The wine delusion

least consider it.’ Algorithms are beating intuition in chess, jeopardy and diagnosis these
days (New, 2013). But the wine market continues to be sceptical toward such innovation,
sticking to its flawed methodologies and conventional tasting techniques.
Following the herd
It is debatable whether wine critics or competitions are giving out scores and
medals with the intention of helping people deal with uncertainty or of quality. The viticulture
researcher Maynard Amerine spent decades understanding wine quality, growing
conditions, winemaking techniques, colouring, flavour, storage and so on. The State Fair
rating system was designed on Amerine’s work (Berdik, 2012, p. 95). Amerine (cited in
Berdik, 2012) believes that judges’ personal preferences do not come into play whilst
judging, or are consciously ignored. He sees wine judging as a legitimate profession with
fixed, common and consistent standards. Both Amerine and Pucilowski agree that experts
and people don’t look for the same thing when they taste wine. But both have contradicting
views on the real value they bring to people. Pucilowski feels that the reason why people
might pay attention to wine critics or competitions is to see if they agree with the word of
the expert. In other words, to check if preferences match. Amerine thinks otherwise. He
feels that the reason why people might pay attention to wine critics or competitions is not to
match preferences, but to pick quality (Berdik, 2012). But why should people expect their
own preferences to match with the preferences of anyone else, or of experts? Especially
when experts themselves, with all their fancy experience, can’t seem to evaluate wine
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