By mthomas
A quick trip to Broadcasting House on Tuesday to participate in All in the Mind (a well known and regarded programme on psychology) on Radio 4 (Website here). It is a great prog and I enjoyed the recent Martin Seligman episode where he invited Claudia Hammond to ask him a hard question and she did! It was scheduled to be the last of this series and had a really interesting debate on psychiatry as well as a section on Hans Asperger and Gilles de Tourette and the syndromes they gave their name to. As the last in the series, close to the festive period, psychology and wine was also on the menu.
The other guest was Malcolm Gluck, famous for ‘Superplonk’ and now infamous for his new book ‘The Great Wine Swindle’, who was clearly galvanised to plug the latter. I had read the book and so expected bombastic polemic. I am not an experienced broadcaster and tended to defer to Malcolm who was more than happy to express his views. Being a psychologist, I tend not to interrupt people when they are speaking so my contribution tended to be a quick question or brief refutation of his position based on research. I also had a bad throat and sounded a bit like a sealion. It was a useful reminder that our subjective experience of ourselves; image, sound etc. is very different from a media representation which, in a strange way, can be more accurate and objective. I once watched an old friend (an award winning broadsheet journalist) ‘die’ during a tv programme when he found himself unable to string two words together (he also had a good face for radio and looked very grumpy).
I hope the programme wasn’t ‘train crash’ radio and the Producer Fiona Hill gave me some lovely feedback. Friends and family have also been generous and I am aware I have a tendency to be self-critical. However, I would like to develop my ability to communicate research in a more accessible but meaningful way. I love lecturing and am unfazed by large live audiences but something about the BBC studio was deeply intimidating for me. The relatively short interview did not really allow me to warm-up and I would have loved to have been able to make a few more cogent points about the topic. Claudia Hammond was a consumate professional and I hope I picked up a few good tips from her performance though.
Malcolm makes many valid points in his book but the tabloid style and vitriol towards people in the wine trade, who seem to be pretty amiable and ethical individuals, undermines his arguments. He also has a tendency to blame others for being subjective and fallible but then ‘puts his hands up’ to the same (as he did on the programme). I also pointed out to him that it was in my opinion the worst proof-reading of a book I have seen in some time… In person he was polite and amiable, perhaps as many people do, he adopts a media persona that is suited to its function.
Anyway, Merry Christmas to one and all and here’s to a positive new decade.
By mthomas
I bought this St Joseph (100 per cent Syrah) La Royes from Domaine Courbis a few years ago as part of a Wine Society ‘clear out’ of 2004 Rhones. It has aged perfectly in my cellar (Victorian coal hole) and is drinking really well right now (and should be fine for another 2 or 3 years at least). It is a perfect example of why wine should be enjoyed with food; very drinkable on its own but when paired with lamb chops it is sublime. The tannins have softened and it is brim full of black cherry fruit and background notes that suggest a trip along a spice rack.
The Domaine in the Northern Rhone (which also grows cherries) is managed by brothers Laurent and Dominique Courbis. They have integrated modern vinicultural techniques without losing touch with core values that make this region so appealing. The fruit is usually de-stemmed, cold-soaked and aged in a combination of old and new oak. This produces relatively dark, but not over-extracted, silky wine which is powerful but, at 13%, not headache-inducing (especially when combined with food - another good reason to put the oven on).
The Rhone has been producing consistently good wines for a decade, bar the 2002 nightmare vintage, and continues to offer value when compared with Burgundy and Bordeaux. Interestingly this wine is reported to have increased in value by 15% during the last year (it is a ‘90 pointer’) and is not cheap at around £20. There are lots of investors who realised that wines from the region being scored at 90+ (especially by Robert Parker) were signifcantly cheaper than wines with equivalent scores from Bordeaux or Napa. Thus was born the pound/dollar to Parker point investment strategy that has resulted in significant price increases in some of the most sought after Rhones. I think that following the recent blip in prices this will continue to be the case and hope that people who collect to enjoy (drink)wines will still be able to afford them. Wines that are destined never to be drunk because they are traded as an investment vehicle are a testament to a culture that knows the price of everything but value of very little.
By mthomas
A heavy cold has meant I have not been drinking wine over the last week. I have quite enjoyed the break but it is a good job I am not a critic trying to meet copy deadlines for Christmas. My taste discrimination is completely shot so I have been trying to use my time constructively reading a few recent papers including;
Mantonakis, A., Rodero, P., Lesschaeve, I. and Hastie, R (2009) Order in Choice: Effects of Serial Position on Preferences Psychological Science Nov 2009, Vol 20, Issue 11, p1309-1312
This paper by researchers from Canada and the USA builds on work since the the mid-1950s undertaken by Ferrer Filipello, a wine researcher at University of California at Davis. When several choice options are sampled in sequence and a ‘best’ option is made at the end there is a strong primacy effect. This type of effect (a first impression bias) is seen across many areas of psychology and in this instance demonstrated that the first wine tasted tends to be selected as ‘best’ most often (despite the samples being the same). A selection of varieties were used to control for differences between styles and interestingly the tasters (apart from one familiar with the researcher’s work) did not pick up on samples being the same wine!
However, this is not the whole story as there has been recognition of a recency effect in wine tasting too i.e. the last wine tasted being selected more often. Mantonakis et al show that this is more apparent when the number of wines tasted increases (in this case from three to five) and the tasters are more experienced. She and her colleagues suggest a process model for this which identifies inexperienced tasters as more susceptible to the initial hedonic impact of the first wine whereas experienced tasters are more engaged and persistent in tastings. They conclude that this persistence and openess to wines later in the tasting sequence accounts for the recency bias.
Another point of note from the study was that Mantonakis and colleagues had to limit the ‘flights’ to 5 wines. They would have liked to have extended the sequence to a dozen wines but ethics committees do not allow this level of alcohol intake. A sobering thought during the festive period.
The other guest was Malcolm Gluck, famous for ‘Superplonk’ and now infamous for his new book ‘The Great Wine Swindle’, who was clearly galvanised to plug the latter. I had read the book and so expected bombastic polemic. I am not an experienced broadcaster and tended to defer to Malcolm who was more than happy to express his views. Being a psychologist, I tend not to interrupt people when they are speaking so my contribution tended to be a quick question or brief refutation of his position based on research. I also had a bad throat and sounded a bit like a sealion. It was a useful reminder that our subjective experience of ourselves; image, sound etc. is very different from a media representation which, in a strange way, can be more accurate and objective. I once watched an old friend (an award winning broadsheet journalist) ‘die’ during a tv programme when he found himself unable to string two words together (he also had a good face for radio and looked very grumpy).