Wine experts can't tell good wine from bad — and they've been exposed repeatedly for decades. In 1976's famous Judgment of Paris, French wine connoisseurs blindly rated California wines superior to French ones, shattering the assumption that only France produced excellent wine. Replications in 1978, 1986, and 2006 confirmed the result, yet the wine establishment continues to peddle expensive expertise that doesn't hold up under scrutiny.
The emperor has no clothes, and the evidence keeps piling up. In 2008, writer Robin Goldstein created a fake Milan restaurant called "Osteria L'Intrepido" and paid $250 to submit a wine list to Wine Spectator for their Award of Excellence. According to Cremieux in the essay "The Myth of the Sommelier," every single wine on that list had been previously panned by the magazine itself—including bottles they'd rated as "not clean," "like turpentine," and "swampy." Wine Spectator gave the non-existent restaurant their award anyway. Meanwhile, massive fraud cases went undetected for years: Rudy Kurniawan sold home-blended counterfeits, and 18 million bottles of mislabeled "Pinot Noir" fooled the experts completely.
The numbers tell the real story. California Grapevine tracked 4,000 wines across fourteen competitions and found that 1,000 wines won gold medals in one competition but failed to place in any others. Research at the California State Fair found that only 10% of judges consistently rated identical wines—poured from the same bottles—within the same medal range. As Cremieux concludes, "The best wine is the one you like — period."
Previously:
• These wine descriptions are perfectly absurd!
