The Limits of Wine Expertise: Achieving Objective Results in Professional Tasting | 6

Isabelle Lesschaeve Author

Can wine tasting be objective? Isabelle explores biases, expertise, and sensory science for unbiased, approachable professional wine evaluation.

Can Wine Tasting Ever Be Truly Objective? Insights from Sensory Science

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We're tackling a big controversy: Can wine tasting ever be truly objective? Or is it always colored by personal bias and background?

In this episode, Isabelle walks you through the difference between traditional expert tastings and sensory science–backed methods, sharing real stories from inside the wine industry about how our genetics, training, and even the order we taste wines can affect what we perceive.

Why does expertise sometimes lead us astray? What sneaky biases mess with our minds during tastings? And—most importantly—how can we, as wine professionals or keen enthusiasts, take practical steps to bring more objectivity into our technical evaluations?

In this episode, you’ll learn about:

☑️ expectation bias,

☑️ the power of suggestion,

☑️ The importance of randomizing wine sample tasting order, and

☑️ How sensory science can help us get more reliable answers about what’s really in the glass.

If you want your wine business decisions to be based on genuine perceptions rather than hidden pitfalls, you won’t want to miss this conversation.

Ready to trust your senses (and outsmart your brain’s tricks)? 

Let’s get started!

Links from today’s episode:

• Bias Free Tasting Masterclass: Learn more about it here
  
• Transform your wine tasting experiences into a customer conversion engine.
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Connect with Isabelle:

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• Leave Isabelle a message

Transcript (auto-generated)

Isabelle [00:00:04]:
Can tasting be objective? Let me rephrase. Can technical wine tasting be objective? Well, usually my answer is yes, because that's what sensory scientists deliver, objective testing data, data that are free of cognitive biases. But I received a lot of pushback lately where the notion of testing objectively is described as nonsense or unrealistic by many influencers wishing to transform the wine industry practices. They are claiming that all tastings are only subjective. But don't hear me wrong. I know from having studied them in depth that differences among people exist in terms of their tasting skills. We have different sensitivities to aromas and taste, different skills to describe sensory perceptions. All these differences come from our genetic makeup and our cultural and home upbringing.

Isabelle [00:01:03]:
So, yes, our personal experience of wine is subjective. But is the pushback against a scientific way of conducting tasting, meaning sensory science? Or is it against the idiosyncratic wine tasting protocol that wine experts have dictated to the industry and the public? Welcome to today's episode of We Taste Wine Differently. I'm your host, Isabelle Lechabre, wine sensory scientist, educator, and tasting coach. Can tasting be objective? As the dictionary, the Merriam Webster dictionary, defines it, the definition goes like this. Objective is the lack of favoritism toward one side or another. It's being free from bias. All right, so can technical tasting be free of bias? To answer this question, we first need to acknowledge that there are two different types of wine tastings, at least two different types. There might be others, but I want to contrast two different types of wine tasting.

Isabelle [00:02:16]:
There is the wine tasting way you've learned at the wine school, whether you call it the five S's. Remember, you see, you swirl, you smell, you sip, and you savor. Or maybe you learn with the deductive method from the court of sommeliers or the systematic approach to tasting from the wasct. And there is the other tasting method, the sensory tasting method, the method that I advocate, which is the scientific method of evaluating products with our five senses. These are different methods to assess wine characteristics, but lately have been amalgamated under the term sensory tasting. And that has led to many, I think, unproductive discussions online and offline. So the question I want to discuss with you today is the Is sensory tasting by default biased and subjective because it is conducted by humans? Or is one approach, the sensory science approach, more objective than the traditional wine tasting approach? So let me first set up the context. But let me first set up the context.

Isabelle [00:03:36]:
I'm discussing tasting objectivity in the case of wine technical evaluation. I'm not talking about testing with consumers at your tasting room or during events. I'm talking about you wine professionals. When you taste wine as part of your work duties, whether it's production, quality assurance or commercialization, most of these duties are led through your expertise. You're expert in the products, in and out. So in today's episode, I will first dive into what expertise is. Wine experts have been criticized lately for their inability to connect with today's consumers because of their rituals and language. But I will argue that we need wine experts, especially on the technical side of operations.

Isabelle [00:04:23]:
If you consider yourself a wine expert, we need you. But you also need to be aware of the limitations of expertise. And be aware when expertise loses objectivity. Then I will discuss what factors hinder objectivity in a tasting and why experts are not immune to them. And finally, we'll review the steps you can take to bring more objectivity to your professional tastings. Let's dive in. Well, I never thought I would come to the defense of wine experts. We usually argue more than we agree.

Isabelle [00:05:04]:
But there is a place for wine expertise that we can't deny. But it seems neglected in the debate I mentioned earlier. So yes, wine experts have their legitimate place when it comes to defining product integrity, its compliance with local rules and regulations, and its marketability. Of course, you want product experts to make wine detect any off flavors or taints during the winemaking process and post bottling, you want experts to assess product compliance to award an appellation of origin. So yes, we need experts, but not everywhere and not for every aspect of running a wine business. Because once you become a wine expert, you're no longer a normal consumer. There is so much academic evidence that experts do not perceive wine in the same way as normal people would do. Because experts tend to detect more aromatic nuances than non experts.

Isabelle [00:06:05]:
They tend to have lower threshold to detect certain aromas or taste. They tend to have an extended wine vocabulary, more technical than descriptive. For example, they would say it smells va volatile acidity instead of nail polish remover. Or it has strong tannins to describe what we called astringency. Basically, they associate perceptions with the cause of the perceptions. Because they troubleshoot the wine, they judge it. That's their job rather than just describing it for the sake of it. And I would add that experts use a top down process to assess wine contrarily to most consumers.

Isabelle [00:06:46]:
And we will talk about that more later. Experts indeed leverage their acquired knowledge of any information given to them at the time of the tasting to assess the wine quality, its typicality and its eligibility. So to judge These aspects, quality, typicality, ageability. Experts need to be specialized in a particular wine region or a particular wine style. Yet wine is so diverse as a domain that it's difficult to generalize expertise, because wine expertise is not solely built on textbooks, but on sensory experiences and what experts remember from them. And that's where expertise can become more subjective than objective. Here are a few examples that came to mind when I was preparing this episode. When New Zealand launched its style of Sauvignon Blanc decades ago, they were heavy on tropical and green notes.

Isabelle [00:07:58]:
While many Sauvignon Blanc experts called them faulty, they didn't fit the established norm for Sauvignon Blanc. And yet we know the commercial success of this style of wine. On the same line. Understanding the different winemaking philosophies between the Old World versus the New world reminds me of one of my former bosses who used to tell me that Australians taught French winemakers how to make hygienic wine because French wines were full of faults. According to him, he referred to what some described as complexity, a touch of Bretanomyces here and there. So for ocs, bread was a big no, no, an infection, and a major fault. For Old World winemakers, it seems to add layers of complexity, but the debate is open. Another example I often quote in my courses is the disagreement between two very well known wines, wine experts, Jancy Robinsons and Robert Parker Jr.

Isabelle [00:09:07]:
When they debated about Chateau Pavie and I think it was vintage 2003, one wrote a very negative review and the other one wrote a raving review. So which expert do you trust when it comes to wine recommendation? Then I understand that's one pushback from today's wine consumers. They don't trust experts anymore. So wine expertise is subject to the expert's specific domain expertise. And yet experts are humans. Meaning relying on one or two experts to make business decisions may be at risk. Let me give you a few examples. When I was working at a large winery one day, a wine shipment to a European customer was refused because of the sulphur levels were out of an acceptable range.

Isabelle [00:10:03]:
But the wines had been tasted before shipping and dipped okay by the head winemaker. But the customer was very adamant that there was a problem. That's when we realized that the head winemaker had a high detection threshold for sulphur and he didn't picket it. So relying on one person can put your business at risk. Another example that came to mind, one client sent his wine for me to describe their flavors using my sensory approach to tasting. And I picked up a Slight bell pepper note in one Cabernet Sauvignon I tasted blind. I didn't know it was a cab. But you see, I'm very sensitive to pyrazines, especially the compound responsible for the green bell pepper aroma, 2 methoxy 3 isobutyl pyrazine.

Isabelle [00:10:58]:
My client was almost offended. I'm sorry about that. And he ordered a chemical analysis of his wines, which came back with the following statement. Pyrazine concentration is below the detection threshold. So was I wrong? Maybe. But the thing is, a detection threshold isn't a fixed value. It's a distribution. So imagine a bar chart.

Isabelle [00:11:27]:
On the x axis, you have the concentration of the pyrazine, and on the Y axis, you have the percentage of people detecting the bell pepper pyrazine in water at a certain concentration. So when you look at this graph, it looks like a bell curve. You have people on the left who need a lot of pyrazine to detect the bell pepper aroma, and the people on the right who are very sensitive. And the majority of the people are in the middle of the graph. So it looks like a bell curve. So the threshold, the detection threshold is the concentration where about 50% of the tested population falls. So I'm really on the right side of this distribution of threshold. So if you want to make sure that there is no green pepper in your cap, you can hire my nose.

Isabelle [00:12:20]:
And I will certainly be more sensitive than any chemical analysis. Same thing for tca, the compound responsible for the cork taint. However, I will be useless for detecting acetaldehyde or the VA compound because I'm not that sensitive. So does wine expertise ensure objective tasting? Well, based on my two examples, we can question that aspect if you rely only on one expert. The knowledge and experience of wine experts can surpass some sensory blind points. The knowledge and experience of wine experts can surpass some sensory blind spots, such as low sensitivity to certain aroma or taste compounds. And, for example, many people are bitter blind. They can't perceive bitterness at normal concentrations.

Isabelle [00:13:22]:
Expert testing conclusions can be objective when it's a matter of troubleshooting technical problems with their defined areas of expertise and sensory skills. But as soon as we go outside, we take a risk. So whether you consider yourself a wine expert or a very trained wine professional, what is critical to remember is that you need to be aware of your own limitations, your different sensitivities, or, you know, your cultural biases, which can be blind spots leading to misinterpretation of what you taste in wine. So is the solution to work with a Panel of experts, Maybe three to five people testing together rather than relying just on one person. Yes, of course, that's the beginning. To take into account diverse experiences and diverse sensitivities. But here's the thing. There are other factors biasing the objectivity of a panel of experts testing wine.

Isabelle [00:14:26]:
And to be honest, I'm appalled that the topic I'm going to discuss now is never taught in wine appreciation classes. Regardless of the level of certification you are reaching. I'm talking about biases that can mislead you during a tasting. And yet being unaware of these biases can lead to some sort of sensory illusions or distortion. When you're tasting wine, There are about 10 well known biases that can affect any taster regardless of their level of expertise. These biases fall into two main categories, Physiological, where your senses trick you, and psychological, where your mind, your brain takes over your senses. These errors are usually out of your control and you won't notice them. So let's explore a few that are particularly relevant for us in technical wine tastings.

Isabelle [00:15:40]:
However, if you want to go deeper into tasting biases, I have a pre recorded masterclass diagram dedicated to this topic. I cover the 10 biases and the sensory practices you can implement to mitigate them. It's called the Bias Free Testing method and I will add the link to it in the show notes. Alright, let's start to review a few of these biases and the most challenging one for all experts out the bias of expectation or anticipation. As a wine professional, your prior knowledge or information pre frames your sensory perceptions. I've described in episode three, the color experiment by Gilles Moreau and his collaborators that tricked many wine experts. If you remember, the researchers created a perceptual illusion where a white bottled wine was artificially colored in red using an odorless dye. Then they asked a panel of 54 wine experts and students to describe the aromas of both the original white wine and the same wine colored in red.

Isabelle [00:16:51]:
The findings showed that when smelling a white wine with a red color, all of a sudden your brain filters any sensory input that seem at odds with the expectation of hey, this is a red wine what I'm seeing and therefore I'm tasting a red wine and should expect a only red wine aromas. Just a side note here, that's what I called earlier a top down process. The knowledge you acquired determines what you perceive from the top cognitive brain to the senses. In contrast, the bottom up process that most naive consumers use start with what we sense and go up to be interpreted based on our knowledge. So these expectations are real. And this bias can lead to unfair quality assessments, whether negative or positive. For example, if you know wine is from a less prestigious region, your brain might reinforce an expectation of lower quality, regardless of its true characteristics for your customers. A wine price point or its vintage, or even the name of your brand can unconsciously set their expectations before they even taste your wine again.

Isabelle [00:18:04]:
It can affect their judgment positively or negatively. And as professionals, we must be aware that our own expectations about wines or those of competitors can bias our assessment. And I'm catching myself when it happens sometimes after the fact. The other day I was tasting an American hybrid wine, a Marechal Foch, and my brain was chatting. It's going to smell like Concord grapes or maybe grilled meat. These are the two attributes I often perceive in hybrid wines. And of course, I was wrong. None of these attributes were there because I caught my thoughts in time.

Isabelle [00:18:46]:
So the most efficient way to mitigate the expectation bias is to taste blind without any information communicated to you about the tasting objective. Meaning you don't want to know what's the desired outcome or the decision to make. You don't want to know the identity of each wine or its technical sheet. I realize it's not the common practice in technical tasting, and it's not always possible to set up a tasting that is blind on all of this information. But the less you know, the less biased you will be. Otherwise, you taste with your brain and not your senses. The second bias I want to talk about is the halo effect. This occurs when a strong impression of one characteristic unconsciously influences your rating of another, even if there is no actual correlation.

Isabelle [00:19:41]:
Taking the Marechal Faux wine that I tasted, the color was deep purple, and my brain started to chat again, screaming, who? Deep color, high astringency, drying mouthfeel, when in fact the wine I tasted after was very smooth, not very tannic at all. So be careful with the halo effect, especially when you're grading a wine using the deductive method or the was systematic approach to tasting. Don't let one perception influence the evaluation of another perception. Let's move on to mutual suggestion. This is typical in commercial tasting, when every participant voices their opinions. So mutual suggestion occurs when one taster's response, especially from someone experienced or maybe with a higher status, influences your own opinion. This can happen through verbal comments or even subtle facial expressions and gestures. We call it the Colonel effect, because who will dare contradict the team, lead or senior officer in the room? Unfortunately, this bias is difficult to control if there is no Prior acceptance by all participants that all perceptions are valid because we all experience and interpret the wine's quality slightly differently, again due to our genetics and cultural background, as discussed earlier in this episode.

Isabelle [00:21:13]:
So one way to counteract multi old suggestion is to ask tasters to record first their notes individually and then to review them with the rest of the group until a consensus is obtained so that you can compare the individual notes with the consensus later on to see if they align and agreed. Another bias that is well known in sensory science, but not really known in the wine world. It's called the position effect. It's the order in which wines are presented. Another bias is called the position effect. It's a well known bias in sensory science, but not so much addressed in the wine world. The order in which wines are presented can indeed dramatically affect their assessments. One wine with a lingering astringency or lingering aroma can impact the evaluation of the following sample.

Isabelle [00:22:34]:
Despite this knowledge, many technical wine tastings keep the same order for every taster. But it's very easy to do. You code your wine glasses, you can use a crayon or label and you pour the correct wine in the correct coded glass. And use a simple presentation order design to randomize the samples among participants so that each taster evaluate the wines in a different order. Blinding the sample and randomizing the order will significantly increase the objectivity of the test. And here's another argument to randomize the sample order if you base your decisions on the taster's preferences. This is definitely not something I recommend because again, we don't like the same wine style. And when experts are no longer normal consumers, so they can't pretend to select a wine that consumers would prefer.

Isabelle [00:23:31]:
But for the sake of the argument, I want to share this research I did with my colleague Dr. Antonia Montanakis at Brock University. We showed that in short flights, when you taste two or three wines, tasters often prefer the first wine, what we call the primacy effect. While in longer flights, when you taste four to five wines, the last wine often gets preferred, what we called a recency effect. So you don't want to select the wrong wine because of an experimental bias. Randomize the sample orders. That's simple to do, and I highly encourage you to do that. The last bias I want to touch upon is physiological.

Isabelle [00:24:18]:
It's called the sensory adaptation. This physiological phenomenon causes our senses to become less responsive with repeated exposure. If you repeatedly sniff the same wine in a short period, its intensity will rapidly decrease as your olfactory receptors become saturated. It's like the aromas of a delicious meal disappearing after you've been in the kitchen for a while. If you keep smelling and tasting without a proper break between samples, you're going to saturate all your sensory detectors, olfactory, gustatory and the chemistasis. You need to come back to your baseline. And really, I don't understand why palate rinsing is not mandatory in professional tasting. It is mandatory in sensory tasting, again to minimize biases and increase objectivity.

Isabelle [00:25:17]:
Because rinsing your nose and your palate is the best way to get rid of sensory adaptation. Going back to our question: Can technical wine tasting be objective? The answer is yes, if you minimize these biases I just reviewed. Self awareness is your best counter to many psychological biases. Simply knowing these biases exist and how your brain can filter information is the first step. It helps you become more open to assessing descriptors independently and staying focused on the wine itself rather than external pressures. So if you work with a group of experts and minimize the best you can, the expectation and hello biases prevent communication. To avoid mutual suggestions, encode the wine glasses and randomize the orders of services. Plus impose a mandatory palate rinsing and break between samples, you will start getting closer to tasting objectivity.

Isabelle [00:26:31]:
But then how do you ensure objectivity in the data collected from tastings? Ah, that's the Achilles heel of professional tasting. The tasting protocols are indeed either freeform, like let's take the wine and talk about them, or very structured using the detective method for example. And there are biases due to these very rigid format. So I mentioned the halo effect, but there are a few more. So that's where sensory tasting, following the sensory science methodologies, sets itself apart as far as objectivity is concerned. Sensory science methodologies are designed not to judge quality, as I mentioned in episode three. But these methods focus only on panelists perceptions of the product. There is no mental interpretation of what these perceptions mean about the wine.

Isabelle [00:27:33]:
As the panelists taste, the interpretation is made based on the data collected and after the tastings. In the context of professional tasting in support of production, quality assurance or commercialization, sensory tasting methods address two types of questions. Are the wines in the set perceived as being different? For example, if we have produced three wines from three different clones of Sauvignon Blanc but made with the same winemaking conditions, do they deliver the same sensory profile? And if they are different, the second question how are they different? Is it a question of intensity of the typical Sauvignon Blanc notes? Or are there different distinct aromas delivered by the different clothes to answer these two basic questions, we use different methods depending on the resources we have available and the constraints in which we operate. But all these methods ensure that the data are collected independently. There is no mutual suggestion here. In an environment that is free of distraction, the data are reliable. Either we collect data from a large panel, 20 people or more, or we replicate the testing twice or three times to assess the panel repeatability so that we have confidence in the data analysis and the data are analyzed for statistical significance, meaning we check if the result is due by chance or if the responses given by the panel are homogeneous enough despite their inter individual differences. We know it's normal we all differ in our sensory abilities due to genetics, upbringing and cultural background.

Isabelle [00:29:33]:
So when the agreement among tasters data is strong enough despite the natural variation in sensory perceptions, then we can be confident the data are meaningful. And that's how we get closer to testing objectivity when we implement sensory testings. Because objectivity in technical testing is critical when you base your business decision on these technical testings, would you agree? So I invite you to listen to episode three to learn more about sensory science and I will add additional resources in the show notes to learn about specific methodologies. I didn't want to go into details here and I'm also available to review your circumstances and help you start collecting more objective tasting data for your operations. So feel free to contact me with your questions using the link included in the show notes. So it's time to recap to the question can technical wine tasting be objective? I shared with you today that despite their deep wine knowledge and experience in the field, wine professionals and experts are and they too have sensory blind spots and they can be influenced by what they know. So no, most technical wine testing can't provide objective data unless unless testings are controlled and designed to remove the well known cognitive and physiological biases we talked about expectations, halo, mutual suggestion, position, effect and sensory adaptation. Finally, I gave you the first steps you can take to minimize these biases in your future technical wine tasting.

Isabelle [00:31:32]:
If you have any questions or want to challenge me on tasting objectively, feel free to contact me@inovinom.com contact it's I n n o v I n u m.com contact and I will be happy to answer your questions.

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