The taste machine: Sense, subjectivity, and statistics in the California wine world

This article is about mid-20th-century attempts to turn subjective judgments about the quality and composition of wine into objective knowledge. It focuses on the research of Maynard Amerine at the University of California, Davis, and his project to formalize the procedures of sensory evaluation. Using controlled experimental conditions, Amerine and colleagues transcribed judgments about taste into numbers that could then be aggregated and analyzed statistically. Through such techniques, they claimed to be able to turn subjectivities into objectivities, rendering private taste sensations into reliable and stable facts about objects in the world.