The best wine in a blind tasting is often the best wine to buy. At least it has passed a quality test.
In a blind tasting, the evaluators have no knowledge of the label and therefore can't be prejudiced for or against a particular wine because of past experiences with it, or with other wines from the same winery.
Blind tasting levels the playing field for wines of widely divergent prices too. This is significant because price is not a major factor in determining quality.
For example, a winery that bought its vineyard in 1934 and makes its Chardonnay from grapes growing on that vineyard can sell the wine for $8 a bottle and make a fair profit. That's because the cost of the raw material, the grapes, is little more than the cost to farm the vineyard plus the cost of oak barrels to age the wine.
On the other hand, the winery that buys grapes at $1,800 a ton is paying nearly $3 for the juice inside each bottle, and with salaries, processing, oak barrels and other cost factors, the wine must sell for more than $8--considerably more.
(It has been estimated that the cost of a bottle of wine should equal the cost of a ton of grapes for the wine times .01, which would make the Chardonnay from $1,800-a-ton grapes sell for $18 a bottle.)
Blind tasting also eliminates the bias we all feel against wines from unknown wine regions. Seeing he'll be tasting a Chardonnay from New Mexico, a judge might wince, yet in a blind tasting, the only thing that matters is wine quality. (And New Mexico has a thriving and improving wine industry.)
On the other hand, blind tasting of wine is really only one element to the ultimate goal of enjoyment of wine. The other is simply: how does the wine go with food?
It is an area of no precise answers because of the obvious drawbacks. Look at the pitfalls in logistics alone:
A fine Chardonnay wins a blind tasting. It is perfectly made and harmonious, offering fine flavors and good balance. Then someone brings to the dinner table two dishes, a salad with rice wine vinegar and baked salmon. The wine tastes awful with the salad (of course), but superb with the fish.
Even though it is not a science and the hazards are obvious, exploring the great wine and food combinations is a quest of loads of people. Books have been written on the subject, people have made careers out of lecturing on it, and it is so fascinating that chefs around the world have recently doted on the idea that a dish once thought classic might well be improved to match better with wine.
