A Difference in Taste
Does it matter that self-styled experts are more sensitive to some tastes than consumers?
Posted: Apr 23, 2012 11:58am ET
Someone could write a treatise on why some researchers seem hell-bent on proving that wine experts are full of it. The most recent is a study by John E. Hayes of Pennsylvania State University and Gary Pickering of Brock University in Ontario, Canada. Early news coverage was along the lines of "all those expert wine reviews are meaningless because most of us can't taste that stuff anyway.”
My colleague Ben O’Donnell reports on the actual paper. Having read the study, my take is that it falls in line with others of recent vintage that purport to show that experts can’t differentiate high-quality wine from rotgut, or that we always prefer a wine identified as more expensive.
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