Roman Weil — Vintage
Wine
Roman Weil selects one of
three pinot noir–filled glasses. Pressing its base
against the white tablecloth, the V. Duane Rath professor
of accounting in the GSB moves the glass in quick, tiny
circles, swishing the wine. He lifts the glass and dips
his nose into it, deeply inhaling. He sips, then lightly
slurps, swallows, and clicks his tongue. After a palate-cleansing
drink of water, he does the same with the other two glasses.
Weil
is repeating an experiment he published in the May 2001
statistical magazine Chance: two of the three glasses contain
the same wine, a 1998 Oregon reserve rated excellent in
Robert M. Parker Jr.’s Wine Advocate vintage guide,
and one contains a 1995 nonreserve rated average. Tasters
must decide which glasses hold the same wine and which is
considered better. Weil guesses wrong, as do two of the
three other diners at his Les Nomades table in downtown
Chicago, including the Mobil four-star restaurant’s
co-owner, Mary Beth Liccioni, whose “refined palate,”
Weil says, makes her a connoisseur.
The 241 GSB students, alumni,
and companions who tasted 593 wines for Weil’s Chance
study also guessed poorly—only slightly better than
random chance would predict. That’s because today’s
winemakers produce “wine of such uniform high quality,”
Weil says, that vintage charts have become useless.
Weil began studying wine
in 1964 when, as a Carnegie Mellon graduate student, he
invited an economics professor to Sunday dinner. Weil considered
his bar well-stocked—scotch, bourbon, gin, rum, vermouth,
Campari—but the professor asked for white wine. “I
had no wine,” Weil says. “I had to give him
some dry sherry. But I decided that if professors drink
wine, I’d better learn about it.”
And
learn he did. By the 1980s he held seminars on how not to
be intimidated by wine. In the 1990s he cofounded the Oenonomy
Society, a wine club of 14 economists who meet at an annual
scholarly conference. He’s building a marine-treated
plywood cellar for his 4,000-bottle stash, purchased primarily
at auction from Christie’s in London and Chicago.
“Life is too short,” Weil says, “to waste
drinking cheap wine.”
—A.B.
Select an expert:
Riccardo Levi-Setti - Trilobites
Richard Epstein - Parking
and Property
Mary Anne Case - Toilet
Inequities
Roman Weil - Vintage
Wine
Robert Grant - Sunken Submarines
David Galenson - Poetic
Values
John Milton - Poise
and Noise
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