woeriud
>But I don't believe they are actually judged on their ability to taste wines and detect flavours. Designing such tests would be simple - rate of successful flavour identification based on data from other Somemeliers.
That is exactly how the tasting portion of the exam works. And
>In my opinion they judge it as a dramatic performance: how quickly can the candidate rattle-off various flavours? How "high class" is the language they use to describe the flavours?
This isn't really how it works, especially the "high class" language comment. Actually there are a variety of different things that they are supposed to identify about the wine, known as "the grid" [1]. You can take a look at it yourself. They are essentially judged based on how well their grid matches up with the consensus grid from the master sommeliers.
[1] https://www.courtofmastersommeliers.org/wp-content/uploads/D...
Actually, this one is bullshit. While it may be true that the average person without blind tasting experience cannot do this, anyone who has actually done blind tasting seriously should be pretty accurate at this. Purely structurally, red wines generally have much more tannin and more alcohol than whites.
The famous study that led to this claim (which survives because people, especially the HN type, love feeling smug about expertise) doesn't really hold up. See eg http://sciencesnopes.blogspot.com/2013/05/about-that-wine-ex...
There are no questions like that any more. You really think the people designing the highest-profile standardized test in the country are oblivious to this kind of problem these days? There's a ton of cultural and racial bias screening and filtering that goes into producing these questions now, both manual and statistical. You can look at some sample questions yourself.