Spicy Roasted Chickpeas
Picnic Recipes Galore
Corner-Store Party Food on the Fly
9 Chili Recipes, Bison to Vegan
How to Choose the Best Strawberries
Sausage Recipes of the Month
Over on Slate, wine economist and MIT Media Lab denizen Coco Krumme (best byline ever? this writer votes "yes") does something simple yet brilliant: she breaks down precisely why a large swath of wine writing is mostly useless.
"Using descriptions of 3,000 bottles, ranging from $5 to $200 in price from an online aggregator of reviews, I first derived a weight for every word, based on the frequency with which it appeared on cheap versus expensive bottles," she writes. "I then looked at the combination of words used for each bottle, and calculated the probability that the wine would fall into a given price range."
The result? Fancy, ultra-specific descriptors ("tobacco," "focused cassis," "boysenberry") cling overwhelmingly to expensive bottles while more general and pedestrian words are used for the lesser (priced) wines.
Moreover: the fancy descriptors are rarely reproducible from taster to taster and often bewilderingly specific, in contrast to simpler terms. Her conclusion: "words like full, sweet, fruity, and dry are, unlike camphor, genuinely helpful. In an earnest effort to nix subjectivity from reviews, critics have gone too far, leaving us with a bag of adjectives that say a lot about price, and almost nothing about flavor." Maybe two-word wine reviews would be better?
Image source: Flickr member gcfairch under Creative Commons
I think the problem is that the people doing the analysis of wine tasting apparently expect that there's some sort of easy to describe objective description that should be able to be applied across the board to all different wines and that's obviously not going to be the case. You can break a wine down to it's esters and alcohols but that doesn't necessarily provide any information for the way...+READ
I think the problem is that the people doing the analysis of wine tasting apparently expect that there's some sort of easy to describe objective description that should be able to be applied across the board to all different wines and that's obviously not going to be the case. You can break a wine down to it's esters and alcohols but that doesn't necessarily provide any information for the way they "mix" to form the final product.
What they're overlooking is that while it may be that the wine drinking customer Bob has never eaten, dirt, camphor, or leather, he knows that he really liked the last three wines that Parker described as tasting "earthy, with hints of camphor and leather" whereas he hated the wine that was described as "jammy".
Therefore to call wine reviews bullshit is to miss the point, the review can provide a starting point for a wine that may interest a customer, relative to the reviewers tastes, not the customer's.-COLLAPSE