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By Root 550 0

first looking to a wine’s rating to support their choice. So when Wine Spectator awarded, say, the 2004 Valentín Bianchi Argentine cabernet sauvignon a 90 rather than an 89, that single extra point translated into a huge difference in Valentín Bianchi’s sales.13 In fact, if you look in your local wine shop, you’ll find that the sale and bargain wines, owing to their lesser appeal, are often the wines rated in the high 80s. But what are the chances that the 2004 Valentín Bianchi Argentine cabernet that received a 90 would have received an 89 if the rating process had been repeated, say, an hour later?

In his 1890 book The Principles of Psychology, William James suggested that wine expertise could extend to the ability to judge whether a sample of Madeira came from the top or the bottom of a bottle.14 In the wine tastings that I’ve attended over the years, I’ve noticed that if the bearded fellow to my left mutters “a great nose” (the wine smells good), others certainly might chime in their agreement. But if you make your notes independently and without discussion, you often find that the bearded fellow wrote, “Great nose” the guy with the shaved head scribbled, “No nose” and the blond woman with the perm wrote, “Interesting nose with hints of parsley and freshly tanned leather.”

From the theoretical viewpoint, there are many reasons to question the significance of wine ratings. For one thing, taste perception depends on a complex interaction between taste and olfactory stimulation. Strictly speaking, the sense of taste comes from five types of receptor cells on the tongue: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. The last responds to certain amino acid compounds (prevalent, for example, in soy sauce). But if that were all there was to taste perception, you could mimic everything—your favorite steak, baked potato, and apple pie feast or a nice spaghetti Bolognese—employing only table salt, sugar, vinegar, quinine, and monosodium glutamate. Fortunately there is more to gluttony than that, and that is where the sense of smell comes in. The sense of smell explains why, if you take two identical solutions of sugar water and add to one a (sugar-free) essence of strawberry, it will taste sweeter than the other.15 The perceived taste of wine arises from the effects of a stew of between 600 and 800 volatile organic compounds on both the tongue and the nose.16 That’s a problem, given that studies have shown that even flavor-trained professionals can rarely reliably identify more than three or four components in a mixture.17

Expectations also affect your perception of taste. In 1963 three researchers secretly added a bit of red food color to white wine to give it the blush of a rosé. They then asked a group of experts to rate its sweetness in comparison with the untinted wine. The experts perceived the fake rosé as sweeter than the white, according to their expectation. Another group of researchers gave a group of oenology students two wine samples. Both samples contained the same white wine, but to one was added a tasteless grape anthocyanin dye that made it appear to be red wine. The students also perceived differences between the red and the white corresponding to their expectations.18 And in a 2008 study a group of volunteers asked to rate five wines rated a bottle labeled $90 higher than another bottle labeled $10, even though the sneaky researchers had filled both bottles with the same wine. What’s more, this test was conducted while the subjects were having their brains imaged in a magnetic resonance scanner. The scans showed that the area of the brain thought to encode our experience of pleasure was truly more active when the subjects drank the wine they believed was more expensive.19 But before you judge the oenophiles, consider this: when a researcher asked 30 cola drinkers whether they preferred Coke or Pepsi and then asked them to test their preference by tasting both brands side by side, 21 of the 30 reported that the taste test confirmed their choice even though this sneaky researcher had put Coke in the Pepsi bottle and