New Jersey Wines Are Apparently Just as Good as French Ones

Don't take our word for it. Just ask the nine international judges who thought the New Jersey bottles were as good, if not better than some (way more expensive) $650-per bottle French bottles.

Don't take our word for it. Just ask the nine international judges who thought the New Jersey bottles were as good, if not better than some (way more expensive) $650-per bottle French bottles. In a summary of "The Judgment of Princeton" tasting cited by The Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen, a group of international judges--vineyard owners, wine critics, and journalists--gave New Jersey whites three of the top four spots (out of ten) and one New Jersey red the third spot (out of ten) during a blind tasting in Princeton last week.

The tasting, as The American Association of Wine Economics reports, were modeled after the 1976 "Judgment of Paris" tasting, where French Wine judges gave the wins to wines from the then-fledgling Napa Valley. Of course New Jersey isn't Napa, and the results were so surprising that one French judge reportedly wanted her score card back, while the American judges present didn't want their scores published. Though if you ask us, the whole idea of getting your feelings hurt in something as subjective as wine tasting, is a little bit dramatic.

Besides, the rankings may not matter "A statistical evaluation of the tasting, conducted by Princeton Professor Richard Quandt, further shows that the rank order of the wines was mostly insignificant," writes the AAWE. "That is, if the wine judges repeated the tasting, the results would most likely be different. From a statistically [sic.] viewpoint, most wines were undistinguishable. Only the best white and the lowest ranked red were significantly different from the others wines." The statistical evaluation, which offers a whole lot of science for such a simple thing as taste, is right here if you want to analyze the results from the judges, who, for one reason or another but still is unclear to us, you're supposed to totally trust when it comes to what you're supposed to like.