LogFAQs > #976019890

Bubble_Gum posted...

I mean if people want to take up wine tasting as a hobby then good for them I guess. But wine tasting actually is sort of bullshit. By that I mean that studies have shown much like with art that people are biased based on the origin of the product. If you give people a platter of French and California wines then people will overwhelmingly say the French wine is better. However in blind taste tests the results change substantially including the infamous event in the 70s where they took a bunch of the "top" French wine tasters and when asked to blindly judge California and French wines, every single one said the California wines tasted better. Now I'm sure there ARE certain traits that you can find out just by smelling and tasting, but taste is also subjective, and a quick Google search shows dozens of articles questioning the reliability of wine testers.

That's just tasting wine, though. What's being discussed here is the ability to taste, smell and observe a wine to determine it's origin. A blind tasting from a sommelier isn't done to determine which wine is better, it's done to determine the year and where it was produced by noticing subtle markers that only experts will notice.