> Judges were most consistent at the bottom of the range—they always agreed terrible wines were terrible—and least consistent near the top. A hypothesis to exp

> Judges were most consistent at the bottom of the range—they always agreed terrible wines were terrible—and least consistent near the top. A hypothesis to explain this: We've evolved a detailed sense of taste to help us distinguish harmful food (spoiled, inedible, etc.) from safe food. That would suggest that our sense of taste is most heavily calibrated to detect bad flavors since those are the actionable danger signals that tell us to spit something out. Part of something tasting good is simply the absence of off-putting bad flavors. Then, once those are out of the way, you can have more interesting but subtle nuances that elevate it to something much better. I suspect that it's easier to reach agreement on bad wine (or bad food of any category) because it's likely bad because of the presence of one or more wrong notes that most of us are sensitive to and dislike. Once you've eliminated all of those, you have a wine that's good but perhaps undifferentiated. To go beyond that, though, you quickly enter the realm of personal preference. Because any flavor component that doesn't signal danger is equally as valid as any other and it may be mostly up to memory associations or other mostly arbitrary preferences.