I thought that as well but my friends and I have done this a few times and most people can’t once you standardize temperature and move away from any desert wines (not a large sample size of course). Try it yourself and make sure not to let anything else get in the way (double blind where possible, all other factors exactly the same). I’ll also note that I’m not a complete noob, the group was in Napa on a wine tasting when we did this and most of us like wine and have done enough tasting and touring to know a little, maybe our pallets aren’t great, none of us are sommeliers or anywhere close :)

I've run this experiment with friends and it was trivial to distinguish reds from whites with table wines. Whatever wines they use in these studies to stump experts must be more close in flavor.

> I'm no wine expert but I bet I could reliably tell red from white in a blind tasting

This response is intended a joke, gently poking fun at the HN cliché response of "SMEs can't reliably do a thing, but I could if I wanted to". (Right?)

That's what I thought. But then I started thinking.

OK, if it's some amzingly tannine-rich, oakey whine.. sure, Bordeaux. And if it's something really 'juicey', acid whine, sure.. Beaujolais nouveau. Etc.

But those are the classics, and they are extremes. What if I present you some obscure Bourgogne with a subtle honey/peach taste. I can assure you won't be able to say off-hand if it's a red or white.

There are certainly different kinds of wine flavor (dry and sweet are the most obvious), and some are red and some are white. But one could make a wine flavor of the opposite color of its usual genre, and you probably wouldn't detect that blind.