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Also: this should extend to whiskey snobs. I’ve got a great palate for spirits so I genuinely do enjoy them and can tell the difference. However a couple months ago I got to try a ~$5000 bottle of XYZ bourbon and you know what it tasted like? Bourbon. Nothing special. Meanwhile the guy who let me try it was losing his shit about it
Same deal with coffee. The “elite” tiers of this sort of stuff always seems extremely contrived and scummy. I’m perfectly fine not having my coffee come from the poop of a jungle cat.
I always wonder what people taste beyond the 40%+ alcohol component that kind of overpowers most other aspects of taste.
Likewise, I trust people less if they insist on a preference for one brand of cola (or white soda, etc.) over another. Most of it is carbonation, what is there to taste through that? The whole idea is that it dulls your sense.
I mean there is a lot to taste there. The grain flavor is more or less prominent. The oak/wood flavor is variable with some being more or less strong depending on the toast or char of the barrel. Plus if it was finished in a wine/beer barrel or something that changes the flavor. Various caramel or coffee flavors depending on the malts used. The proof itself wildly changes how a whiskey can taste. Some finish sweet or dry. Some go deeper into the heads or tails cuts and those flavors can either be very off putting or very interesting. Etc etc
I mean it would be a lot more straightforward to taste all these things if the substance that told my taste buds they were being damaged wasn’t as concentrated.
“I’m kind of like a public intellectual”, I say as I pour my fifth drink before noon.
I’ve taken out several credit cards in my children’s names to pay for wine. One day they can read my reviews which include one with four stars due to how much it tasted like blueberries when I was throwing up on the steering wheel.
:wojak-nooo: nooo you have to drink this extremely expensive wine and describe the chocolate or nut or whatever notes it has while drinking
:gigachad: ha ha 10 buck box wine go brr
The fact that we know people can have different reactions to tastes (like cilantro, the fact that mental state and what you’ve eaten or drank recently can effect your senses, and other stuff) kinda makes me wonder if it’s a weird conclusion that each person could possibly recognize an “objective” taste profile of something with their subjective senses and experiences
Like at best youre randomly similar to an equally subjective experience that just happened to be lionized and enshrined in some standard perception.
Plus, either way, they’ve done tons of studies on wine experts and fooled them with cheap wine like a bajillion times.
It’s really about picking something arbitrary that you can be good at that other people can’t be and patting yourself on the back for clearing your imaginary goal
The fact that we know people can have different reactions to tastes (like cilantro, the fact that mental state and what you’ve eaten or drank recently can effect your senses, and other stuff) kinda makes me wonder if it’s a weird conclusion that each person could possibly recognize an “objective” taste profile of something with their subjective senses and experiences
Like at best your randomly similar to an equally subjective experience that just happened to be lionized and enshrined in some standard perception.
Aesthetics (as in, the philosophical discipline) has some really cool takes on the subject, and it is still a matter of debate. Not to mention the idea of criticism or expertise having any actual weight when it comes to for example art or music. I am an absolute nerd about food and philosophy, so i have gone down that rabbithole.
Taste is pretty cool because it is both largely socially constructed and not completely physiological. It actually involves a whole bunch of other things, and ecological theory of perception opens the door to ways of understanding taste and appreciation that kinda blow your mind when you read and kinda take them in. It pretty much does away with the whole idea of objectivity, but it doesn’t just shrug and say “well shit, everything is subjective now”. I keep teasing that i’ll make effortposts about my dissertation research, which is related to this stuff. Once i’m done with it i’ll try to do that.
Kid who reviews Fruit by the Loop with Good/Bad/Yucky please start tasting wine.
My absolute favorite thing to do with “good wine” is to drink it in red solo cups or something equivalent in front of snobs. They lose their shit about the cup being wrong, it’s great
Did you guys see that study where a researcher gave sommeliers 2 glasses of cheap white wine, except one was dyed to look like red wine?
They didn’t even fucking notice it was the same wine, and described them in vastly different ways.
Wine tasting is total bullshit.
there’s some John Cleese hosted wine tasting docu where they do blind tastings with novice and expert tasters, but they use a cup that hides the contents (so unable to see the liquid at all - literally blind tasting)
and even the experts couldn’t distinguish red from white better than random guessing
sweet - I found it on the tube!
