As a result, there is no doubt that tasting wines blind is a humbling experience. Perhaps this is why it is resisted. But the failure to taste wines blind leads to terrible biases. Indeed, one of the primary purposes of an independent wine tasting is to test whether common perceptions are really correct. Doing this requires that extraneous information that reflects the opinions of others be kept from biasing the tasters.
Wine tasting is a very subjective experience.
As a result, even when wines are served blind, the opinions of others often serve as focal points for agreement. What seems to happen is that one or two individuals have strong opinions at a table, and this crystallizes the opinions of others. To combat the problem of dependence of tasters, some very professional groups do not permit anyone to speak about the wines until after they have written down their ranking of them. The basic scientific presumption from which they start is that human behavior is not perfectly predictable . Among those with considerable experience with wine tasting, this is hardly a controversial assumption.