I thought that as well but my friends and I have done this a few times and most people can’t once you standardize temperature and move away from any desert wines (not a large sample size of course). Try it yourself and make sure not to let anything else get in the way (double blind where possible, all other factors exactly the same). I’ll also note that I’m not a complete noob, the group was in Napa on a wine tasting when we did this and most of us like wine and have done enough tasting and touring to know a little, maybe our pallets aren’t great, none of us are sommeliers or anywhere close :)

Was wondering how much temperature matters, and thinking probably a lot. Do I even know what room temperature white wine tastes like? Not really.

Usually, it tastes pretty bad.

Oh, and I’d recommend chilling your reds in the fridge for about 10-15 minutes before drinking. I often find true room-temperature reds to be on the warm side. I had a particularly bad experience with a “room-temperature” wine at a restaurant in Turin that had been sitting in the 35C heat…

Room temperature in wine is cellar temperature generally. That’s why you put reds in a wine fridge as well in many cases, just not as cold as white.

I've run this experiment with friends and it was trivial to distinguish reds from whites with table wines. Whatever wines they use in these studies to stump experts must be more close in flavor.

> I'm no wine expert but I bet I could reliably tell red from white in a blind tasting

This response is intended a joke, gently poking fun at the HN cliché response of "SMEs can't reliably do a thing, but I could if I wanted to". (Right?)

The trick is to dribble some on your shirt and discreetly look

That's what I thought. But then I started thinking.

OK, if it's some amzingly tannine-rich, oakey whine.. sure, Bordeaux. And if it's something really 'juicey', acid whine, sure.. Beaujolais nouveau. Etc.

But those are the classics, and they are extremes. What if I present you some obscure Bourgogne with a subtle honey/peach taste. I can assure you won't be able to say off-hand if it's a red or white.

There are certainly different kinds of wine flavor (dry and sweet are the most obvious), and some are red and some are white. But one could make a wine flavor of the opposite color of its usual genre, and you probably wouldn't detect that blind.