Is Blind Wine-Tasting Best?

Mike Steinberger, at Slate:

Don't drink the label, drink the wine. Among the many (unwritten) rules of wine appreciation, this is easily the most important. It's also the hardest one to follow. Even the most discriminating oenophiles find it difficult not to be influenced by the name on the bottle, particularly if the name is a hallowed one. For this reason, many people believe that the only reliable way to judge wines is to taste them blind-that is, to taste them without knowing who made them. (Indeed, a blind tasting is the one occasion when drinking out of a brown paper bag is not only respectable but a sign of intellectual rigor.) When people don't have the benefit of seeing the label, the argument goes, they have no choice but to judge a wine solely on its merits.

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