I think anyone who enjoys alkyhol and is not a professional wine reviewer is well aware of the self-reinforcing bullshit cycle of wine journalism. (When will a sommelier win a Pullitzer already?) But this article does a nice job summarizing the actual scientifical facts about human taste and the idiocy of winos. (Note: the only difference between a oenophile and a wino is how much money you have.)
Some choice quotes:
Heee.
Getting buzzed drinking a decent amount of wine for free or a low charge (Napa excepted)? Sounds like it works to me!
Otherwise, I don’t know if it’s bullshit per se, but pretentious is a good word to use. My favorite is “barnyardy” or similar. It smells or tastes like hay soaked with pig urine?
I’ll read it later, but is +/- 4 points supposed to be a big spread? It sounds reasonable. The dyed wine is similar to studies where they give some people vodka fruit juices where you can’t taste the alcohol vs. just juice and tell them it has vodka. The placebo group will act “drunk.”
plus or minus 4 points on a 80-100 point scale (21 points total, 4/21 = 19%) is a spread of nearly 40%. That’s huge.
The dyed white wine is hilarious. Confirms my suspicion that white wines and red wines are more or less the same. I’m sure there are some red wines that you simply couldn’t mistake for a white wine but there are so many dry red wines and so many fruity white wines that it makes sense that an official taste tester could easily get fooled, let alone 54 of them.
I worked in hospitality years ago and was (and remain) of the same opinion - it’s mostly pretentious wank.
Certaintly, I have never had a wine where I could taste notes of vanilla, peach, toffee, unicorn’s breath, or whatever the fuck else the tasting notes reckon is in there.
I knew it was largely bullshit, but I’m surprised that experts can’t even tell the difference between white and red. I thought I could tell, but if they can’t, I’m sure I can’t either. Or maybe it’s harder to tell when it’s fancy wine, I don’t know. I can definitely tell the difference between white (peach) and red (red) Cisco 
.
Lately, it all tastes like vinegar to me. Even the wines I used to like. No biggie - it’s easier and cheaper to drink water anyway.
I have actually tested myself - I put red wine and white wine in identical glasses, closed my eyes, slid the glasses around enough to lose track of which was which, and tasted them. Result? It was obvious which one was red and which white, and I’m no wine expert. So yes, it surprises me too.
Of course I can tell white wine from red. White is colder.
Of course it would be trivially easy to tell a red from a white in such a test where you bought the wines, you know which two wines you poured, and so you know what flavors to expect between them. Even I know what a muscatto tastes like compared to a merlot.
It would be a much more interesting test to be given 10 wines blindfolded and not told ahead of time which wines they were, and to correctly identify which were red and which were white, for example. It would be even more hilarious if they were all the same damn wine.
Another test would be to take 10 wines, some red, some white, and dye the white ones red. And see how well you do. Of course, you can’t be the one who has picked out the wines, and the dying needs to be done properly by someone else.
I don’t think it’s a case of them not being able to tell the difference between red and white wines. They were given a white wine that had been dyed to look like red wine. In a case like that, the power of suggestion could cause you to taste red-wine flavours that weren’t actually there. That doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between an actual red and white wine if they tasted them blindfolded.
Stuff like this is always interesting. But the same thing happens with musical instruments - “Look at this study! They had blindfolded experts listen to someone playing violins - and they couldn’t tell the Stradivarius from the one from Wal-Mart!!! It’s all a big scam!!! Those violin-snob bastards!!!.” 
As a musician, I can tell you that a listening test like that is total bullshit. There’s much more to experiencing an instrument than listening to someone else play it - for instance, the responsiveness when actually playing the instrument is at least as important as its sound.
So - is most of wine tasting bullshit? Yes. Do the vast majority of folks who use wine words have any idea what they are talking about? Nah, not likely. But are there legit ways to approach wines that: a) help you pick out good wines vs. bad ones; and b) understand the qualities of specific wines - e.g., sweet vs. dry; full/round vs. light; pair with rich foods vs. pair with light foods? Of course.
is it true that if you put a peg on your nose you can’t tell the difference between tea and coffee?
If there is a clear and unmistakable difference between all white and red wines, and the tones/notes/boquets/etc, then not even the strongest powers of suggestion should be able to fool an expert who has dedicated his/her life to studying and tasting wine.
As I said before, there is a clear and unmistakable difference between most individual red and white wines. But obviously there is enough overlap in flavor, tones, hints of whatever, that when you give a dyed white wine to an expert (or 54 of them) not only can they not immediately tell it is an imposter, but that they actually describe it as being a red wine using words they use to describe only red wines.
That’s the very definition of bullshit if I ever saw it. They saw a red wine so they felt like they had to justify its taste using words that describe red wines. If they had tasted it blindfolded, they may very well have described it as a white wine, which goes to show you that they aren’t basing the judgments off of the taste/boquet alone. Which is what they should be doing.
I have a friend who’s very big into wine-tasting. She has an actual wine cellar in her basement.
I wouldn’t call her pretentious by any stretch. But she is a foodie, has an amazing palate, and likes to compare and contrast different wines with different foods. She’s the type of person who actually can taste the subtle nuances in a given wine.
OTOH I’m the “Oh, gives me a glass of red/white/whatever and if it isn’t too dry, I might have another glass. Or I’ll switch to vodka.”
The Freakonomics guys have looked into wine tasting a lot.
Their conclusions: It’s mostly BS.
I love wine, mostly dry reds and whites but I’ve always considered myself lucky that I didn’t have a “wine tasters” palate. I’ve enjoyed some really cheap wines, like one Australian producer, Yellow Tail. I enjoy their cabernet sauvignon and Malbec quite a bit. While prices vary, I’ve seen them from as low as $6.99 a bottle up to around $10. I also like the Cupcake winery that has been seen more lately on grocery store shelves. They commit (in the wine snob world) the sin of having screw-top bottles. The only reason I stayed away from them for awhile is I can’t drink more than a glass or so at a time of sweet wines, and I assumed because of their name they specialized in sweet wins…but their sauvignon blanc or cabernet sauvignon is just as dry as you’d expect.
I’ve drank $20-60 bottles of wine and honestly, I haven’t had one that jumped out at me as “wow, this is way better than the $8 bottle of wine you get at Kroger.”
I even learned recently that wine snobs of a certain cut dismiss the concepts of “dry and sweet” as being non-specific and meaningless. Me personally, I always thought dry meant “a wine that wasn’t sweet and where you could taste a strong tannin aftertaste” but I guess in the pretentious wine world you can’t so easily distinguish between “sweet” and “not-sweet” although I’ve never had that problem.
I’d never read these studies undermining wine tasting, but anytime I’ve read an article on wine or the few times I’ve actually gone to a wine tasting I’ve always wondered if I have numbed taste buds because these people go on and on about tastes and sensations that I’m not getting at all. It’s nice to know they might just be bloviating meaninglessly.
An old Cracked column on the subject. (I wish Christina Hsu was still doing articles.)
It’s BS. Highly pretentious, snobby BS though, which I guess makes it okay, especially if you have more money than brains.
Of course it’s pretentious. But I need to see how other domains of snobbery perform on similar tests before singling out wine tasting as the worst.
I love red wine, but I admit that I am no expert nor am I a real connoisseur. I like to try different wines and, if I like one, I will buy more of it. In the small wine fridge in my den, I have three or four bottles of Castle Rock Pinot Nior, a couple of bottles of Ruffino Chianti and a couple of Mouton Cadet Bordeaux. None of these cost more than ten dollars.
I do enjoy drinking them out of a Waterford Crystal Lismore Claret glass. This retails at about eighty dollars. I picked it up from an estate sale for five.
The fancy glass is my only nod to snobbery.