Judgment of Princeton

The Judgment of Princeton, held at Princeton University on Friday, June 8, 2012, was a structured blind tasting of top New Jersey wines against top French wines from Bordeaux and Burgundy.[2][3][4][5][6][7] The event was based on the famous 1976 Judgment of Paris (wine), in which California wines famously beat French wines in a blind tasting. The Judgment of Princeton was spearheaded by George M. Taber, who had been in Paris for the original Judgment of Paris and later written a book on the subject.[8] Along with Taber, the tasting was organized and carried out by economists Orley Ashenfelter, Richard E. Quandt, Karl Storchmann, and Mark Censits, owner of CoolVines, a local wine and spirits shop, who acted in the role of merchant Steven Spurrier, gathering the competition wines from the NJ winemakers and selecting and sourcing the French wines against which they were to be pitted. The French wines were sourced from the same estates as the original wines of the Paris tasting. The event also included other members of the American Association of Wine Economists, who then posted the data set from the tastings online as an open invitation to further analysis.[9][10]

Of the nine judges in Princeton, six were American, two French, and one Belgian. They are listed here in alphabetical order.

Name	Affiliation	Nationality
Jean-Marie Cardebat	Université de Bordeaux	France
Tyler Colman	DrVino.com	USA
John Foy	The Star-Ledger, thewineodyssey.com	USA
Olivier Gergaud	BEM Management School	France
Robert Hodgson	Fieldbrook Winery	USA
Danièle Meulders	Université Libre de Bruxelles	Belgium
Linda Murphy	Decanter (magazine), American Wine	USA
Jamal Rayyis	Gilbert & Gaillard Wine Magazine	USA
Francis Schott	Stage Left Restaurant, RestaurantGuysRadio.com	USA

The judges were told, in advance, similar to the set up in the Judgment of Paris, that six wines in each flight of ten were from New Jersey. Subsequently, several of the judges complained about the revelation of their judgments, as also occurred in the Judgment of Paris.

In 1999, Quandt and Ashenfelter published a paper in the journal "Chance" that questioned the statistical interpretation of the results of the 1976 Judgment of Paris. The authors noted that a "side-by-side chart of best-to-worst rankings of 18 wines by a roster of experienced tasters showed about as much consistency as a table of random numbers," and reinterpreted the data, altering the results slightly, using a formula that they argued was more statistically valid (and less conclusive).[11] Quandt’s later paper "On Wine Bullshit" poked fun at the seemingly random strings of adjectives that often accompanied experts' published wine ratings.[12] More recent work by Robin Goldstein, Hilke Plassmann, Robert Hodgson, and other economists and behavioral scientists has shown high variability and inconsistency both within and between blind tasters; and little correlation has been found between price and preference, even among wine experts, in tasting settings in which labels and prices have been concealed.[13][14]

The blind tasting panel was made up of nine expert judges, with each wine graded out of 20 points. The tasting was performed behind closed doors at Princeton University, and results were kept secret from the judges until they were analyzed by Quandt and announced later that day. According to an algorithm devised by Quandt, each judge's set of ratings was converted to a set of personal rankings, which were in turn tabulated cumulatively by “votes against," with a lower score better (representing higher cumulative rankings) and a higher score worse (representing lower cumulative rankings). The data were then tested by Quandt for statistically significant differences between tasters and wines using the same software he had previously employed to re-analyze the Judgment of Paris results.[15]

Shortly after the tasting was completed and the results tabulated, Taber, Quandt, and Ashenfelter announced the results to an audience of media, New Jersey winemakers, wine economists, and the judges themselves. The event took place in an auditorium at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs as part of the American Association of Wine Economists’ annual meeting. Due to the technical limitations of Quandt's custom-built, floppy-disk-powered FORTRAN system, it was necessary for Goldstein to scrawl the results onto a giant chalkboard, eliciting murmurs of disapproval from the audience over his poor handwriting.[16]

• Garden State Wine Growers Association
• List of wineries, breweries, and distilleries in New Jersey
• New Jersey Farm Winery Act
• New Jersey wine
• New Jersey Wine Industry Advisory Council

• The Judgment of Paris: A Turning Point for Wine (NPR)
• Asimov, Eric. Judgment, Schmudgment. New York Times.
• Murphy, Linda. California wines beat the French -- again Taste-off proves California wines age best, too. San Francisco Chronicle.