Winemaking comes back down to earth

The last few weeks have been better than most for wine stories in the British press. First, the Daily Mail ran a piece in which a wine expert tasted ten clarets blind and wasn't shown up as an idiot. The surprise was not that the expert was pretty much spot-on in identifying the quality and price level of the wines – because said expert was über-palate Oz Clarke – but that the feature was published at all. Two provocative conclusions could be drawn from it: that knowing about wine makes you better at blind tasting, and expensive wine tastes different...