the same wine.

Of the sparkling wines, the most famous is Perth Pink. This is a bottle with a message in, and the message is “beware.” This is not a wine for drinking; this is a wine for laying down and avoiding.

(By the way, the wine palate is connected to the soft drink palate. When a researcher asked 30 cola drinkers whether they preferred Coke or Pepsi and then asked them to test their preference by tasting both brands side by side, 21 of the 30 reported that the taste test confirmed their choice--even though the researcher had put Coke in the Pepsi bottle and vice versa.)

A few years back, when both The Penguin Good Australian Wine Guide and On Wine’s Australian Wine Annual reviewed the 1999 vintage of the Mitchelton Blackwood Park Riesling, the Penguin guide gave the wine five stars out of five and named it Penguin Best Wine of the Year, while On Wine rated it at the bottom of all the wines it reviewed, deeming it the worst vintage produced in a decade.

Real emetic fans will also go for a Hobart Muddy, and a prize winning Cuivre Reserve Château Bottled Nuit San Wogga Wogga, which has a bouquet like an aborigine's armpit.

All hail Two-Buck Chuck. Like Olympic figure skating scores and modern art, when it comes to wine, we’re often being taken for a ride.

The former editor of Wine Enthusiast says, “The deeper you get into this the more you realize how misguided and misleading this all is.”

So why does the rating system thrive, Mlidonow asks? “The critics found that when they attempted to encapsulate wine quality with a system of stars or simply verbal descriptors such as good, bad and maybe ugly, their opinions were unconvincing. But when they used numbers, shoppers worshipped their pronouncements. Numerical ratings, though dubious, make buyers confident that the can pick the golden needle from the haystack of wine varieties, makers and vintages.

Would that this phenomenon were limited to wines. Mlidonow notes:

A group of researchers at Clarion University of Pennsylvania collected 120 term papers and treated them with a degree of scrutiny you can be certain your child’s work will never receive: each term paper was scored independently by eight faculty members. The resulting grades, on a scale from A to F, sometimes varied by two or more grades. On average, they differed by nearly one grade.

If you have kids in school, you know how maddening this can be.