On Wednesday, a court in southwest France found 12 wine producers guilty of fraud for selling millions of gallons of fake Pinot Noir to America s E. & J. Gallo Winery, among others. The producers received suspended prison sentences and tens of thousands of Euros in fines. French customs officials figured out the scam, according to the BBC, when they noted that the amount of Pinot Noir being sold to Gallo exceeded the amount produced in the region. But would anyone have figured it out otherwise?

The scheme ran for years. But, as one French winemaker s lawyer sniffed to the BBC: Not a single American consumer complained.

And why would they have? While this fraud may be grabbing headlines, less noticed is the overarching fraud that underpins the entire wine industry: The idea that the average consumer or even wine experts can reliably tell the difference between higher- and lower-quality wines.

While oenophiles may sincerely believe that they can suss out the difference between a $95 bottle and a $19 one, science indicates otherwise. What experiments show, in fact, is that the amount of pleasure contained in a bottle of wine follows the price tag not the other way around.

Take, for instance, a recent experiment conducted by researchers at Caltech and Stanford, which looked directly at the relationship between the price of a bottle of wine and how much consumers enjoyed it. In the experiment, 20 volunteers were told they would be sampling five wines, priced at $5, $10, $35, $45, and $90 per bottle. Unsurprisingly, the participants consistently reported that they preferred the $90 bottle to the $5 bottle; they also reported that they preferred the $45 bottle to the $35 bottle.

But, there was a catch. The participants weren t really tasting five wines; they were tasting three, with two of the wines being tasted twice, labeled at different prices. For example, Wine 2 was presented as the $90 wine and as the $10 wine. So how did that affect people s enjoyment of the wine? As the $90 wine, they loved it; as the $10 wine, not so much.

What s more, these levels of enjoyment were confirmed not just by people s reports of how much they liked each wine, but inside a brain scanner. Higher ratings of how pleasurable a wine was matched up with greater activation in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, a part of the brain thought to encode for the pleasantness of an experience.

But was this effect just a result of testing people who didn t know much about wine? To get at that question, the team repeated the behavioral part of the experiment (though, not the fMRI) on what they termed semi-experts : members of the Stanford Wine Club. The effect of price on taste remained the same.

But what about real experts? What about professional sommeliers and judges in respected wine competitions? What about reviewers for prestigious wine magazines?

Well, they re full of it, too. Take two articles published recently in the Journal of Wine Economics, both by a retired statistician and active winemaker, Robert Hodgson.

In one experiment, Mr. Hodgson served 100 wines to actual California State Fair Wine Competition judges, over the course of four years. The tastings were blind, and each judge was presented the same wine three times, each time from the same exact bottle. What Mr. Hodgson found was remarkable: On a 20-point rating scale, from 80-100, judges typically varied in their ratings of the same wine by plus-or-minus four points. The same wine could be rated a 90, an 86, and a 94, all by the same judge in the same year. Only about 10% of judges stayed within two points and those judges weren t the same judges year-to-year, meaning it was more likely chance than skill that led to their greater accuracy.

In another study, Mr. Hodgson looked at the probability of a wine winning a gold medal in one competition while not even placing in another. Looking at a sample of wines entered into at least five competitions, he found that the chances of a wine winning 0, 1, 2 or more gold medals in those competitions was roughly the same as if the competitions were determined by chance.

How can so little of our experience of wine be objective? How can we be so sure, despite all evidence, that we know whether one wine is superior to another? How can counterfeit wines consistently please us as much as the real thing?

As Princeton economist Richard Quandt wrote in his delightfully titled essay, On Wine Bullshit, about the flowery (and seldom consistent) language employed by wine critics, perhaps it s just that our expectations of wine fuse with our experience of drinking it so completely that the liquid s intrinsic and extrinsic properties become inseparable.

If we re told a bottle of wine has hints of cat pee or hot fig flavors, then by God we re going to taste hot figgy cat pee. When we shell out on a bottle of wine, in other words, the bullshit is what we re buying.

Ryan Sager writes the blog Neuroworld at TrueSlant.com.