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Comment by boyter | Hacker News Reader

It's not total bullshit. For the record I am not a wine buff (more interested in beer personally) but it doesn't take long for the average drinker to learn to recognize the difference in taste between grape varieties in new world wines and regions in old. It also doesn't take long to learn the difference between a good and bad wine.

That said do I think you can score a wine though? No. You can certainly pick between a selection of wines and rank them in order of what you prefer. You can certainly have a preference for style/type food combo icewine and botrytis for dessert or Riesling with seafood. This is the benefit in wine tasting in my opinion. Not impressing your friends with a 98 score wine but matching food appropriately.

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I agree with this in general, half the battle of wine is finding something that brings out or at least tries not to mask the flavor in whatever foods you're serving. The value in a good sommelier is not that he can sell you a $500 bottle, but that he can enhance your entire meal experience by bringing expertise, exposing diners to new wines they might have never tried or new tastes they might have not considered pairing.

And to be fair to wine reviewers, it seemed like the score was a 3-4 point variable. That's a lot if you're in competition but in general if you only think in terms of 90s, 80s, 70s and such, you'll generally get a higher quality wine. I think the lack of value comes in when you're trying to judge between say, a 90 and a 95. That's when it becomes arbitrary and subjective.

Some of the review mags now no longer give straight scores but give instead range scores because it's true that every batch can be slightly different. I've started to see wine mags rate a wine say, 92-95 instead of 93.3434234. Seems far more reasonable to give it multiple goes to deal with variable conditions.

> It also doesn't take long to learn the difference between a good and bad wine.

Have you done the sort of blindfold/label-free bottle tests described? If not, you're potentially falling for exactly the sort of thing the article is about.

Yes I have. So long as I am not holding my nose I can still pick them out. That might be due to the wines in Australia having very distinctive flavour's though.

"doesn't take long to learn the difference between a good and bad wine."

If you have to teach people to distinguish good and bad isn't that an admission that the whole thing is bullshit?

Not in the slightest. As a counter-example, challenging food and music comes to mind.

How are those counter-examples?

In the same way that being able to tell the difference between good and bad code takes time for a novice. Just because you have to learn to distinguish what makes some code more easily understood, easier to maintain, more robust, etc., doesn't make the notion of telling good from bad a bogus pursuit.

The code analogy is silly. With wine (or food) we're talking about a fundamental sense we all have. Everyone can eat and drink and either the stuff tastes good to people or it doesn't. And that's the point of the food/drink to begin with. The point of code is not generally to appeal to novices' innate sense of code aesthetics.

Chef: You stupid amateurs could never appreciate my noodles!

Tampopo: But people who eat noodles are all amateurs. So why make noodles amateurs can't appreciate?

Consumable subjective experiences (fine art, wine, food, music) are not always naturally pleasing on the first-go. Learning of the nuances, and being taught to identify the existence/lack of those nuances, aid in development of an opinion.

While I happen to agree that people should just "buy what they like," the path to forming an opinion is usually a guided one.

I do not watch American Football. I understand the overall rules of the game, and I don't particularly enjoy it.

However, I have not immersed myself in the game enough to be able to understand what is a good play and what is a great play. I don't understand the lingo, I don't understand the strategy and I don't understand the tactics.

Am I in a position to judge then whether one player (or game) is better than another? I don't believe I am.

Substitute with chess if you like. A chess aficionado may find a lot of pleasurable excitement in a move that an amateur may see as pointless.

There are also concepts you've heard of such as a "musician's musician" or a "comedian's comedian" - wherein deep knowledge of the craft gives a different appreciation of the experience.

No.

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