Is Wine-Tasting Junk Science?

There's not really a good correlation between price and "goodness" of wine. The real rule of wine is, if you like it, it's good wine. If you don't like how it tastes, it's not good wine. That's it.

The wine world is notoriously pretentious.

It's good to know locations, varietals and aging a little because it can help you narrow the window down to find a wine you'll probably like well enough vs ones you won't. I for example, tend not to like Malbecs. Why? I dunno, just something in the flavor. I also don't like Mountain Dew.

Wine can help accent or suppress flavors in your food as well. Just like drinking beer with pizza tastes good, you probably wouldn't drink coke with your morning cereal.

If you really want to get into wines, there seems to be a correlation between rating and flavor complexity. And there's all kinds of ways to taste (or miss) complexity in wines. Just like a good bbq sauce has elements of sweet, sour, spicy, etc., wine can be more or less complex in flavors. But not everybody likes complex flavors and that's fine. That's easier in fact since complexity is usually a result of more expensive wine making processes like aging so your local Two-Buck Chuck might make those people happy. But detecting the differences or preferences for flavor complexity is like detecting the differences between two different batches of your grandmother's home-made Spaghetti sauce. You can probably describe it (the first had more garlic, the second more basil), but absolute comparisons are really impossible and don't really matter all that much. It's like asking "which is better a sponge or the number 7?"

Something revealed to me during trips to various places where a glass of wine with lunch or dinner is normal, is that wine is just another drink. Some of the better meals I've had were had with a 2 euro 1/2 L carafe of the local watered down table wine. In these places, wine is just a drink, like juice, water or soda. People who drink wine with every meal really don't care what the wine is so long as it doesn't taste bad.

You can probably find more than enough wines anybody will like for under $10 a bottle.

It's just a drink.

One cheap test I like to do when with friends is to order a flight of something, have each person taste it in turns, then have one person shuffle the glasses around while the others aren't watching, recording how they were shuffled (if you want everyone to participate, just have a second person do a second shuffle).

It's then everybody's job to taste again and see if they can put the glasses back in order. So far, nobody I've done this with has performed better than chance with vodka tastings and people barely perform better than chance with red wine tastings, even when they're 3 different varietals.

The test tends to come out after at least a few drinks though so most people's palates are at least somewhat compromised.

I don't trust anyone who can "smell" winners or losers. Seems like it's going on in the startup world lately

No, it's saying that people who claim to be able to identify which wines are "better" than others (and how they differ) can't reliably do that.

Wine recommended to you by trusted experts is not better than just blindly picking a bottle. Or at least, that is not something you can "say with certainty" if you haven't tested it. (And if you do test it, the results are likely to surprise you.) An awful lot of the experience of wine turns out to be the result of your expectations of it.

Thanks, this guy's voice is super soothing.