Wine and Irrationality

Over a rather spectacular kick-off dinner with two of my consultants in Las Vegas last week, I had the pleasure of basking in the meal/wine pairing choices of chefs and sommeliers, deliciously devoid of any need for my decision making as to how to eat, much less how to pair wines with food. At the beginning of the meal I was handed a tablet computer that we could use to try to pick our wine, but by choosing the tasting menu we avoided having to do anything more than play around with the user interface.

What amuses me about this is that just how to do that pairing, or how to evaluate wine quality, is not just a mystery, but is a profound black hole of irrationality and subtle psychology. If determining wine quality was rational, we would expect consistency among experts. We would expect predictability in the Wine Spectator scorings. There isn’t. We would not expect to find that people buy wines with animals on the bottle more than other wines, or that you can label the same wine at $40/bottle and at $3/bottle and get remarkably different reviews from tasters (the $40 version is remarkably better!)

In the end, though, no one really knows anything beyond some simple rules about how to combine wine and food flavors together. Sweeter wines with spicier foods. More robust meats with richer and darker reds. A sommelier and a tasting menu makes much better sense than any of us wine spectators.

Sitting at that table, one of my consultants managed to dig out an 1899 Rothchild Pauillac from the tablet computer. Price tag would have been $8999.00. I nixed the idea. I promised him that someday, maybe, we might get it in a fit of irrationality.