Expertise in a field is often undervalued or even dismissed by those who don’t have it
It’s a strange thing, but we often have a tendency to dismiss expertise, when that expertise is outside of our own field, or our own reach.
I’ve noticed this with some talented trade journalists who have come into wine from the outside. They’ve often written astutely about the business of wine, but often they carry with them a cynicism about wine expertise, especially at the highest level. It’s not something they’ve really experienced themselves, so when they look at wine geeks debating the nuances of Bourgogne’s 1247 climats, they dismiss it as nonsense.
I’ve fallen prey to this when I’ve dabbled in other fields. Back when I used to play a little golf, a friend took me to his club, Sunningdale, for a round. This is a proper course, and he was a proper golfer. I was the sort of golfer who could hit the occasional great shot, but who also peppered a round with some absolute shockers. He was fussy about the ball he used, while I’d use any ball. Was he being fussy? I thought so at the time, but now I recognise he had the sort of skill level where the way the ball would come off the face of the club was something he could feel.
Another parallel is music and guitars. My main guitar is a Martin D15, and I chose it by going into a guitar store in Madison (Wisconsin, USA: I was there for a science conference) and trying perhaps 30 different acoustic guitars with a friend. Of all the ones I tried, this sounded and felt the best. And I already had a good guitar (Takamine EN10, which I bought as a student, and which I used when I was in the band Tintagel; I lent it to another friend maybe 15 years ago, so I think it’s still out there somewhere).
The same happened when I bought a mandolin. I’d owned a few, and they’d been OK, but then I went into a shop and tried a bunch, and this was the best. Now, to a normal person who doesn’t play, they might not spot the difference. But as someone who plays a lot, I just know when an instrument is really good. It’s clear.
I think the same is true for wine. When you have true expertise, earned the hard way by lots of practical experience and a degree of talent that has been applied well, you know when you encounter a really good wine. It might not always be easy to communicate it, but it’s often clearer than people without this expertise realise. The great wines stand out. Ranking the best producers in a region isn’t that hard.
Be careful before you rush to judgement on those who make quality calls from a position of expertise. Often, they aren’t just making it up, even if it seems that way to you, and you are tasting the same wines.
Yes, though I think there's a point of diminishing marginal returns.
I do some Olympic weightlifting, and something my coach has mentioned to me is that some high-level weightlifters have strong preferences about how much the sleeves (the parts where you put the weight plates) on a barbell rotate. What I think is true about that and about your guitar / mandolin example, but isn't true about wine, is that those small differences in quality are functional and expressed through a performance that other people can see: for weightlifting, whether you're able to hit or exceed totals close to your maximum, or for music, how comfortable you are with how the instrument sounds.
Wine, OTOH, is only appreciated through sensory experience that is by definition personal (your smell / taste). And so there isn't a way--at least not a consistent, immediate way--to demonstrate what you perceive to be meaningful quality differences to someone else, in the way that you could do lifts in front of them with two different bars or play them the same song with two different mandolins.
This is why the gotcha stunt of having somms blind a wine and then telling them the bottle cost $2 keeps getting done (or tbh even the Judgment of Paris), right? Even though it's obviously silly, the argument underlying it seems to be: how real can these distinctions be if you, trained person, can't even consistently rate or identify them when context is taken away?
So in addition to the good point Paul made earlier, we probably need a little more appreciation of subjective importance in how much and to whom different degrees of knowledge matter in wine. The distinctions between eg Blanchot and Bougros in the Chablis GC might be very important to someone who cares a lot about Burgundy, but not important to someone who cares more about Georgia, and both of those positions are valid--there's no objective way to settle it one way or the other.
This is known as the Dunning Kruger effect. The less you know about a field the easier you think it is. I summarize it as “ignorant people have no clue”. Being aware of it helps keep one humble.