Tasting wine blind is the industry's attempt at being fair. It is our way of removing bias so we can tell for certain that a wine is good, or perhaps even better than its peers. We count on it for ratings and competitions, and indeed give little credence to reports of wines that are tasted in the open. It is a way to bring a scientific like control to a process that is inherently flawed by the inclusion of people. We the people, the most flawed of all testing devices.

In science a controlled experiment is designed to reduce or randomize all of the variables, so that the outcome can be determined as being free of outside influence. The weakest link in any experiment is the experimenter. Bias is a hard wired part of who we are. We can not help but to pigeon hole every aspect of our environment. This served us well as a developing species, ensuring that our flight or fight instincts allowed us to survive long enough to produce future generations.

Ever gone a week without a rationalization?

The problem, from a point of view of tasting wine, is at there is no on off switch for our lizard brains. We don't have a way to be truly objective since everything we sense is filtered through our basal ganglia before it ever gets to the rational part of our brains. Once the input does get to our frontal lobes, it is involved in a whole other battle, over rationalization.

As Jeff Goldblum's character in "The Big Chill" reminded us, rationalization is more important than sex ("Oh yeah? Ever gone a week without a rationalization?). We simply can not objectively look at any thing without giving it a good once over in our minds, consciously or not.

All of this brings us to why we taste wines in a controlled environment where the less we know the better. The difficulty is that there are many more variables at play than just knowledge. The order that the wines are presented, the company of wines. The preferences of the tasters. The assumptions we subconsciously make at the sight of the wine. The temperature, the ambiance, the time of day, even the music that may or may not be playing.

The weight or size of the bottle can greatly influence a tasting

Some of these, such as the seemingly over the top suggestion about music have more to do with relating the experience to real world situations than just tasting in a completely controlled environment, and yet few people sit down to enjoy a wine in an all white sterile room with sound proofing. Wine is more often enjoyed in noisy environments with the strains of instruments and laughter coloring the aural senses.

Something as simple as the weight or size of the bottle can greatly influence a tasting, so the best tastings carefully decant the wine before hand to make all things equal. Next time you are at a blind tasting, look for yourself if this is part of the procedure. If the wine was decanted, is it sitting visible in a decanter, or is it in obscured identical bottles? I keep screwtop bottles for this purpose myself. The best tastings use the official INAO glass to ensure that the stemware is not an issue.

A good blind tasting ensures that each taster in the group tastes the wine in a different order, but it is all too rare that anyone tries to account for this factor. The importance of reducing sight bias has led to the advent of black glasses, but I have never been to a blind tasting where these were used as a matter of fact. Instead black glass tasting have been in of themselves an example of how the inability to see the wine changes our conception of the wine.

Every taster is physiologically predisposed to prefer one style of wine over another

How hungry you are greatly changes your ability to taste. I have often tried to do my most important tastings before lunch, but unless I do the same for every wine I ever rate, I am introducing a variable based on time of day and state of hunger that is inconsistent. Unless every wine tasting ever held was at the same same time with the tasters at the identical level of hunger, it will remain an issue.

Ideally, a wine should not only be tasted in a random order, but against a random set of wines. Larger competitions sometimes work like that, with each taster receiving their wines by lottery. This is a good start, but it means that different people are tasting different wines, and inherently the most important of all biases, preference, comes into play.

I have written before about how our ability to perceive bitter, sweet, sour, and even oak greatly influences our preference in wine. I can watch your reaction to these as you taste them individually and in an act like a carnival barker, guess your favorite wines. This means that every taster is physiologically predisposed to prefer one style of wine over another. This ensures that certain judges will always give higher marks to some wines over another.

One expects such chicanery from a tasting

Only by pretesting the testers, and taking their preferences into consideration, can we help to balance out the most basic of variables in a blind tasting. The scores would have to be handicapped in some way - for example those tasters that love tannin would start with a negative score when they judge a wine with pronounced tannins, and the opposite for the tannin haters.

We begin to see what a truly fair and unbiased blind tasting would have to look like. Wines chosen at random would have to be served to random tasters a random times of the day with random environmental conditions in black glasses and scores would have to be handicapped to remove preferential bias. This doesn't exactly sound like the set up of the usual tasting for any of the influential publications assigning the all important ratings to the wines in today's marketplace.

Like a magician, given control over the set up of a wine tasting one can predictably influence the outcome. Not only can this happen, but it of course has happened any number of times. One expects such chicanery from a tasting conducted by an entity with something to prove, and so the most honest of us would never include the results of such an event in our ratings.

No one, not consumers nor pros, drink their wine blind

Finally, there is the simple anecdotal evidence that most of us have experienced. Our favorite wines rarely taste as good to us when they are tasted blind. How many times have you been surprised to find that you rated a wine you know well, lower than you would have expected? The scrutiny of a wine tasted blind yields an experience completely unrelated to enjoying the same glass in a casual setting.

No one, not consumers nor pros, drink their wine blind. We often drink it fully aware of every aspect of the price, place and even the stories behind it. We add our own memories of enjoying the wine in previous settings and the company of friends to this moment as we sip, swirl and examine. The world of ratings and completions attempt to quantify our potential subject experiences, how much we might enjoy a wine, but they are at best half measures, doomed by the impossibility of complete control, and unable at their best to predict the moment and circumstances of consumption.

Blind tastings are usually not only imperfect, they are nearly a farce. We can, and should attempt to improve the procedures, but always with the caveat that as long as there are humans involved, bias will hold sway. Perhaps someday we will be able to build impartial machines that can consistently rate wines not on preference, but on a precise flavor profile that we might be able to relate to. Until that day take all ratings, and descriptions of wines with a healthy dose of skepticism, and do your best to make your own tastings more blind, than not.