Above a certain threshold one cannot tell the difference between good and very good. Wine tasters know it and it has been very well documented.
When it comes to flavours, as long as it doesn't harm you, your judgement is as good as anybody else.
1. The label of ‘wine expert’ is left undefined. True sommeliers have spent thousands of hours studying wine and are not the same thing as a guy that takes a weekend wine-tasting course and gets a certificate. Yet most ‘studies’ fail to mention this.
Just as importantly here, what literally every single source we could find not only leaves out when reporting this story, but in the vast majority of cases falsely states, is the actual qualifications of those being tested by Brochet. It turns out, the people he was using as taste testers were not experts at all, simply undergraduate students studying oenology (wine and wine making). While certainly probably more knowledgeable than your average person on the street, nobody would call an undergraduate mathematics major just learning the ropes a “math expert”, nor would their skills be indicative of what their professors who have vastly more experience and are actual experts are capable of doing.
2. The ‘experiments’ are done in a totally unscientific arbitrary way, with massive amounts of suggestion and psychological influence. If this were any other scientific study, it would be laughed out of the room for its total lack of rigor.
As the Master Sommeliers demonstrate by passing the taste test they are subjected to in the first place, with enough time and study, there are actually people who are exceptionally good at identifying and judging attributes of wines in the right circumstances. But overwhelm there sense with 100 wines or change their expectations about what they are tasting and their perceptions will change significantly, seemingly, making them little better than a random person off the street at telling anything definitive about the wine.
https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2019/07/can-profess...
I personally, by no means an expert in any way, can attest the difference is minimal and mostly comes down to one's own preferences / pairing of wine with food in given situation.
Its often one of those markets where you buy your own emotions with higher price rather than actual, measurable subjective added value.
But yes, if you use a wine costing 2-3 euros, quality of taste in many aspects will be incomparable even to that average joe.
But that isn't usually why these studies are often referenced, and certainly wasn't what the OP meant. The argument presented is often that there is no difference between high-end wines and low-end wines, which seems to be demonstrably false. That's not the same thing as unless you're an expert, you won't be able to tell the difference.
The reality is that wine appreciation, like any field, requires experience and knowledge to build "taste." This is pretty obvious when it comes to other things - no one would suggest that you could understand or appreciate the nuances of a WW2 film without knowing what WW2 was, but somehow when it comes to matters of taste in art, food, etc., the totally-ignorant person's opinion is equal to the expert's.
I'd say it's far more likely that contemporary culture is aesthetically/phenomenologically illiterate.
It won out over several wines that where four times as expensive.
2-3 euro wine tastes disgusting to even an "average joe"
The country I come from, this would be put in above-average quality (which isn't very nice to my home country, but that's my experience).
Any car driver can easily appreciate the difference between a Ferrari and, say, a Ford. You can't say the same about wine.
Now, since you're making a utilitarian argument here - what is the point of becoming a sommelier when all it does is make you so sensitive to the taste of wine that you need to spend hundreds of dollars for "a really good one"?
On the surface, this sounds like a huge waste of time and money to me. Perhaps having such a fine taste is pure bliss. My suspicion though is that sommeliers are just bullshitters that use their knowledge of expensive produce to get into the company of wealthy people - and earn a decent living.
Because not everything is about maximizing economic transactions?
As for difference between cheap and expensive wines, the same wine tasters tell me that price does not always correlate with quality, it is mostly a marketing thing. In fact, the ones I know are more likely to serve you cheap (but good!) wine. They know enough not to rely on price as a proxy for quality.
When put up against a real triangle/discrimination test, they just don't stack up. I'm not saying they don't do anything, but claims of being able to discriminate individual compounds in any sort of detail are not substantiated.
I guess this is why it's called "a matter of taste". Anecdote: I can't stand vinegar in anything. So it's really interesting to see someone insist that I should use it because it makes this or that better.
Experts have to judge based (also) on objective criteria. You don't, you just like it more or less.
Isn't that the heart of the "meme"? I never thought it was "no difference" or "all wines are equal" but rather that you get out of it what you want.
There are some workarounds that will make very good pizza at home.
My favorite is to use an outdoor grill instead of an oven. A hot grill with a pre-heated pizza stone is totally capable of reaching proper temperature. This can actually make neopolitan style pizza crust and works perfectly for other styles too.
If you can't do a grill, starting the pizza in a large preheated cast iron pan on the stove top will help. Finish it off in the oven. Not Neopolitan, but very good.
If you are using the recommended "00-flour" (finely milled high gluten bread flour), and you're not reaching pizza oven temperatures because you're using a household oven, add diastatic malt (powder) to the dough mix. This boosts yeast activity and also helps with coloration of the dough at lower temperatures. Otherwise, the pizza will be "done" before the crust has a chance to color properly.
I take issue with Neapolitan being a standard of quality. It's just a style.
There's a hack you can do where you use your oven's self clean function to reach high temperatures. Most ovens have a physical interlock preventing you from opening the door during a self clean cycle though, so to work around that you'll have to void your warranty and saw off the lock.
That said, cooking pizza on the clean cycle is difficult, and not necessarily worth it. Timing and vertical positioning in the oven is crucial, or you will end up with a burnt bottom or toppings. Make sure you have a long peel, and keep your face away from the heat when you open the door.
And it IS a superior style of pizza /s
Talking about Italian food in specific, they're very opinionated about what's the best way to work each ingredient, how to work dough, how long to leave pasta resting, and what's the best blend of herbs and the best species for each recipe. On engineering we call it standardization not fetishism. That's what DOP, DOC and DOCG is about, and that's what the Neapolitan on Neapolitan pizza is about, you know that if you eat a Neapolitan pizza that follow the official process you will have a predicted flavor on your pizza, like it or not.
By reading the classics and asking yourself why they cook that way you will start to understand that you can use shortcuts where the output could be the same or close enough. For instance stone is a very bad heat conductor, that's why you need a very hot oven to deliver the right amount of heat to cook your pizza. But if you use a better conductor you could deliver the same amount of energy on a much lower temperature. On the "Modernist Cuisine at Home"[0] book they research this topic and arrive on the conclusion that a thick baking steel sheet arrives on much better results, they even sell their official baking steel [1].
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Modernist-Cuisine-Home-Nathan-Myhrvol... [1] https://modernistcuisine.com/shop/baking-steel/
These assure on the other hand normally a good quality standard as the regional producers' associations have every incentive to keep quality good.
Me personally, I think Italian (non-Neapolitan) thin crust pizza is the best I’ve ever tried but they’re all just different styles.
There's an annual pizza festival in the summer i nBoston, which brings a lot of Italians with their stone ovens making neopolitan pies. So I went there and finally got to try neopolitan pies which according to pizza aficionados are supposedly really good.
Man, I was in for a ride. Just not my taste. I'll admit that I may be a charlatan or have a pedestrian palate, but I can say now I'll prefer a slice of NY pie over an authentic neopolitan pie any day of the week.
I also adhere to the Roman style in that there are no rules for toppings. Anything goes.
Please please please go to Italy and show them who's boss, make sure you film.
But I think you've dialed down a very complicated issue too far when you say "one cannot tell the difference between good and very good". A better characterization would be that many factors go into the perception of taste, and it's not always straightforward to identify "good". Here's a decent article on wine tasting that explores the idea much more honestly than, "Haha, experts can't tell!": https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2019/07/can-profess...
But beware, once you have a sophisticated taste for something you can no longer enjoy all the “bad” ones.
>Please ignore all these experts, all they want is to make you feel special because you drink/eat their stuff.
But if this isn't cynicism for effect and is your true outlook on life I would encourage you to spend some time with any master of something and have them describe in detail to you the things they are seeing in a fellow master doing the same thing.
This <thing> could be anything - sports, music, art, acting, chess, video games...
What you will probably see is the master picking up on all sorts of imperceptible details that seem so subtle that they seem like bullshit. Then try going deep on that same thing, learn it for yourself. Eventually you will reach a stage where you will suddenly discover firsthand how little you know about that skill and how big the world above you is in skill and detail.
Then eventually you will appreciate that this is true for almost every other disciplines and there myriad worlds of hidden detail that you never noticed or appreciated that creators have slaved over. Things that you only notice but can't put your finger on when you compare a pro to an amateur.
Is Monet just dabs on a canvas? Federer just hitting a ball? Is Daigo just a lucky guesser at Street Fighter? Is Mitsuko Uchida just more stuffy and pretentious than your street busker?
Granted, there's a lot of snake oil in food and wine because there's money to be made but don't let that theatre close you off categorically to the world of food (and wine).
In general of course a person can eat whatever crap they want and it doesn't affect me except when that person is cooking or picking out food for me.