Neil Pendock: April 2007
Author:
Neil Pendock
Published: 07 May 07
How to have your cake and eat it - by tasting blind and factoring in label recognition too.Airline wine selections are potent examples of irresistible forces meeting
immovable objects. Take the wine se
lection for Singapore Airlines that went
down in Singapore in February, for example. Irresistible force was personified
by a wine selection panel consisting of Bordeaux boffin and Old Mutual magnifico
Steven Spurrier, Aussie aficionado Michael Hill-Smith MW and Napa nabob Karen
MacNeil, a trio who jointly and severally put the various submissions to the
airline's tender process through their organoleptic paces.
In the immovable object corner is the preference of First Class passengers for brands with big sticker prices. A feature pointy end passengers like to remind airlines of in surveys, frequent fl yer workshops and via feedback comments. And with Singapore Airlines (SIA) in keen competition with Cathay Pacifi c and Emirates for Asian and other well-heeled itinerant elites, what the customer wants is what she invariably gets.
The problem comes, as Spurrier demonstrated convincingly in his famous America vs. France bicentennial tasting of 1976: iconic brands have the unfortunate habit of coming second in blind tastings. Back then it was Bordeaux First Growths, the judges were all French, yet still the American parvenus triumphed. To slice through this gourmet Gordian Knot, the SIA selectors use two strategies. As Spurrier remarked with a straight face: "We had a Bordeaux tasting a few years ago and identifi ed some Second Growths that did well: Gruaud-Larose, Pichon- Longueville Comtesse de Lalande, Cos d'Estournel and Leoville Poyferré and we choose from them." In this case, necessity is the mother of invention, as SIA Vice President Commercial Supplies, Mr. Ng Sui Guan, admits: "The big names of Bordeaux don't submit to tenders."
A practice that extends to Champagne, hence Krug and Dom filling the bubbly berth up front. The late British wine writer Auberon Waugh, no stranger to first class travel, was on top of all this when he argued, "It is part of the pleasure to know that a wine is famous and very expensive." Which ensures that Kiwi icon Cloudy Bay 2004 flies high with SIA, even if it tastes like a tin of stale asparagus.
The Singapore selectors have taken Waugh's observation one step further and quantified it. With some brands of such mega-gravitas they are automatically selected if offered (Krug, Dom P, the Super Seconds, Cloudy Bay), others are scored blind out of 20 and their labels then rated sighted out of 5, giving each entry a maximum tally of 75 from the three judges. As Spurrier said, "If a wine gets over 55, we're over the moon."
Criteria for rating labels are necessarily personal and subjective and, with all three judges paid consultants to various producers, hopefully any conflicts of interest are disclosed upfront and the label scores are suitably adjusted.
In SA, the strategy preferred to produce a desired result in blind tastings is the concept of "seeding players", where a wine knocked out in an early tasting round can be added back to a later one. The Singapore system is arguably better in that label ratings can be quantified, published and discussed.
While cynics might argue that both systems are obvious attempts to ensure a particular result, statisticians are one group of wine lovers who will find nothing wrong with rating the label: it is simply the prior probability of your assessment of wine quality before you taste it.
Indeed with in-store tastings rarer than rocking horse droppings, rating labels is often the only information used to inform a purchasing decision. In the case of Grande Marque Champagne, Bordeaux Second Growths and Cloudy Bay, the weight assigned to the label is plus infinity (which is nearly as much as the purchase price), obviating the need to actually taste the stuff and score it - a procedure that may lead to an embarrassingly low score and red faces all round, of both judges and First Class punters.
In the immovable object corner is the preference of First Class passengers for brands with big sticker prices. A feature pointy end passengers like to remind airlines of in surveys, frequent fl yer workshops and via feedback comments. And with Singapore Airlines (SIA) in keen competition with Cathay Pacifi c and Emirates for Asian and other well-heeled itinerant elites, what the customer wants is what she invariably gets.
The problem comes, as Spurrier demonstrated convincingly in his famous America vs. France bicentennial tasting of 1976: iconic brands have the unfortunate habit of coming second in blind tastings. Back then it was Bordeaux First Growths, the judges were all French, yet still the American parvenus triumphed. To slice through this gourmet Gordian Knot, the SIA selectors use two strategies. As Spurrier remarked with a straight face: "We had a Bordeaux tasting a few years ago and identifi ed some Second Growths that did well: Gruaud-Larose, Pichon- Longueville Comtesse de Lalande, Cos d'Estournel and Leoville Poyferré and we choose from them." In this case, necessity is the mother of invention, as SIA Vice President Commercial Supplies, Mr. Ng Sui Guan, admits: "The big names of Bordeaux don't submit to tenders."
A practice that extends to Champagne, hence Krug and Dom filling the bubbly berth up front. The late British wine writer Auberon Waugh, no stranger to first class travel, was on top of all this when he argued, "It is part of the pleasure to know that a wine is famous and very expensive." Which ensures that Kiwi icon Cloudy Bay 2004 flies high with SIA, even if it tastes like a tin of stale asparagus.
The Singapore selectors have taken Waugh's observation one step further and quantified it. With some brands of such mega-gravitas they are automatically selected if offered (Krug, Dom P, the Super Seconds, Cloudy Bay), others are scored blind out of 20 and their labels then rated sighted out of 5, giving each entry a maximum tally of 75 from the three judges. As Spurrier said, "If a wine gets over 55, we're over the moon."
Criteria for rating labels are necessarily personal and subjective and, with all three judges paid consultants to various producers, hopefully any conflicts of interest are disclosed upfront and the label scores are suitably adjusted.
In SA, the strategy preferred to produce a desired result in blind tastings is the concept of "seeding players", where a wine knocked out in an early tasting round can be added back to a later one. The Singapore system is arguably better in that label ratings can be quantified, published and discussed.
While cynics might argue that both systems are obvious attempts to ensure a particular result, statisticians are one group of wine lovers who will find nothing wrong with rating the label: it is simply the prior probability of your assessment of wine quality before you taste it.
Indeed with in-store tastings rarer than rocking horse droppings, rating labels is often the only information used to inform a purchasing decision. In the case of Grande Marque Champagne, Bordeaux Second Growths and Cloudy Bay, the weight assigned to the label is plus infinity (which is nearly as much as the purchase price), obviating the need to actually taste the stuff and score it - a procedure that may lead to an embarrassingly low score and red faces all round, of both judges and First Class punters.
