Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only to the untrained taste. I've helped a sommelier friend study for her exams. In wine school you get taught about how different climates and methods in winemaking gives the wine product its character. With relatively little training it's easy to spot young wine, old wine, wine that passed through oak, defects like Bret, and other properties.
almost any serious research in this field suggest that is completely false, and that even highly trained "experts" are incredibly bad at wine tasting, are inconsistent in their ratings, and fail to identify fakes, white wine with red food coloring, etc. It seems like you've fallen for the wine industry propaganda. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-ta... https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/…
First of all you link an article from a news webpage. Second of all you link about American wine "judges", with no references to their actual credentials in the field; that you can be a judge for a contest has no indication to your merits.
Third of all these talk about labels being qualified as "bronze", "silver" and "gold" in these contests. If anything this shows you know nothing about the area.
Sommeliers are in the business of marking objective taste and smell descriptors and then using that to distinguish wines in other, broader criteria.
Actually go to a wine tasting with qualified winemakers or spirit makers, and do some tastings comparing how different wine processes, grape varietals, and other factors make a difference, instead of sitting in a sideline pretending you have any idea of what you're quoting.
There's several spirits tastings where the difference in the sizes and properties of distillation columns have objective and notable chemical differences that even an untrained amateur can catch.