Wine experts can't tell good wine from bad — and they've been exposed repeatedly for decades. In 1976's famous Judgment of Paris, French wine connoisseurs blindly rated California wines superior to French ones, shattering the assumption that only France produced excellent wine. Replications in 1978, 1986, and 2006 confirmed the result, yet the wine establishment continues to peddle expensive expertise that doesn't hold up under scrutiny.

The emperor has no clothes, and the evidence keeps piling up. In 2008, writer Robin Goldstein created a fake Milan restaurant called "Osteria L'Intrepido" and paid $250 to submit a wine list to Wine Spectator for their Award of Excellence. According to Cremieux in the essay "The Myth of the Sommelier," every single wine on that list had been previously pa

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