Food is 50% psychology. All those Wine-Experts are just people dumb enough to trust their brains.
And this comes from a guy who sold Cassismousse as Mousse au Chocolat in a blue lit room and got away with it.

Your brain lies.

i am gonna call bullshit.
i am not disputing that study he referenced nor am i going to defend wine snobbery (cuz thats just being an asshole).

but i have known a few people who could tell you the varietal or appellation just by taste.

hell,twenty years ago i was running a ballroom at this very affluent country club and every year one of the main partners would come down from canada and every year me and my boss would try to trick him with a wine tasting.

we even blindfolded his ass.
and every single time he would nail it.
sometimes even by vintner!
the man was impressive.

wine snobs are just trying to keep themselves relevant,but wine is fairly easy once you know the basics:
1.the things that raise the price of wine (not make it better in most cases) is storage time and name of vintner.
2.wines can be broken down into basic categories:
dry-semi dry
sweet-semi sweet
and of course white or red.(and i guess blush/rose)

dont get all caught up in intimidating processes that are unnecessary and frankly..useless.

drink what you like,and you dont have to break the bank for a good wine.

I wondered how good their experts were too

That said though, Shiraz grapes are used to make both red and white wines and some whites are quite full bodied and can easily stand in for a red. It would be easy to be fooled if you weren't expecting tricks.

I'm fortunate to live in a city where it's really hard to buy an undrinkable wine. Even the cheap ones that I use for cooking are quite nice, although a little less complex than the mid range wines.

p.s. The actual study by Frédéric Brochet is linked from this article - http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infamous_study_on_wine_tasting.html (which also points out that the study used oenology students).

1)don't forget supply and demand, particularly when a certain year just turned out great and wins a bunch of awards... price goes up.

2)and for categories, the way the wine was aged(not just duration) makes a huge difference, even type of barrel used (french/american oak).

that study doesn't seem too accurate as I, a virtual wine lay-person, can tell the difference between white and red blindfolded. And I can certainly pick out my favorites from a selection of reds, they are my favorites because they taste better to me... has nothing to do with the bottle or the price.

I'm not a wine snob but I have several wine snob friends who recommend me wine and they've never let me down. I'm not jealous of someone's refined tastes, I'm happy to let someone else do all the hard work of honing their taste and using their experience to help me purchase something that will impress a woman and let me indulge in my refined tastes. My happiness is a testament to other people's wine snobbery. Thank you, snobs. True wingmen.

@Khufu
and interesting (if you find wines interesting) thing to note regarding "good" or "bad" years is that is almost exclusively a european thing.

which is why california (and now washington state,among others) has consistently won top awards,and it basically comes down to weather.

california and basically the entire west coast have some of the most steady climate.whereas europes weather is far more volatile.

so a "good' year for a french wine may mean "there was no drought" or "no floods this year".

ya know,as i am writing this i am giggling to myself.the reason why i know ANY of this is because i was a captain at yesterdays on the intracoastal for years and for me to become a captain i had to pass this 300 question test specifically about wines and get a 95% or above.

here it is 20 years later and i STILL know way more about wine than i really care to,i dont even drink wine for fuck sakes!

Australia has a pretty variable climate too. The best wines are often from years that the vines were stressed, so yields are lower but the resulting wine has more character. There also seems to be an odd year/even year variation here.

Another way stressed vines make more interesting wines is if they are infected with Botrytis fungus. This reduces the yield, and as it tends to kill yeast it makes wine making harder, but the result is a more intensely flavoured sweet dessert wine.