It's probably a lot like wine, where blindfolded critics struggle to determine between red and white or $5 and $5000 wine but can claim to tell you which particular hillside of a vineyard in France the bottle came from if they can see the bottle.
If you never felt any difference between 5 euro and 50 euro red wine, you are buying wrong wines and probably at wrong place. I only once had wine over 100 euros, but that was something else altogether. I put prices in euros as they are in France, where we often shop although not coming from there (and having no idea about prices across the pond), nor having kind of 'wine tradition' in family/region/country I come from.
I can't judge price from taste, but for sure I can appreciate massive variations and types of taste experience in good red wines, bigger than any other drink I've experienced including whiskeys (again, never tried expensive ones but say up to 100 euro per bottle). Initial hit, body, aftertaste, how it changes when in your mouth. The higher ones are (near) flawless experience every sip, rich, smooth tastes I couldn't previously imagine a simple wine can hold.
Not saying every wine deserves its price, most probably not, but there are gems even in mid tier category, at least for me (+ my wife who feels the same).
Also, one of best red wine experiences was a random buy for 12 euros from some local bodega in Puglia, south Italy. Explosion of fruits and nuts, very very long and varied aftertaste that felt like a small symphony. I tried desperately after vacation there to buy it online, and its simply not out there... one of those local, (still) highly under-appreciated gems.
> In the course of their routine duties, he would sometimes present the judges with samples from the same bottle three times without their knowledge. The judges were among the top experts in the American wine industry: winemakers, sommeliers, critics and buyers as well as wine consultants and academics. The results were "disturbing"... "Over the years he has shown again and again that even trained, professional palates are terrible at judging wine."
You fully and completely misunderstood what I wrote, I am well aware of those double-blind tests (which can have their own flaws), but real life experience of me, my wife and plenty of our friends consistently says what it says.
We are not yet in time where I trust internet or anonymous commenters more than my/our own taste buds.
But look, if you enjoy those 5 euro wines in same way as others do with 5000 euro bottles, good for you. Or at least illusion of equality there, at the end it doesn't matter that much, does it. I'll stick with our selection of 8-50 euro range of french and italian ones (mostly at the bottom part), so everybody is happy.
> real life experience of me, my wife and plenty of our friends consistently says what it says...
Real-life experience fairly consistently shows vaccines cause autism, angels are real, and my cousin's brother's sister-in-law went to school with a kid named "Shithead" but pronounced "shu-theed".
>blindfolded critics struggle to determine between red and white
This never happened.
The source of this myth is typically a 2001 experiment (G Morrot, F Brochet, D Dubourdieu), in which they took oenology undergraduate students and had them (not blindly) taste wine and write down tasting notes. A week later they repeated it, but with a white wine and another white wine that they dyed red, given a list of their "red wine notes" and "white wine notes" from the prior trial, and asked to label the two wines using them. They found that the students were more likely to pick from their "red wine notes" to describe the dyed red wine.
There are a couple of problems here. First is that a small (50) sample of undergraduate students were used, not "critics", and there was no requirement for them to have any wine drinking experience. I have met very few college kids with developed wine palates, most (even in France where the study was done) I've known drank whatever booze was cheap and available. Second is that the trial was testing visual biases to tasting notes by examining faked visual cues, which is not the same as "determining between red and white" wines blindfolded for example. It's a very specific thing and no one who brings this study up seems to understand that. They were neither neither "blindfolded" nor "critics".
In my experience, for common varieties and wine regions, wine professionals can typically place it to the given region of a country and sometimes a given year based off a tasting. I've seen them practice for CSM exams doing this, and you would be pretty surprised at how often they're very close to correct (if not entirely so). Your average non-professional who drinks a lot of wine and pays attention to common notes can also usually place the grape and/or region pretty well, they'll just get thrown off by outliers like Eastern Europe orange wine or Tasmanian pinots or whatever.
As far as $5 vs $5000, $5 is a price point that is impossible to meet without extensive use of additives and tricks like adding wine concentrate to a thinned out (read: cut) and deacidified wine, and then correcting its color with an additive like Mega Purple. I've never tasted a good $5 bottle. $20 and up is where you have the chance of getting great bottles, and then it is true that (imo outside of a few types like champagne) the only difference between high and low cost wine is the price tag.
Of course, "critics" will tell you that one wine or another is good for all sorts of reasons. Maybe it is good, maybe they are afraid of offending a large producer, maybe their parent company has a stake in the wine being reviewed, maybe (in the case of Robert Parker) they are a lush that likes overly boozy and juicy reds. Either way, don't take wine critics too seriously, it is not an honest industry, and be especially skeptical of Parker-style numerical ratings.
Only surveyed 20 people, subjective rating of effects, no word on existing tolerance in this cohort. Also double blind is pretty impossible to actually do when it is in terms of a psychoactive drug. Imagine testing drunkenness and having a cohort drink water, how useless that would be as a placebo, as people would know immediately they have not been given the drug and are still feeling quite sober.
Double blind means the researcher doesn't know what they are giving to the subject. They still ran a placebo.
"Methods: Twenty healthy adults completed nine, double-blind outpatient sessions in which they inhaled vaporized THC alone (15mg or 30mg), d-limonene alone (1mg or 5mg), the same doses of THC and d-limonene together, or placebo; a subset of participants (n=12) completed a tenth session in which 30mg THC+15mg d-limonene was administered. Outcomes included subjective drug effects, cognitive/psychomotor performance, vital signs, and plasma THC and d-limonene concentrations."
