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I agree with you to a point. Infrequent wine drinkers who want a casual option generally prefer a lighter, sweeter or more fruity wine. These people truly didn'

I agree with you to a point. Infrequent wine drinkers who want a casual option generally prefer a lighter, sweeter or more fruity wine. These people truly didn't like cabernet (too bitter for many), but they wanted to be "with it" and merlot was the hotness, so it became a go to. As the article I linked above mentioned, for these people pinot noir was always a better choice, but the hotness of merlot (at the time pinot was oft considered a dessert wine) made it socially less of a norm. Sideways, and people just generally discovering that there were other options, made it an easier social choice for many, and pinot noir was on fire. As an aside, while I absolutely agree that most wine snobbiness is absolute horseshit (there is loads of it throughout the discussion in various other threads), that study on wine "experts" who couldn't tell the difference between red and wine is just terrible nonsense. It was some students who were recruited and smelled wines, given the visual cues of color.

dmurray 5y ago
> that study on wine "experts" who couldn't tell the difference between red and wine is just terrible nonsense. It was some students who were recruited and smelled wines, given the visual cues of color. It's even less than that. The study showed that if people are primed to think they're drinking red wine, their responses reflect that. If the experiments wanted a controlled study on whether the subjects could tell red and white wine apart, they could have blindfolded them or told them the wines had all been dyed the same colour, and the students would have discriminated between them very accurately. Anyway, like you I tend to discount the opinion of anyone who misinterprets this study's results in the way that the article does.