French wine scam uncovered

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On Wednesday, a court in southwest France found 12 wine producers guilty of fraud for selling millions of gallons of fake Pinot Noir to America’s E. & J. Gallo Winery, among others. The producers received suspended prison sentences and tens of thousands of Euros in fines. French customs officials figured out the scam, according to the BBC, when they noted that the amount of Pinot Noir being sold to Gallo exceeded the amount produced in the region. But would anyone have figured it out otherwise?

The scheme ran for years. But, as one French winemaker’s lawyer sniffed to the BBC: “Not a single American consumer complained.”

And why would they have? While this fraud may be grabbing headlines, less noticed is the overarching fraud that underpins the entire wine industry: The idea that the average consumer — or even wine experts — can reliably tell the difference between higher- and lower-quality wines.

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But what about real experts? What about professional sommeliers and judges in respected wine competitions? What about reviewers for prestigious wine magazines? Well, they’re full of it, too. Take two articles published recently in the Journal of Wine Economics, both by a retired statistician and active winemaker, Robert Hodgson. In one experiment, Mr. Hodgson served 100 wines to actual California State Fair Wine Competition judges, over the course of four years. The tastings were blind, and each judge was presented the same wine three times, each time from the same exact bottle. What Mr. Hodgson found was remarkable: On a 20-point rating scale, from 80-100, judges typically varied in their ratings of the same wine by plus-or-minus four points. The same wine could be rated a 90, an 86, and a 94, all by the same judge in the same year. Only about 10% of judges stayed within two points — and those judges weren’t the same judges year-to-year, meaning it was more likely chance than skill that led to their greater accuracy.

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