Free Everything Is Bullshit: The Greatest Scams on Earth Revealed by Zachary Crockett

academic
evidence strongly suggests that experts cannot identify “good” wine.
    The 100 point scale for rating wine,
invented by Robert M. Parker Jr., is extremely influential.
    According to the buying director of prestigious wine merchant
BB&R, “Nobody sells wine like Robert Parker. If he turns around and says
2012 is the worst vintage I’ve tasted, nobody will buy it, but if he says it’s
the best, everybody will.” When retired statistician and hobbyist winemaker
Robert Hodgson successfully lobbied to measure the accuracy of the system in
the mid 2000s, his results showed that the judging was completely inconsistent.
By having the judges rate the same wine multiple times, he found that:

 
    “The judges’ wine ratings typically varied by ±4 points on a
standard ratings scale running from 80 to 100. A wine rated 91 on one tasting
would often be rated an 87 or 95 on the next. Some of the judges did much
worse, and only about one in 10 regularly rated the same wine within a range of
±2 points.”

 
    Year after year, Hodgson replicated his results. When he
broadened his scope to hundreds of wine competitions, he discovered that the
distribution of medals “mirrors what might be expected should a gold medal be
awarded by chance alone.”
    More sanguine critics — who do not dismiss studies like
Hodgson’s as “hogwash” — often point to the
shortcomings of tastings and the subjectivity of taste. But arguing that judges
taste too many wines per tasting, or that the 100 point scale enforces
artificial uniformity on subjective tastes, does not seem to address the way
these findings shake the foundations of the wine industry.
    At the University of Bordeaux, for example, Frederic Broche
conducted an experiment in which experienced viniculture students tasted
glasses of red and white wine. The students described the red in language
typical of reds and the white in language typical of whites. The problem? Both
were identical white wines; the “red” had been tinted with food coloring.
    So why then do critics and consumers bow down to Lafite Rothschild Bordeaux when objective analysis suggests
that the Emperor has no clothes?
    Well, outside the world of double-blind taste tests, perceptions matter. People are influenced by
wine critics, marketing, and fear of appearing foolish . Another
explanation is that big-name labels and high price tags literally make wine
taste better. Numerous experiments have shown that people will enjoy a table
wine and a fine wine equally if they believe that both are fine wine. The
drinkers could be lying about enjoying the “bad” wine due to social pressure.
But an experiment involving a Stanford wine tasting group, a lineup of
identical wines presented under fake price tags from $5 to $90, and a fMRI machine measuring activity in areas of the brain
correlated with pleasure suggests otherwise. Drinking the same wine with a
higher price tag did increase pleasure.
    Despite the substantial differences in wine production and
hundreds of years of history, the most significant determination of a wine’s
“quality” seems to be pure perception.

 
    A Tale of
Two Startups

 
    While
the cheap, industrial wine market operates by the same dynamics as the light
beer market, fine wine is all about experience — a point aptly
demonstrated by the contrasting experiences of two wine business founders.
    After a year spent observing wine collectors and investors in
London, James Maskell believed that the industry’s
opaque network of luddite middlemen offered an
opportunity. With venture capital backing, he and a co-founder launched a
website called Vinetrade in 2012 as a marketplace for
buying and selling fine wines. Users could list their wines for sale and buy
from other investors and collectors with a few clicks. Maskell and his partner aimed to play a “classic intermediation game — connect
buyers and sellers, increase transparency, cut margins, and take a small cut”
for