Now, I like wine well enough, but I’ve never developed any particular knowledge of it - I can tell a $6 wine from a $20 wine well enough, but I do not know if I could tell a $20 wine from a $80 wine, and beyond that I’ve not really gone.
I always wondered if the really expensive wines were really all that different. This article claims that the real experts are often unable to tell one wine from another - but then, I assume they are all as it were “top” wines. Can a real expert tell the difference between (say) a $20 bottle of wine and a top wine - or are they often fooled? In short, is the article correct in its approving quote that “A label on a wine substitutes 10,000 years of [tasting] experience”?
Is the trade in expensive wines merely a sort of tax on snobbery, or is this reviewer merely ignorant of a skill or taste that he dosen’t possess?
In my experience, the very top experts can tell the difference between wines. Part of the Master Sommelier (one of the top wine certifications you can get) includes a blind tasting. I’m not sure how close you have to get to the exact wine to pass, but you’re gonna have to be pretty damn close or you’re not going to get your certification. For what it’s worth, the MS certification is pretty damn hard to get - years of study go into it.
That said, there’s a lot of evidence that the lesser experts (such as the winery owners involved in the Judgement of Paris) can be quite full of shit.
>>I always wondered if the really expensive wines were really all that different.
They can be very different. However, not all $100 wines are “better” than $20 wines. Some are, some aren’t, and it’s very much personal taste. Typically the more you spend the more complex the wine is, but you may or may not be able to pick up the complexities and enjoy them. And just because you enjoy them in one type of wine doesn’t mean you will in another. And it’s personal taste, too. And of course, there’s crappy $100 bottles of wine. And and and and…
If the wine “expert” is truly objective, there will be some very inexpensive bottles of wine in his list of the best wines. For example, Yellowtail Shiraz ($8) is very highly rated by many wine reviewers and it’s not unusual to see it listed alongside bottles costing $50 or more. If you find a reviewer who only has $50 bottles on his list of highly rated wines, he’s probably a poser.
Wine Spectator magazine, for example, does blind tasting of all wines they review. They don’t know how much the wine costs until they’ve tasted and rated it. It’s not at all unusual for them for give a high rating to a bottle that costs $10 - $14 and they sometimes rate very expensive bottles very low.
I think any wine expert will tell you that there are some $20 wines that are better than some $80 wines. If you look at Wine Spectator’s “best of” lists, you’ll find that the rankings don’t correlate with price. Sure, the more expensive wines will tend to be better, but that isn’t always the case.