Wine Tasting Datapoint of the Day

Robert Hodgson has a paper out entitled "An Examination of Judge Reliability at a major

U.S. Wine Competition". He had the ingenious idea of serving up three identical glasses of wine — poured from the same bottle — to groups of judges; only 10% of the judging panels managed to rank the three identical wines even in the same medal group, even though the wines were served in the same flight. And, as Peter Mitham reports:

One panel of judges rejected two samples of identical wine, only to award the same wine a double gold in a third tasting.

I’m beginning to think there’s really no such thing as a really good wine: there’s just really bad wine, and everything else.