Describing vs. Imbibing: Thinking Too Much About Wine

I haven't been writing much about wine lately, but I have been reading about wine (and, of course, drinking wine). One of the things I've recently read helps me rationalize my reluctantance to describe wines in much detail: thinking too much about wine and writing down a description may affect one's perceptions and enjoyment of wine.

I have been writing a lot about Jonah Lehrer, ever since seeing him give a fabulous convocation speech at Willamette University last month: Jonah Lehrer's Metacognitive Guide to College. I started reading his book, How We Decide, and following his Twitter feed (@JonahLehrer) shortly thereafter, leading me to write another post on my main blog about his - and Stanford Philosophy Professor John Perry's - views on creativity, distractability, productivity and structured and unstructured procrastination. Last night, I read a passage in Lehrer's book about a study showing the how writing about different strawberry jams affects our perceptions of those jams, and it helped me feel a little less inadequate about my wine blog, where I rarely offer much in the way of original descriptions of the wines I enjoy (I typically copy and paste descriptions others have written).

In the strawberry jam study, psychologists Timothy Wilson and Jonathan Schooler set out to see if undergraduates' taste preferences for strawberry jam would correlate those with experts recruited by Consumer Reports. In a blind taste test, they asked undergraduates to rank the 1^st, 11^th, 24^th, 32^nd, and 44^th best tasting jams from the CR article, and found a pretty good correlation (0.55) to the rankings of the experts. Then they repeated the experiment with a second set of undergraduates, but asked these subjects to fill out questionnaires describing why they liked or disliked the different jams. Under this condition, the correlation between students' ratings and expert rankings plummetted to 0.11. Lehrer writes:

What happened? Wilson and Schooler argue that “thinking too much” about strawberry jam causes us to focus on all sorts of variables that don’t actually matter. Instead of just listening to our instinctive preferences, we start searching for reasons to prefer one jam over another.  For example, we might notice that the Acme brand is particularly easy to spread, and so we’ll give it a high ranking, even if we don’t actually care about the spreadability of jam. Or we might notice that Knott’s Berry Farm has a chunky texture, which seems like a bad thing, even if we’ve never really thought about the texture of jam before. But having a chunky texture sounds like a plausible reason to dislike a jam, and so we revise our preferences to reflect this convoluted logic.

Lehrer reports that these results have been replicated in rankings of posters, jelly beans, cars, IKEA couches and apartments. I started wondering about whether and how these results might apply to the domain of wine tasting, and sure enough, Schooler was involved in another study investigating this area of preferences:

When participants generate a detailed, memory-based description of complex nonverbal stimuli (e.g., faces) their recognition performance can be worse than nondescribing controls. This effect, termed verbal overshadowing, has been hypothesized to occur in situations in which domain-specific perceptual expertise exceeds verbal expertise. The present study explored this hypothesis by examining the impact of verbalization on the wine recognition of individuals of three categories of wine tasting expertise: Non-wine drinkers, untrained wine drinkers, and trained wine experts. Participants tasted a red wine, engaged in either verbalization or an unrelated verbal activity, and then attempted to identify the target wine from among three foils. As predicted, only the untrained wine drinkers showed impaired wine recognition following verbalization. The results are explained in terms of the differential development of perceptual and verbal skills in the course of becoming an expert.

[The Misremembrance of Wines Past: Verbal and Perceptual Expertise Differentially Mediate Verbal Overshadowing of Taste Memory, by Joseph M. Melcher and Jonathan W. Schooler, Journal of Memory and Language, Volume 35, Issue 2, April 1996, Pages 231-245]

So, this study suggests that experts' ability to recognize wine is not impaired by verbally describing it, whereas non-experts' recognition is impaired by the process. This may be consistent with the earlier study, which only studied students, most of whom are presumably non-experts in the realm of strawberry jam tasting. However, given the high variability in ratings and reviews by wine experts that I wrote about in my last post, I'm not sure how much faith to place in experts' descriptions. And as Lehrer convincingly argues, many ratings and descriptions are simply arguments aimed more at persuasion and rationalization than finding or describing the truth.

I do not have a copy of the full study by Melcher and Schooler, so I don't know how verbal overshadowing impacts the enjoyment of wine (vs. its recognition). I suspect that verbal overshadowing did impair the enjoyment of jams by some of the students in the second strawberry jam study. If a jam they would have ranked higher based solely on nonverbalized perceptions is ranked lower when those perceptions are verbalized, I would expect that they were enjoying the hard-to-describe jams less as a result ... and they may not have enjoyed the verbalization process, either.

As for my own perceptions and verbalizations of wine, I often have strong opinions about wines, but those opinions are typically at the level of how much I like the wine rather than what I specifically like or dislike about a wine. While I admire the ability of Robert Parker and other wine experts to describe a mind-boggling array of flavor and aroma components they discern in a wine ("pencil shavings" and "saddle leather" come to mind), I've never been able - or, perhaps, willing - to delve into such fine levels of detail. The best I can usually do is something along the lines of "big, bold, fruit-forward, full-bodied and chewy" (as I described my favorite wines in my report from the 2009 Zinfandel Festival).

I'm still not sure whether training myself to become more expert in verbalizing my impressions of wines would enhance or detract from my enjoyment of them ... but these studies give me more to think about (but hopefully, not too much).