Hilarious journal article on "bullshit" in wine ratings

Originally posted by b3shine
Maybe you should do a little research on Richard Quandt. He’s an extremely well-respected economist from Princeton, so I’m comfortable with his credibility and qualifications.

Originally posted by Christian

I have read a little Habermas and quite a bit about Habermas. Like wine writers, he likes to use really complicated terms to describe everyday activities

Right, so to which extent does Quandt in his article elaborate on how wine connoisseurs "quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant"?

I don’t see much emphasis on exposing the activity of ’quietly changing the rules governing their end of the conversation’ in his article. I see more emphasis on comparing what the author reads with his own experiences.

I need to find a bottle of that 1995 Chateau La Merde; sounds fantastic!

Originally posted by Christian
Also, I just entered an old rating of Three Floyds Arctic Panzer Wolf. It has scorched earth in it’s commercial description. It mostly tasted of hops though

There is always a stretch in the descriptors people use for beer, wine, scotch, etc. in short, very complex human made concoctions like those above will have a blend of rare or previously unknown smells and tastes to our brain. Thus we describe these flavors in terms that we do know. Have we eaten chips of oak? Have we eaten raw black currant? Have we all smoked marijuana? Don’t fool yourself into thinking every stretch of a descriptor is total bullshit. To the uninitiated strange descriptors sound like BS. Really they are our minds reaching for something we can comprehend when the true smell or taste eludes us. Clearly slate, clay, and graphite are not descriptors because we have eaten these things. But because they remind us of the mental image and it makes sense.

Tasting and smelling are about association, not the actual product. Otherwise any beer would only smell and taste of beer (or maybe hops, malts, yeast and other ingredients). And association of taste and smell goes way beyond things we have eaten or smelled, even beyond what can be eaten. What this article fails to make clear (although it makes for a funny read) is that he objects to the kind of observations in reviews that are almost only understood in the reviewing community itself.

The danger here is not the clearly, almost ironically, poor attempt at science on beverage reviews or the unscientific one-sided approach of writing ones personal opinion without factual backup, but rather the possibility that this paper might be read and further advocated in a serious manner by some ass who calls him/herself a journalist.

I’ve often thought there’s a hint of new-mown cow pasture in some of the more esoteric beer reviews on this site. The article is quite hilarious.