I am out of the office for a week or two on jury duty and  the experience has unexpectedly reminded me of some important things about the world of wine.

A Jury Duty Paradox

I didn’t hesitate for a moment when the jury service summons arrived. I can find the time right now and besides it is a civic duty. I am not an expert on the law but that doesn’t seem to matter.

The idea of a jury trial is that the experts make their case and try to convince ordinary citizens like me that they are right. Some cases are decided by experts — the Supreme Court,  for example, is both judge and jury for the cases that come before it — but most justice starts (and often ends) with the judgment of a jury of peers.

I think it is a bit of a paradox, however, that I accepted the jury duty quickly but, about the same time, I declined an invitation to be on a different kind of jury — a jury of judges for an important regional wine competition. Thanks, I replied,  but I am a self-taught taster and inexperienced with these particular wines. This is a job for experts, not someone like me.

Each of these decisions makes sense on its own, but they are a bit puzzling when you put them together.Objectively, I might actually be better qualified to judge wine than a legal case. But for some reason I applied different standards in the two situations.

Why do I seem to believe that specialized knowledge is needed to serve on a large wine judging panel (where the stakes are actually very low), but expertise is not required for duty on a civil or criminal court jury where with potentially significant consequences? Seems like I’ve got my priorities backwards, doesn’t it?

The Jury of Public Opinion

But then I realized that I was missing something. Wine is actually a lot like the judicial system. While there are a few wine market cases that are decided mainly by the “Supreme Court” of experts (here I am thinking of the role of big-name critics in the en primeur market, for example), it is really the supply and demand “jury of peers” who render most verdicts.

At the end of the day for most wines, it is what the buying public thinks that matters more than the experts’ judgement. Is this a good thing? It is easy to point out that citizen juries have some disadvantages compared with expert panels, but there are advantages, too. It is important that arguments are persuasive enough to sway unbiased citizen peers. It sort of keeps us all honest, if you know what I mean.

In the same way, it is a good thing that critics don’t always reign supreme when it comes to wine markets and that most of us take their expert wine advice with a grain of salt. Wine’s most important job is to give us pleasure, as Jancis Robinson has said, and we amateurs are ourselves the best judge of that.

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(Did you notice the sneaky way I used Jancis Robinson as a kind of “expert witness” in the last paragraph?) The Wine Economist will take a brief recess until my court duties are complete. In the meantime, here’s a “judge and jury” scene from Eric Idle’s fun London Mikado production. Enjoy!