I may have qualified as a Master of Wine and have been immersed in wine professionally since 1975 but I’d never style myself an “expert”. Even before 2016, when Michael Gove declared that “people in this country have had enough of experts”, Britons were already suspicious of expertise.
Suspicion all too easily turns to delighted ridicule when that expertise involves something such as art or wine that is not widely understood, or seen as elitist. “Fake Ming vase fools dealers” or “Cheap cava confused with champagne” are the sort of headlines guaranteed to please.
Now there’s a new fashionable headline, suggesting that machines will be able to replicate humans in every endeavour (and often confusing computational statistics with what is so loosely called artificial intelligence). Setting aside the threat of ChatGPT et al to those of us who write for a living, I feel moved to defend wine professionals in general and the need to retain the personal touch in much of what we do.