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I don't know what you're searching for, but with conditions like that I'm pretty sure you won't find it. It sounds a lot like you're trying to look objectively at a subjective art form.


> a subjective art form

Lots of people claim that it's not just subjective, and that's what I'm asking about. You said as much in the post I quoted and replied to.

I mean: if someone says Bordeaus pair well with croutons, obviously that's an opinion. But if they say a wine's taste discernibly correlates to its region or vintage, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask if there's any evidence.


Those people saying it's not subjective are wrong, because wine is far too complicated for a human to decipher.

The fruit/veg is the output of a plant's function, whose input (simplified) is light, water, temperature, and soil. Two identical seeds will grow two slightly different tasting fruit if they have different access to those inputs. Most gardeners can attest to how many variables are needed just to grow a vegetable at all, much less get it to grow as well as it can.

On top of that, wine grape vines are often selected for the particular fruit they develop, but are often grown in regions they aren't suited to. So they need all kinds of complicated grafting techniques and treatments to survive the local climate, pests, bacteria and fungus.

Once you can actually get the grapes to grow, you have to harvest them when they are just the right ripeness for wine-making. Since a natural environment is variable, you never really know when this is, but good winemakers establish a good feel for when this is. Much like the above gardening processes it's still mostly unscientific, though it is informed by data and experience.

Then you get to process the grapes and ferment them. This unique grape that has gone through so much to be born is now subject to one of several processes to try to convert sugars into alcohols. The fermentation process used (typically yeast fermenting in barrels) depends on several dozen compounds and a hundred factors all being right for the yeast to thrive and convert the grape's sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide.

Just imagine: the land, air, water, temperature, pests, gardener's care, grape varietal, fermentation... all of these involve complex processes, and a single variable changed can throw everything off. All of this adds up to one unique bottle of wine.

If a person claimed that they could detect all of this from a single sip of wine, no matter how standardized the process of tasting, they're lying. The only thing they can hope to do is guess where this wine was from, what type it was, how it was grown, how it was fermented, etc. They do this by studying the above entire chain of events in every wine growing region in the world, and based on that information, try to deduce the origin of the wine, and judge its quality.

Considering how many wines there are and how many variables go into each wine, it's kind of insane to think you could decipher all of this with a human palette. So wine tasting is a weird guessing game/hobby. A lot of people do make a living off of accurately determining all these things, but there's no way you could call this a science. It's an art.


> If a person claimed that they could detect all of this from a single sip of wine...

Nobody's talking about anything remotely that grandiose. If someone simply says they can tell a red from a white more often than not, that's still an objective claim that can be tested. Just because nobody can know everything every time doesn't mean it's all subjective.

More to the point, if someone says "you can taste differences, and often those differences correlate to a certain "kind" of wine", that's also a testable claim - i.e. something I'd believe if there's evidence for it. Hence I asked if you knew of any. (At this point I'll take the answer as read. ;)




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