[dahart]

> when people express their complex, nuanced wine preferences, it's easy for me to feel like they're pulling something out of their butts … but they don’t disprove the existence of something real.

Yes! Most such preferences in my experience have been people pulling something out of their butts, whether it’s wine or web design. But then there are rare cases where it’s real. When I go to expensive restaurant that serve different flights of wine depending on the chosen food course, I like to sample the “wrong” wine in order to validate they claims they make. Often it makes little difference, but two restaurants in my life stand out in my mind as having wine pairings that were truly good, and when I sampled wines outside the pairing it was obvious that it didn’t work. I buy that amazing wines and amazing pairings exist, and also believe that people who actually know what they’re talking about are few and far between, so I can’t easily trust what someone says.