The theme was Syrah/Shiraz. Guests were asked to bring a wine where Syrah was the principal grape. Price limit was set at $20. No regional bounds were set, so of course I went with a Maryland wine. I knew I was bringing a bottle of Maryland’s Finest from Black Ankle Vineyards. My target was their Passeggiata, but Wells Liquors was out of it that day. Rather than drive around town looking for the wine I wanted, I swallowed my pride and paid up $44 for the Black Ankle Leaf Stone Syrah.

Wine were evaluated blind with the tasters knowing only that the wine was Syrah. Wines were bagged and capsules stripped prior to tastings.

As I tallied up the scores at the end of the night, I realized something really cool: two people had brought the same wine. The 2006 Colonial Estate Explorateur came out of both bag 3 and bag 4. The people who brought the wine did so independently. It’s the sort of thing that got me really geeked. Here we had evaluated the exact same wine without knowing it was the same wine.

So, two interesting factors in play. One, two of the wines were the same. Two, Maryland was in there tangling blindly with Australia, California, and Chile.

The contenders:

1) 2007 Miguel Torres Santa Dinga Shiraz, Chile
2) 2005 Zaca Mesa Syrah
3) 2006 Colonial Estate Explorateur Old Vine Shiraz, Barossa Valley Australia
4) 2006 Colonial Estate Explorateur Old Vine Shiraz, Barossa Valley Australia
5) 2007 Black Ankle Leaf Stone Syrah, Frederick County, Maryland
6) 2008 Raw Power Shiraz, South Australia

Onto the scores…

Wines were scored out of fifty possible points. Scores were Parkerized by adding fifty more points.

And the analysis…

The Leaf Store Syrah finished third by average score at 80.7 and medaled four times. It was my Wine of the Night (WOTN) receiving an 86. An 86! From me! And, Maryland! I was pleasantly surprised as it was the only wine that wasn’t barreling me over with alcohol and oak. Good balance, good fruit, some floral aromas. It’s not worth $44 (let’s not get ahead of ourselves) but it is a well-made wine.

How did the duplicate bottle of 2006 Colonial Estate Explorateur Old Vine Shiraz fare? It was the clear winner by score with an average of 82.6 and three medals. It also finished fourth at 78.8 with a gold and a bronze to show for the effort. Jon was the only one that scored the wine the same, but it should be noted that his component scores (for nose, palette, etc…) were different. For more, here’s one of those wine tasting videos where the taster stares at you while he drinks wine link.

The 2007 Miguel Torres Santa Dinga showed well, barely being edged out by the Explorateur. It averaged 81.6 and picked up one gold, two silvers, and a bronze. Dead last was the 2005 Zaca Mesa Syrah averaging 72.58 and turning up as the least liked wine on three ballots. Mike brought that one, and he says “you’re welcome.” No wine scored over 90. The Explorateur was the only one to come close pulling down scores of 88 and 89.

Nobody left impressed with any of the wines unfortunately. Perhaps tasting blind leaves you with some sense of anticipation, leading on the hope that you’ll uncover something really good. Not so in this case.

Wine critics are not immune. The conditions under which they taste and evaluate wines has come under fire recently, such as when Dr. Vino traded jabs with Robert Parker over a Wine Advocate employee getting a tasting trip paid for. I am sure that most critics are as objective as possible; it’s just so difficult to separate the wine from the experience of wine. Wouldn’t the best, most objective, evaluation of a wine be done without any outside influence, including the the name on the label? This is called tasting blind, and it produces the best wine tasting results.

Thus, I’m a blind tasting guy, and so are Alexis Herschkowitsch & Robin Goldstein. You can read all about it in their updated edition of The Wine Trials 2010. Goldstein picked up a bit of notoriety last year when he threw Wine Spectator a curveball by entering their Award of Excellence program with a fake restaurant and was placed on their excellent list.

When I first flipped through The Wine Trials, I thought it was going to be useless. The heart of the book is page after page of cheap wines. They note the price, the label, the notes, and call some “winners” and others “values.” In short, at first glance it looked like a glorified wine blog that someone had bothered to print out. The substance of these reviews, though, comes out when you read the six chapter introduction and the short statistical nerd-fest at the end. The opening chapters of The Wine Trials 2010 is almost a manifesto for why Goldstein would pull a stunt like make up a restaurant and pay $250 to get it on the Wine Spectator Award of Excellence list. The entrenched elite wine critic establishment is not as reputable as they claim and this, he argues, must not stand.

The thesis of the book is this: price and pleasure do not correlate when it comes to wine and non-expert wine drinkers actually prefer inexpensive wine to expensive wine. The authors make a very strong case for it. Using the results of hundreds of blind tasters, they ranked inexpensive wines and set out to prove that the cheap wines can stand up to the wallet-busters.

The back part of the book… well, it’s a good time. is just jammed with stuff out of my 4000 level stat classes.

In a linear regression, this allows both the intercept and the slope coefficient to differ for both experts and non-experts.

You like that, do you? Yeah. You love it. Read it again. Go ahead… I’ll wait.

If you’re not into this sort of thing I can summarize for you. They’re proving that their results are statistically significant. This means that they’ve asked enough people to make your stat professor stroke his mustache and nod in stoic approval.

So you put all that together and you find out how they came to all the reviews and notes in the middle of the book. The book no longer looks like compendium of paragraphs posted by some wingnut on the Internet (see also: Blog (n.)). It is an awards program, if you will, for cheap wines. The judges were a long array of blind tasters and their cumulative blind tasting experience comes together to pick some winners.

I agree with most of the winners. Chateau St. Michelle (highlighted in the book) in particular is one of my favorite US producers, especially their Riesling. Other winners included Bogle, Fetzer, and Black Box wine. The book is a good piece of work and it would be nice to have in your back pocket next time you’re browsing through the sea of $15 wines at your local mega-shop.

This book was provided to me as a press sample. It feels so good to say that.