The classic tale of the wine judging nonsense

An excellent retelling of the exposure of the nonsense that is wine judging in the South China Morning Post (reprinted from the London Daily Telegraph) recently.It tells the story of American statistician turned wine maker Robert Hodgson who analysed how different so-called wine judging experts differed so widely about the quality of wines.
An example:

"I looked at a set of data that showed the scores for wines that were entered into as many as 13 different competitions," he says. "I tracked the scores from one competition to another. There were, like, 4,000 wines that I looked at. Of all the ones that got a gold medal, virtually all got a 'no award' some place else. It turns out that the probability of getting a gold medal matches almost exactly what you'd expect from a completely random process."

Other gems recalled in this piece that it well worth reading in full:

One French academic, Frédéric Brochet, decanted the same ordinary bordeaux into a bottle with a budget label and one with that of a grand cru. When the connoisseurs tasted the "grand cru" they rhapsodised its excellence while decrying the "table" version as "flat". In the US, psychologists at the University of California, Davis, dyed a dry white various shades of red and lied about what it was. Their experts described the sweetness of the drink according to whether they believed they were tasting rosé, sherry, bordeaux or burgundy. A similar but no less sobering test was carried out in 2001 by Brochet at the University of Bordeaux, in France. His 54 experts didn't spot that the red wine they were drinking was a white dyed with food colouring.