I have never been bothered my lack of ability to discern fine wines from table wines (aka plonk). They're all pretty equally drinkable for me, so most of the time I don't see the point of spending the extra cash on expensive wines. So I was thrilled to be reminded of this by Steve Levitt [ht Jack], describing a taste-test he organized for colleagues at Harvard:
I thus had two different expensive wines and one cheap one. I tried to make things more interesting by splitting one of the expensive bottles into two different decanters. Thus, in total the wine tasters had four wines to taste, although in reality there were only three different wines, with one sampled twice by each taster. I gave them a rating sheet and each person rated each of the four wines.
... There was no significant difference in the rating across the four wines; the cheap wine did just as well as the expensive ones. Even more remarkable, for a given drinker, there was more variation in the rankings they gave to the two samples drawn from the same bottle than there was between any other two samples. Not only did they like the cheap wine as much as the expensive one, they were not even internally consistent in their assessments. ...
... I am happy to report that the results of my little experiment have been confirmed by rigorous academic research involving more than 5,000 subjects, as published in a paper entitled “Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better?” from the American Association of Wine Economists published in the Journal of Wine Economics, Vol. 3, No. 1. Their conclusion: fancy people with lots of training can tell cheap wine from expensive wine, but regular people cannot. (A non-gated working paper version is available here.)
These results are consistent with the long-held views of the Philistine Liberation Organization [PLO], of which I am the self-proclaimed chair. From our manifesto,
We have been subjected to the biases and special pleadings of the artsy culture vultures long enough. They sneer at anything which isn't in their own mold (mould?) of avant-gardishness. They perpetuate stupid jokes by laughing at people who quite seriously say, "I may not know much about..______... but I know what I like."
It is time for the rest of us to revolt against this claptrap of self-indulgent behaviour which passes itself off as "the actualization of one's self potential," and which somehow has, unfortunately, [in Canuckland, at least] bedeviled enough politicians that fully 65.7% of our tax dollars go to supporting these alleged artistes through direct grants and purchases of junk [Voice of Fire - - need I say more?] that any sensible person would pay someone else to haul off to the municipal landfill site. It is time for a new organization to be formed to aid this revolution. To that end, I hereby announce the formation of the PLO....
The purpose of our organization, it must be made clear, is to promote tolerance and open-mindedness -- to lampoon arrogance and self-indulgent pomposity. We don't really care if you like Shostakovich, escargot, and Birkenstocks.
We also don't really care if you like Neil Diamond, pizza, and Kodiak Grebs. We do, however, become disturbed if you try to tell us we should like; and we have apoplexy if you try to get us to pay for what you think we should like.