As you might expect from a statistician, Hodgson’s numbers are big enough to count. It’s hard to argue with data extracted from hundreds of judges and thousands of wines over several years. He might be the first academic to have treated the pronouncements of the wine gurus so rigorously, but he’s not the first to have come to an embarrassing conclusion. One French academic, Frederic Brochet, decanted the same ordinary bordeaux into a bottle with a budget label and one with that of a grand cru. When the connoisseurs tasted the “grand cru” they rhapsodised its excellence while decrying the “table” version as “flat”. In the US, psychologists at the University of California, in Davis, dyed a dry white various shades of red and lied about what it was. Their experts described the sweetness of the drink according to whether they believed they were tasting rosé, sherry, bordeaux or burgundy. A similar but no less sobering test was carried out in 2001 by Frédéric Brochet at the University of Bordeaux. His 54 experts didn’t spot that the red wine they were drinking was white with added food colouring.