Last year, the psychologist Richard Wiseman bought a wide variety of bottles at the local supermarket, from a five-dollar Bordeaux to a fifty-dollar champagne, and asked people to say which wine was more expensive. (All of the taste tests were conducted double-blind, with neither the experimenter nor subject aware of the actual price.) According to Wiseman’s data, the five hundred and seventy-eight participants could only pick the more expensive wine fifty-three per cent of the time, which is basically random chance. They actually performed below chance when it came to picking red wines. Bordeaux fared the worst, with a significant majority—sixty-one per cent—picking the cheap plonk as the more expensive selection.

Having drunk a lot of wine, you can certainly tell the difference between varietals and you can certainly tell the difference between cheap wine and decent wine but rating decent wines of the same varietal is difficult. You can certainly tell if you've gone from a very nice wine down to a less complex wine in the same sitting! The key is finding something you like that doesn't cost too much...