It is pretty clear that wine tasting does not work the way we might think it ought to.

  1. Experts contradict themselves over time in their scoring of the same wine
  2. Experts in a test can't tell if a wine is red or white when it is the same white wine dyed red
  3. Emotional circumstance affects our enjoyment of the wine
  4. Wine critics say they know they are inconsistent
  5. Trained wine critics enjoy expensive wine more than inexpensive wine. Us numpties go the other way.

The interesting question for me is whether we can fix this.

There's an interesting suggestion from a Freakonomics show:

Steven Levitt: My approach to buying wine for gifts is simple: I go in the store, and I look for the label that looks the most expensive of anything in the store. And I make sure it costs less than $15, and if it does, then I buy it.