“Wine Experts” Are Full of Crap
In response to the great essay by Ryan Opaz on the sad state of the modern wine world. Here are a few thoughts of my own about “wine experts”.
First, the well known stories and then my own personal experience with being embarrassed by thinking I had a great palate for wine judging. Anyone who has poked fun at wine snobs over the years knows about and frequently mentions one of several studies that have embarrassed even the most seasoned wine professionals.
There is the 2001 study where a University of Bordeaux professor took the same bottles of white wine, added red food coloring to half of them, and served it as two different varietals to 54 wine experts. The overwhelming majority of experts not only rated both wines quite differently and but genuinely believed them to be different varietals. Apparently, the study caused a bit of a shitstorm in the wine expert world.
Or the one where top wine experts were blindfolded and served the exact same three wines, over and over again. Each time they would not only rate the same wines differently, but sometimes dramatic swings from an 87 to a 95 on the same wine, just moments apart (**87 to 95 is a huge deal for wineries and their marketing). The study also did a meta-analysis of the scores of these same judges across multiple public competitions and discovered a complete lack of consistency in…
