BY OWEN MORRIS
It may not be fancy nor chic to admit, but lots of people buy wine based on what the label looks like. It's nothing to be ashamed of. As sommlier Kelly Wooldridge explained on this blog, the quality of the label can have a direct correlation to the quality of wine in the bottle.
But just how big a correlation? Can lay people tell what wine came from what bottle just by looking at the label? To find the answer, I acquired several bottles with very different labels and gathered some fellow drinkers.
First, I wanted an ugly label. Mad Housewife fits that description. On the Pinot Noir shelf at a liquor store, among understated French labels and American wines bearing fictitious-but-fancy crests, the housewife on this label was a can't-miss. While the idea of the '50s gal who stayed at home getting blotto is kitschy, the label just comes off as tacky or worse -- lame. My fellow tasters had a field day with it. "Who are they targeting?" one wondered. "I don't think any man would bring this home to his wife. Who wants a mad housewife?"
When it came to a great label, there was no beating the brawny Nieto Senetiner. It's an Argentine Bonarda (made with the country's second-most popular grape after Malbec) that's pure manliness. The brass label itself is nearly a half-inch thick and fits on the wine bottle like a heavyweight title belt. "Now that's a label!" declared a male taster who went on to call it "the John Wayne of wines." One of the women in the group liked it for a different reason: "I could turn it into a belt buckle ... and the little label underneath into a bracelet." The Nieto Senetiner isn't cheap, and between the label and the price ($29), we expected it to stand head and shoulders above the Mad Housewife and the third wine, Glamour Puss.
The friend who had selected the Glamour Puss described it as looking like "A secretary's picture frame on her cubicle." The tasters didn't seem to think the label was that bad, though one called the cat prints on the foil "elementary school." Still, having a third wine with a label of questionable taste prevented the tasting from being a coin-toss.
The bottles were on one side, and three rows of sample cups on the other. The tasters' job was to match which row was which wine.
There were ten tasters in all. Four correctly identified the Glamour Puss, eight correctly identified the Mad Housewife and five correctly identified Nieto Senetiner.
A closer look at the numbers revealed that all three wines scored above the statistical average, meaning that there is almost certainly a correlation between labels and wine. Four of the tasters had perfect sheets, only slightly above the statistical average. Of the five people who misidentified the Nieto Senetiner, four of them thought it was the Glamour Puss, the cheapest wine in the test.
As for the wine itself, while Mad Housewife may have had the ugliest label, it was the most popular wine. "I like it because it's easy to drink and really grapey," one taster wrote. Another wrote, "Dry and complex. I mean complicated!" The Nieto Senetiner was the biggest let-down. "I'm guessing this is the fancy one because it's velvety but its too serious." "It's really mean tasting ... it kindof punches you in the mouth. It's adult." The Glamour Puss was the sweetest. Three people called it "fun" on their sheets.
So what did this experiment prove? Yes, labels do act as a rough guide to wine. But just because wine comes from a certain type of bottle doesn't necessarily mean you'll like it more.
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