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that a good palate is one that you happen to agree with. The reality is that wine appreciation is to a large extent subjective. I’m stating the acutely obvious here, but taste is personal, determined both by one’s biological attributes and by things such as experience, expectation, and culture, intangibles that obviously vary from individual to individual. You might love a robust, heady Australian Shiraz, while the same wine might strike me as a hot, syrupy mess. If I tasted the wine on your recommendation, I’d probably think less of your palate, and if I told you what I really thought of the wine, you’d probably think less of mine. Neither of us would necessarily be right or wrong; the difference of opinion would be at least partly rooted in personal taste, in factors beyond our control.
    But wine appreciation is not wholly subjective. The British philosopher Barry C. Smith points out that wines have objective qualities that exist independent of our ability to discern them, and he boldly contends that “good tasters are those who get matters right . . . There are standards by which we can judge a wine, or musical score, or painting to be better than another, and these reflect discernible properties of those objects, though it may take practice and experience to recognize them.” Interestingly, researchers have found that in experienced tasters, such as sommeliers, more areas of the brain are activated when tasting than is the case in novices, which suggests that experience promotes greater discernment. The fact that major critics seem to agree about individual wines far more often than they disagree likewise suggests that qualitative differences between wines are at least partially rooted in objective properties—that quality isn’t just a matter of personal taste.
    Of those objective properties, the most important ones to be able to recognize are flaws. At the very least, you need to be able to tell when a wine is damaged (one thing that never fails to amaze me is how often I have seen wine journalists, some quite prominent, flunk this basic test). Easily the most common problem is cork taint, which affects anywhere from 5 to 10 percent of wines bottled under natural cork. If a wine smells like damp cardboard and tastes as if its flavors have been leached out, it is a corked bottle and should be returned to the store (assuming it was bought fairly recently; if it is a thirty-year-old wine, you are probably out of luck). If a wine smells like a particularly pungent barnyard or like vinegar, it is also an off bottle. There are also visual cues you should look for. If the cork on a relatively young bottle is soaked through with wine, or if the cork has clearly moved, the bottle has suffered heat damage and should be returned. If a young white wine shows a surprisingly deep, mature color and smells like Sherry, it has suffered oxidation and should be returned to the store or tossed. If a fairly young red wine looks oddly mature in color, it has probably suffered the same fate. It won’t hurt you to drink wines with any of these defects; you just won’t be drinking particularly pleasurable wines.
    And who are these people referred to as supertasters , and are they really superior tasters? The term supertaster was coined in 1991 by Linda Bartoshuk, a professor of otolaryngology and psychology at the Yale School of Medicine. S ome sixty years earlier, Arthur L. Fox, a scientist for DuPont, had discovered that the chemical compound phenylthiocarbamide, or PTC, tasted oppressively bitter to some people but elicited no response in others; the former were dubbed tasters, the latter nontasters, and the differences were put down to genetic variation. In the 1970s, concerns about the toxicity of PTC led Bartoshuk and other scientists to begin using propylthiouracil, or PROP, instead to test for sensitivity to bitterness. During the course of her research, Bartoshuk noticed that not all tasters