Experts and Connoisseurs

This chapter includes case studies of the way reputations are built in the wine market. It explains that wine provides a paradigm for the role played by reputation in introducing novices to a new domain of taste. It observes adult novices in encountering for the first time a new cultural sphere that requires them to make value judgments. By restricting the discussion of newcomers to adults, the chapter avoids the kind of biases associated with deference to intellectual authority in the education of children. Adults being schooled for the first time in the world of wines find themselves facing a cultural domain strongly structured by landmarks about which they initially know nothing.