Jamie Goode: Do wine experts taste better or simply differently?

The preferences of the wine trade don’t always align with those of everyday drinkers. Where does this disconnect come from, and is it a problem worth fixing?

Every now and then someone has a good idea for a wine competition. Normal, low involvement consumers are the ones who buy most of the wine. So why not have them judge wine competitions? The peoples’ vote would be very democratic, and might ensure that the wines that won the medals were the ones that people actually wanted to drink. I can see why this idea is appealing to many.

Allied to this is the fact that wine industry insiders have particular tastes. While consumers get weak-kneed in the face of big, ripe, sweetly fruited red wines that are inky dark in colour and need a spoon to prise them out of the bottle, geeky critics like me are singing the praises of lighter, ephemeral reds that whisper their charms, and beguile rather than seduce. The masses want extraction and density; the critics celebrate infusion and ethereality.

And what about whites? We geeky insiders love Riesling, and tell everyone about it. Normal people don’t understand what the fuss is all about, and avoid it. We champion Fino Sherry and Manzanilla. Regular folk sip it, and spit it out. What is this wine, they ask. It’s so weird.

The great taste divide

So we have a problem. At least on the face of it.

But I’m here to help, and make sense of this disconnect. Once you dig a little deeper, it’s entirely unsurprising, and also easily solvable.

It is not surpising that the tastes of the majority and the few who have significant product knowledge should differ. This is made clear by looking at the retail space. You can see a parallel in coffee or chocolate. The coffee shelf in the supermarket bridges many iterations and interpretations of the same product, coffee. We have freeze-dried instant coffee. We have powdered coffee. We have ground coffee, and coffee beans. We have pods. All cater for different levels of the market. When it comes to chocolate, there is mass market milk and white chocolate; there is mid-market chocolate including dark chocolate with the cocoa percentage marked on it, and then there’s gourmet chocolate. Consumers like different things, they like different levels of ‘authenticity’, and they all explore to different extents, with some rarely straying out of their lane while others range widely across segments and categories.

When it comes to wine, I express my opinion to my geeky audience quite freely. For 19 years I had a national tabloid newspaper column, where I was speaking to a different audience, and I recommended quite different wines. This wasn’t a patronising move, just a recognition that some consumers are at a different stage in their exploration of wine, and that many simply want something that tastes nice at a decent price, and that’s all for them.

I know that not everyone has the same engagement with wine that I do. I also recognize that even high involvement consumers might like different styles of wine to the ones I prefer. This is not a complicated stance to take. If you like the same sort of wine aesthetic to me, read my work and take my recommendations. If your taste differs significantly and you don’t find me a reliable guide, then follow someone else.

But we are in deep trouble if we don’t express our opinions, and instead try to guess the tastes of the majority, and tailor our recommendations to what we feel is mass taste. This is different to what I was doing in my column for the newspaper. There, I recommended what I thought were the best wines from the major retailers at an affordable price point. I didn’t think: most normal people like sweetness in their red wines, therefore I am going to recommend the sweeter red wines with added sugar because this is what I think they’ll like. There’s a difference in approach here.

Why experts and amateurs see wine differently

Now to the difference between the way experts and novices taste. This has been studied scientifically, and the results are interesting, and perhaps as you might expect. Novices taste what is there in the wine glass. It’s all about the direct perception. Experts bring their knowledge into play. They filter their direct perceptions through a wall of experience: what is this wine, what sort of type of wine is it, what are the similar wines that I’ve tasted, and of its type how does this rank? Experts use their knowledge to interrogate the wine; they ask questions of it; they latch onto sensory cues. In many cases, the experience helps the expert understand the wine, but in some cases this knowledge can lead them astray. They can miss what is actually there.

What about the democratic idea of having novices judge wine? It’s usually a disaster. This is because blind tasting many wines in sequence is a hard thing to do well, and even professionals can struggle. Judging wine well is a professional skill, and get amateurs to do it, and the results are invariably wildly random and utterly confounded. It’s too abnormal a situation for most people to attempt and have any expectation of performing well.

Many competitions judged by professionals have a degree of randomness to their results. Bring in regular consumers, and the randomness will doubtless undermine the results.

I don’t think the taste preferences of experts is a problem in the wine world. Ultimately, wineries don’t really need to satisfy the critics: they need to sell wine. Anyone making wine to suit the preferences of trade insiders will go broke if their customer base doesn’t share these tastes. The spectrum of wines being made shows a wide variety of styles, and these wines are presumably finding a home, or else they wouldn’t be made. Just as the opinions of food critics hasn’t stopped fast food franchises from thriving, the valuable and important verdicts handed down by wine critics hasn’t seen the big wine brand manufacturers tilt their style in favour of lean, mineral, taut, authentic wines. And nor should it. We can all relax a bit when it comes to questions of preference.

• Jamie Goode is a London-based wine writer, lecturer, wine judge and book author. With a PhD in plant biology, he worked as a science editor, before starting wineanorak.com, one of the world’s most popular wine websites.