Imagine a highly trained medical pathologist, laboring to determine whether the clump of cells from the biopsy is a tumor or not. To the untrained eye, it just looks like any other clump of cells in the image. To the professional, it appears to be a tumor but there is some degree of uncertainty.

Then again, if they have to do that much effort to even distinguish between the two, maybe the decision is not that important after all.

In that case, the correct classification is a means to making the correct classification in a life or death matter.

In the case of wine, the very act of classification is the same as the ostensible goal.

Would you say that’s a relevant difference? I’m not sure why you’d think the latter is comparable to the former.

I get your point, but just because people find something important and interesting and you don’t does not necessarily mean that it lacks value. Especially as a member of this community, where one might for instance find a heated discussion about the merits of node.js, for instance, that the vast majority of the world would find mindlessly dull.

But do you see the point? You’re consistently surprised by the difference between fields where you have to make an active effort to know you’re enjoying something at all vs those where the difference between real and fraud is unfakeable. In neither node nor cancer research do you have to go through significant effort to even be aware that there exists a relevant difference at all. In neither case is the fan entirely responsible for awareness of a difference at all, as they are for wine.

I would hardly say that people have ever had to make an active effort to know they are enjoying wine, or any well-made alcoholic beverage.

If they’re into this connoisseurism, they are. How do they know they “enjoy red wine” if they don’t even know the taste difference and can be fooled by food coloring?