Pieter Colpaert
speaker
122 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Pieter Colpaert’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Because if you're a master sommelier, you've undergone super rigorous training and that is supposed to help you identify all these different kind of technical elements in a wine so you can assess its quality.
Yep. But I mean, I don't know if it'll surprise you, but in these blind tastings, you know, experts, they're often able to pick out grapes and vintages and regions, but generally they're not going to be able to tell you if they're drinking an expensive wine or not.
Yeah, I mean, they tested that as well because there's this famous study known as the Wine Spectator award-winning wine tasting. And they had researchers had 54 wine experts taste a selection of wines. These ranged from like $1.65 to $150 a bottle, but they didn't tell them anything about the identity of the wine.
So it was a blind tasting and the experts were unable to consistently identify which wines were expensive or even like rate the expensive wines as tasting better than the cheap wines.
No, no. I mean, I don't want to put Somalias out of work here. I think they, you know, wine experts, Somalias, they have real important expertise. They will have a wide knowledge of wine regions, of grape varieties, of winemaking techniques. You know, they'll be like super knowledgeable about how you serve, store, decant wine. They'll tell you all about how you can pair it with food.
You know, a lot of these people train for this for years. Especially there's this thing called the Masters of Wine.
Oh, yeah. I mean, those guys, they're part of a very super elite club. As of last year, there are only 416 masters of wine in the entire world from 31 different countries. So these guys, they have to, guys and girls, sorry, they have to pass a very rigorous exam. And it can take years before you pass the exam. They usually pass less than 10% of people who even participate.
That's an exam that'll test their knowledge of, you know, everything from like grape growing, winemaking to the business and marketing of wine. And the exam also includes a blind tasting of 36 wines over three days.
I mean, to be fair, again, they'll be able to tell you all kinds of things about this wine. They'll be able to make a really good assessment of the quality of the wine, you know, like the balance, the complexity, the potential for aging.
So in theory, you know, these masters of wine, they'll be able to say like, Jordan, this is a well-made high quality wine that just doesn't necessarily mean that it's an expensive wine. And I think this goes to show there's no straightforward connection between perceived quality and price. And listen, I think that's good news for people like me who love wine.
Right. But that's also why it's worth it for these wineries to invest in creating this image, this like aura of luxury and exclusivity around their wines, because that's what's going to make people think that their wines are worth spending money on.
Yeah. And then, you know, to your point, there are lots of small and subtle ways that they can achieve that. Because ages ago, I was just getting into wine and I had a friend who pretended to be a real wine expert.
And he told me that if the bottom of a wine bottle had what they call a punt, which is, you know, where the bottom is not entirely flat, but slightly indented, and you can kind of like put your thumb in there. That meant it was a great quality wine.
Yeah, well, most bottles. Most bottles are not entirely flat and they'll have like an indentation. But I think basically what my buddy was saying is that the deeper the punt, the more expensive the wine should be. And, you know, I heard that from several people. But then later on, I found out that's really just an urban legend.
Yeah, fair enough. And I mean, there's some historical truth to why glass blowers used to make bottles that way. It made it easier for the bottles to stand up on the shelf. It helped collect the sediment as the wine ages. And so it is true that it's like slightly more expensive to make bottles with a punt. But still, there's no correlation with the quality of wine inside the bottle.
Yeah, I mean, and you know, I'm bringing this up because I think it shows how there's all kinds of external factors that influence how we gauge the quality of a bottle of wine. And that's something the wine industry obviously knows and plays into with like pretty creative marketing strategies, like how they designed a wine label,
the shape of the bottle, and even the weight of the bottle, those have all been proven to influence people's perception of a wine's quality and their willingness to pay a higher price for it.
Yeah. I mean, another study, because they do a lot of studies on this kind of thing, found that people associate heavier, thicker glass bottles with higher quality wines. So in this study, they present the exact same wine, same label, bottles of different weights, and they found consumers are willing to pay more for the wine in the heavier bottle.
So I mean, go to any winery and look at their more premium wines. Usually they'll use heavier, more substantial bottles for them.
Yeah, brilliant. Brilliant idea, Jordan. I think health authorities might have a slightly different opinion on that one. The shape of the bottle, that's another signifier. Like think of a classic burgundy bottle has those nice sloping shoulders or a Riesling bottle is tall and slender. Those designs kind of give them this air of tradition and of quality.
Showing 41–60 of 122 · page 3 of 7
← Previous
Next →