Reddit mentions of The Emperor of Wine: The Rise of Robert M. Parker, Jr., and the Reign of American Taste

This is really interesting to me because there are opposite claims here that are both clearly true when put into different circumstances.

One claim is that people can't really tell the difference between fancy wine and cheap wine, red or white, etc. And you can easily design a study that shows that.

But then you go and watch a documentary like Somm that follows people training to take the most rigorous test on the planet that includes wine tasting, and it suddenly becomes clear that all humans have the capacity to differentiate very subtle flavor-aroma combinations.

If you read Robert M. Parker, Jr's biography (a famous supertaster in the wine world), there's a point where he and his biographer attend a private wine event hosted by a very wealthy wine collector (something that happens relatively often if you're Robert M. Parker, Jr.). At the event, waiters flit about the room with trays of wine glasses, and the glasses are all labeled with numbers. You pick one, taste it, write down what you think, repeat. At the end of the evening, they reveal the wines.

The biographer describes Parker nailing not only the varietal (type of grape or grape blend), but region, age, and other characteristics of pretty much every wine. Most amazingly, in one case he tasted from the glass and said something along the lines of, "Wow, I had a feeling this one would age like this!" Turns out he had tasted this wine when it was first released like 12 years before and recognized it based on the fact that it had evolved in the bottle exactly the way he thought it would. He "called the label"–winery, varietal, vineyard, and year.

His biographer writes how he found this superhuman, and he commented on it to one of Parker's good friends at some point later. The friend replied along the lines of, "It is amazing when you point it out, but you tend to forget because he does it all the time."

The point of this is to say: I don't believe these studies that say people can't tell the difference. It doesn't square with my experience, and the way the studies are designed is bad science. They seem to be testing "Can you fool people into thinking red wine is white wine?" and that's quite a different thing than asking if people can differentiate between red and white. Note that a scientific study is supposed to validate a hypothesis by trying hard to disprove it, not by trying to prove it, and that's the problem with all of these studies. These studies should be designed to challenge the hypothesis, not challenge the subjects in the studies.