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August 2008
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Wes Marshall, our Austin wine guy, reports from his recent trip to New York, where he helped spread the word about Texas wine. While in New York, I asked all the main wine and food magazine writers how they tasted their wines. As it turns out, most know exactly what they are drinking, even though when you see a label, you immediately start having expectations about how a wine will taste, sort of a wine placebo effect. One magazine said their taste tests were blind, but the only part that was blind was the label. So when they tasted Texas wines, they knew they were tasting Texas wines. Expectations then lead to, “Well, it’s OK, for a Texas wine.” And there were no ringers to improve the experimental design. (I’m dangerous. I have too many graduate hours in statistics.) So at the few places where they were willing to taste really blind, we mixed Texas wines with gold-standard wines from around the world. Each wine was in a brown paper bag, and none of us knew which was which. That’s called a double blind study. Now that’s rigorous. Texas wines didn’t always win, but they won some and they were never tagged as substandard wine. At the end of the trip, we had an open house at the new restaurant in Manhattan called Hill Country, a barbecue place modeled on Kreutz Market in Lockhart. I set up a tasting area at the bar and invited the journalists to come by and try the brown bag treatment. This time, I knew which was which (that’s called a single blind study), but I have a good poker face. I loved watching the little epiphanies as about two dozen New York writers realized they’d picked a Texas wine. Most fun was Sara Moulton, executive chef for Gourmet and a regular on the TV Food Network. We talked for about an hour, not because I’m so charming, but because she couldn’t walk away from Dr. Roy Mitchell’s sherry from Homestead Winery in metropolitan Denison, Texas. She’s now a believer, too. I love those brown bags. Check out Homestead wines at any of the three tasting rooms in North Texas. |
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