> Meanwhile, the store was becoming even slower to deliver. In February 2012 a participant on Wineberserkers.com, a popular discussion board, started a thread titled “Why does Premier Cru take so long” that would continue unspooling into outrage for the next four years.
Basically every page before then is a few people saying it might be a pyramid, and everyone else calling them trolls or competitors smearing the company.
It's funny that there were a few people who guessed exactly what was happening years before the bubble burst and they were silenced by all the people saying everything was fine because they got their wine just fine.
Powerful, respected people, or just people with enough money to demand to be treated as such, do not like to be made fools of any more than you or I, some even less so. Do they want to believe that they're so thick they've been swilling crap and scammed? People usually believe what they want to believe, for as long as possible.
Nobody said anything about the why am being bad. The scam is that the wines they ordered just didn't exist -- what little they did receive was the genuine high-quality stuff. That's the whole reason the scam was able to take off
I phrased that poorly, I didn't mean in this case. I'm thinking in general of study after study that shows most people can't tell the difference between red or white wine without the color as a guide.
Also, "Wine" to "Why am", classic autocorrect. I wonder how much longer we're all going to get to enjoy them?
I've read many studies that depicted folks not able to distinguish the price point of wine[1] but not being able to tell the "color" of wine is slightly rediculous to anyone who've drank enough wine. The flavor profiles are extremely different.
P.S. I spent 10 years in hospitality industry and have known many wine sommeliers, purveyors, and restaurant owners and have sold enough wine to be able to judge the regular public. I've also participated in many blind tastings and never experienced anyone "mixing up" the verity of wine.
P.P.S. I put color in quotes because all wine is white, red wine gets its color from the skin of the grape and the oak barrels. That's why Oak Ages Chardonnay is "golden", it took a bit of the oak barrel with it.
If you're curious, white Pinot Nior should be easy to find. Try a blind test against other verities, for scientific purposes.
Seems this is typical of urban legends - something that has a hint of truth but which has been retold in a way to produce a more sensational sounding result. Snopes did a little digging a couple of years back to find out what the origin of this story was: http://sciencesnopes.blogspot.cz/2013/05/about-that-wine-exp...
To save you the bother of reading the article (though it is pretty interesting) here's the key few sentences which describe the experiment setup and execution. Essentially a scientist called Frédéric Brochet was doing some research into "perception and wine tasting" and setup an experiment with some undergraduate enology (wine tasting) students.
"The undergraduate subjects came into the lab one week and were given a glass of a red wine and a glass of a white wine. (both Bordeaux, but the experimental details do not include any label or vintage, so we are unable to judge them) They were supplied with a list of potential descriptive words, and told to make a list of words and phrases that best described each wine, either from the supplied list or in their own words. The following week they return to the lab for another session. They were presented with two glasses, one containing white wine, and the other containing the same wine dyed red. They were then given the list of descriptors that they had used to describe the wines from the previous week, and asked to choose which of the wines in front of them best represented each descriptor. It was a forced-choice setup"
So "undergraduate students select the same words to describe a red wine which they had previously used to describe a white" becomes "wine experts can't tell the difference between red and white".
There are obviously different types of wine, like dry and sweet at the simplest extreme. Sure, color may be hard or impossible to taste (which should be obvious, right? you can't taste the difference between a yellow fruit and a red fruit, it doesn't classify that way), but there are still different flavors.
If you want to amuse yourself, here's the thread: http://www.wineberserkers.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=61257
It's interesting to me that even the mere hypothetical suggestion that Premier Cru was a Ponzi scheme produced such outrage.