The wine delusion

Putting on the sceptical hat
Blind tasting may not take people to their true preferences. But finding true
preferences can be a work­in­progress even if it’s never found. If any, it opens up people to
knowing how much they don’t know about what they really like (Berdik, 2012). Likes and
dislikes are part of our own selves. Expectations may offer suggestions to our preferences;
some useful, some not so much. Just as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus believed, ‘The
only thing that is constant is change,’ our preferences, too, are anything but consistent.
They are constantly being changed, evolved, influenced, and by nature, can certainly do
with some questioning and discovery. At the heart of questioning and discovery is trial and
error (Sutherland, 2014). In The Black Swan, the Lebanese­American mathematician
Nassim Taleb explains the human tendency of trial and error in finding simplistic
explanations retrospectively. The trial and error approach has defined human progress,
from steam engine to aspirin. The human act of discovery through trial and error is what
Taleb (cited in Sutherland, 2014) calls ‘stochastic tinkering’. The notion that people make
progress on their own without really understanding how it works. In the notoriously complex
wine market, where even expert preferences are about as consistent as flipping coins, trial
and error seems like a reasonable way for people to find better and more genuine
preferences (Sample, 2011; Sutherland, 2014; Berdik, 2012). How is Taleb’s use of the
phrase ‘teaching birds to fly’ so different from unreliable experts telling people ‘how to
drink’ or ‘how or enjoy’ a glass of wine? By using purchase data on more than 77 million
shopping trips over 7 years, the Dutch economist Bart Bronnenberg matched shoppers’
actual choices to their knowledge and found an interesting correlation: the more informed
18