Love is blind, especially when it comes to wine
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It's a well-established fact that if you're drinking expensive wine, the best way to maximize enjoyment of it is to be sure that you know what you're drinking.
- So it's worth asking why the very people who helped establish that fact have continued to blind their wine for 40 years.
Why it matters: As evidenced by the revealed preference of some celebrated economists and others, blind tasting can, in the right circumstances, provide long-term benefits that dwarf any short-term returns.
The big picture: A long series of empirical experiments has demonstrated that even sophisticated and experienced wine tasters do not prefer more celebrated and expensive wines when they're tasting blind.
- Many of those experiments were conducted by Richard Quandt, a lauded economist and founding member of the Princeton Wine Group, which has met roughly eight times per year since the 1980s, drinking more than 1,700 different wines in the process.
- Now the legendary economist Burton Malkiel — author of "A Random Walk Down Wall Street," which has sold more than 2 million copies and has never been out of print in more than 50 years — has published a detailed account of the Princeton Wine Group, and what its members have learned, in the Journal of Wine Economics.
What they found: The group does a statistical analysis of every group of wines it tastes, and has found, with one notable exception, that they cannot "determine dependable differences in wine quality," per Malkiel, even when they're drinking such spectacular wine as Mouton Rothschild or Romanée-Conti.
- The one outlier came in a tasting where a 1995 Dom Perignon was clearly preferred to "a $2 bottle of Russian sparkling wine bought at a Moscow airport."
Between the lines: Every member of the group loves and appreciates drinking fine wines, so why would they deliberately obscure that enjoyment by drinking them blind?
- One hint can be found when Malkiel writes that "the real delight" in the tastings "comes from debunking myths and finding wines that are beating their more expensive peers."
- The members of the group are all self-aware enough to know that if they weren't drinking the wines blind — if they knew just how celebrated one wine was versus another — then they would be far less likely to be able to identify unsung wines that are just as great.
Zoom in: The group does know which wines it's drinking. It just doesn't know which is which. As a result, says labor economist and founding member Orley Ashenfelter, "the general pleasure is always clear."
Zoom out: Ashenfelter notes that "blind tasting encourages some modesty that is all too often missing among those who claim wine expertise."
- He's wise enough to know that even economists can become big-headed about such things if they don't have regular tastings keeping their feet firmly grounded.
The bottom line: As former Continental Airlines CEO Frank Lorenzo, another member of the group, tells Axios, "Blind tasting adds an intellectual element to the wine drinking pleasure, and adds some modesty to experienced tasters."
Go deeper: The whole paper is worth reading, including the way in which the tastings were designed to create an "unbreakable prior commitment" that Ashenfelter and others could use to excuse their absence from Princeton faculty meetings.
- Malkiel, 92, can also be delightfully waspish. At one point, for instance, he writes that drinking wine, as a hobby, "sure beats collecting stamps."
