Blind vs Sighted Tastings

The renowned Platter guide uses sighted as opposed to blind tastings to generate its wine assessments. David Priilaid of the UCT School of Management Studies critiques this approach. What explains the difference between the results returned in sighted as opposed to blind tastings? During the 1980s, a battle concerning this very issue took place between Coca Cola and Pepsi that has entered marketing lore. Pepsi discovered that on the basis of blind taste trials, they outscored Coke by roughly 52% to 48%.

Upon investigation, Pepsi researchers concluded that this was because Pepsi is a markedly sweeter drink, a taste characteristic preferred by the majority of the cola market. Assuming this to be a source of competitive advantage, Pepsi launched a series of advertisements showing that on average cola drinkers chose Pepsi over Coke when choosing blind.

The campaign's success unnerved Coke to such an extent that it subsequently launched New Coke, a version sweeter than Pepsi. The move proved disastrous, most especially because Coke executives had overlooked the power of their $1,6 billion annual marketing spend.

At play was the significant effect of branding on how consumers perceive a product, something demonstrated by more recent research. Using MRI brain scanners, findings confirmed that when tasting Pepsi blind, the brain's ventral putamen - a region understood to process sensations of enjoyment and reward - lights up five times more strongly than when stimulated by Coke. The situation changes, however, when sighted tastings are conducted.

On sighted assessments of Coke, the medial prefrontal cortex - an area of the brain that governs the faculties of memory and judgement - registers high degrees of activity. With Pepsi, however, it hardly registers at all. The conclusion reached is that the brain is literally responding to the impact of Coke's branding.

Nowhere is the issue of blind versus sighted tasting more contentious than when it comes to wine, with the two methods often producing markedly different results. Some critics contend blind tastings are less reliable. As demonstrated by the Coke-Pepsi case, they argue that given two products in the same category, intrinsic merit is insufficient on its own to explain why we prefer one over the other.

They seem to have a point - in wine terms, if you know that you are drinking a classic 10-year-old Kanonkop fetching upwards of R200 a bottle, how much more pleasurable is the experience of the wine than if you consider it only as an old red? Such arguments favour sighted tastings. You would imagine.

But how conclusive is this? In a piece of research to be published shortly in the International Journal of Wine Marketing, I sought to investigate the correlation
between sighted and blind assessments. In this country the former is derived from the Platter guide database; the latter comes from WINE magazine. Three varietals were included in the study - Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Shiraz - with tastings spanning over 1 500 wines tasted in the nine-year period between 1993 and 2001.

The paper's central premise was that when visually assessing the merit of a wine, the cue-effects of region and price tend to cloud our judgement and mask the importance of intrinsic merit. There are a host of other extrinsic cues, such as label cachet, that could be tested for but these fell outside the scope of this research.

The results are staggering. When trying to explain sighted assessments, the findings indicate that the combined effect of both the region and price cue explains 95% of all tastings, with price alone explaining 84% of sighted quality assessments (adjusted-R² = 31%).

Across the entire database, the overriding effect of these cues means that intrinsic quality alone contributes no more than 5% of any sighted assessment. Put simply, and as heretical as it may sound, the brain seems literally to be tasting price and region before considering the merits of the wine itself.

This said, the fact that the brain prefers to make judgements in this way should in no way serve as a vindication of this apparent non-conscious neurological bias. To the contrary, what we are observing instead is a scotoma or blind-spot in the field of judgement. It is here, we believe, that the brain fails to locate and explain the true source of quality. This neurological idiosyncrasy is most commonly observed in what is known as the placebo effect.

 

This occurs when the body heals itself because it believes it is receiving medicine, where in reality it is merely receiving a placebo. In the absence of proper medication, the patient is healed not because of any prescribed drug (there is none), but because of his or her belief in the placebo's apparent effectiveness.

Neuroscientists have conducted placebo experiments on volunteers which in many respects mirror the approach of my own tasting research. In one published experiment, a local anaesthetic was administered and the patient was asked to rate the pain recorded after receiving a mild shock. On repeated injection of analgesics followed by shock treatment, the patient so expected to feel less pain that after application of a saline solution placebo instead of the regular anaesthetic, the patient really did feel less pain. Through conditioning patients to expect less pain from the anaesthetic, the study was able to boost the placebo response from the "usual" 30% to 90% - roughly the same result as this research.

Such studies have led The Economist to observe that "while the exact mental state that allows the placebo effect to kick in remains a mystery, the belief that something will work seems to be the necessary ingredient". Such is the power of suggestion.

The findings of my research draw attention to the degree in which we are inadvertently distracted by the apparent efficacy of price and non-price information. Quite why the brain colludes in this way is another matter entirely. This aside, ethical issues abound, since the mind's apparent vulnerability makes price manipulation and the amplification of the regional cue a tempting if not cynical strategic option to ramping sighted wine assessments. This in turn translates into the justification of yet higher wine prices, and so the Pavlovian cycle of positive reinforcement persists until price resistance occurs. Only we as wine consumers determine that threshold.

At this point it all becomes smoke and mirrors. Looking through a glass darkly, can we really claim to judge? My study shows that in the case of sighted tastings, the effect(s) of price and area information on the eventual rating are significant. While this means that we should consequently be sceptical of this method of assessment, in strict academic terms it does not necessarily follow that blind tastings are better. The task remains to prove this.

What is clear is that judgement rests in two seats of the brain, one processing sheer physical enjoyment and the other allowing for personal experience and cultural conditioning. Is one any better than the other? If so, then why does the "inferior" one exist and exert such powerful influence?

In practical terms, most wine consumers don't have the time or the budget to sample all the wines available. Thus they defer to the experts and their ratings, and make their purchases accordingly. If these selfsame experts are inadvertently influenced in their sighted judgments, then so be it. The placebo psychology suggests that we are likely to do no better.

As for blind assessments, they rinse out the effect of bias, but does that necessarily make them any better? It is arguable that wine appreciation would be the poorer if we did away with all extrinsic cues. Heritage and tradition, for example, have powerful effects. This notwithstanding, too many wines appear to be trading on over-pricing and insubstantial hype. Placebo research in wine marketing seeks to expose this con-artistry, and in time a more responsible and regulated marketing environment will prevail, ensuring consumers are better served in the choices they make.