A blind taste test between French and American wines

What’s one difference between French and American wine? I posed that question for five of my friends one afternoon during a blind wine taste test. The concept was simple - An American red versus a French red, an American white versus a French white. My friends ranged in age from mid 20s to early 30s. Their backgrounds as varied as their age, with one from Nashville, TN and another from upstate New York. All Americans, and all with varying degrees of wine knowledge. My friend Eric claimed expertise in grape drinks, especially of the fermented variety. He meant wines, but most of the time I don’t think he can tell the difference from one to the other, the guy just loves to ‘get his drink on’.

“I thought that Burgundy was a type of grape, oops…”

A recent study by London’s International Wine & Spirit Record revealed that Americans average 68 glasses of wine annually. Meanwhile, the French drink 280 glasses per year. Facts simply don’t lie – The French know how to party and we Americans need to catch up. This blind tasting probably won’t help offset the disparity anytime soon, however.

Personally, wine is a fairly new thing to me. For example, I had no idea that French wines are labeled by regions; for the longest time I thought Burgundy was a type of grape, like merlot. Oops.
My main concern was whether more expensive wines taste better. I restricted the wines to moderately priced wines. I polled my friends prior to the wine taste test, and they believed that moderately priced wines ranged between $15 to $25 dollars. For the French wines, I went to a wine store and picked up a white and a red bottle in the $20 to $25 dollar price range. For the American wines, I found two bottles at the local Trader Joe’s store for $7 and $13.

“Cheap=American”

The blind taste test started with a 2007 Sauvignon Blanc by Ghislaine & Jean-Hugues Goisot (12.7% alcohol). My friends said it was “lightly oaky,” “sweet,” and “not that dry”. This led all of them to assume this made for a cheap bottle costing less than $10, when instead it really cost $20. They also roundly believed it was American, believing that cheap = American.

Next up was a 2007 American bottle of Geyser Peak Sauvignon Blanc (13% alcohol). The commentators said, “Dryer,” “complex,” “more alcoholic than the first.” They all agreed it cost more than the first bottle except this bottle was $7 dollars, merely a third of the price of the first bottle. Unanimously, they thought this was the French bottle.

With two bottles to go, the taste test group had mixed up the French wine for the American, and the expensive for the cheap.
Let’s see how they do with the reds!
If you hear about a bottle that’s “bold,” “rich,” and “a little more alcoholic”, what would you think? Would your first guess be that it’s an American bottle? The first red wine we tested was a ‘Red Table wine’ from Hahn Estates made in 2007 (14.5% alcohol). Again, everyone misidentified the place of origin!
The last wine of the test was from Chateau Pimpine. It was a 2005 Bordeaux with a 80% Merlot and 20% Cabernet Sauvignon mix (12% alcohol). The lesser alcohol content in this bottle made for a more muted experience that was expressed by the panel as “Oaky/smoky,” “less body,” and “generic”. It was interesting to note that while smokey or oaky was on more than one response, “generic” also appeared on multiple responses. Again, this bottle was roundly miscategorized as the American bottle.
Wine novices can’t correctly identify an American bottle from a French bottle. There’s a bias to assume good wine comes from a far away lands. Perhaps a taste test with oenophiles would be different…

Geyser Peak - $7.99
Hahn - $13.49
Chateau Pimpine - $24.99
St Bris Goisot - $17.99