"Good wine" and subjectivity

My laptop battery is solidly dead, and I am too lazy to get the charger (but not too lazy to type with my index finger), hence this is the first post from my phone...

Anyway, I was at a wine tasting today... (very nice perks of the job). We were provided with a selection of wines and asked to rate them on various criteria: flavour, acidity, alcohol, 'balance' (?) etc. It was a lot of fun, the highlight of my evening included meeting a forensic anthropologist (I now think I know how to sex a skull!). A comment made by one of the members of our group struck me, specifically, the comment was on the nature of subjective element of the scoring. Now subjectivity I think to most people implies an element of indetermination, arising from the belief in a 'right' answer and expressing a certain element of skepticism that the current experiment is capable of exposing the truth.

This statement got me thinking... (I personally have always been and remain convinced that if I think a certain glass of wine tastes crap/good then it is, I have no time for the 'quality', price, year etc... of the wine)... of my new thesis that we are all in a very frightening and vulnerable way very similar to each other. You and I share the same pains, the same anxiety, our mutual silence is what prevent us from realising this. I thought of my first experiences lecturing, the first time you present a set of material, your stomach is in a knot, your voice shakes , you think what will they ask me? These amazing brilliant students? ... (if you prepare well, they ask you questions you can answer) and and...most surprisingly the subsequent time you give the lecture, the very SAME questions are asked! I was astounded the first time, but I wonder what this says about subjectivity? Does it exist?

These people that put this wine tasting event on, and had us fill in a survey, they knew this, that on average we are all the same, and they just wanted to calibrate to our similarity...

Hmmm... I don't yet have an answer, but I think I need to think more, what does it mean - subjectivity?!

And before I loose myself to the ecstacy of music, I express my last naive subjective thought that my friend's ragou was very nice :)