(Wine-Searcher) - Do you trust professional palates? Oliver Styles wonders how reliable they really are.

 

Ever tasted a wine on a summer's holiday, thought it was the greatest wine in the world, bought yourself a bottle or 12, taken it home and opened it several months later only to find out it was a nondescript, really rather average drop?

What happened? If that was what passed for great wine during your vacation, your taste buds were clearly not to be trusted. Next year you'll just content yourself with the cut-price deals on Scotch in the airport.

It may not even be a wine: it could be a chocolate bar or even a fruit-flavored tea. It tasted like ambrosia under the Mediterranean sun but, several months later and in a more circumspect mood, it tastes like pureed goat scrotum. What were you thinking? Well, we've all done it. We all make the wrong call now and again.