mattbrowne That’s interesting and more relevant to the question at hand. Thanks for explaining in more detail. :)
When it comes to wine the taste can be very subjective. I was at a large tasting party once where they made a sort of game out of having people try to guess what wines were the expensive wines and voting their favorites in a blind taste test. It was interesting when they showed the results. The point of the test was to show that wine snobbery is sort of pointless and to show how subjective the flavor perceptions were. Basically the wine expert who was hosting the event said to just drink what you enjoy!
Back to the article I posted the link to:
The article did not explain at length how the information could be used but some of the findings related to taste receptors which are not on the tongue. It’s way off topic really since the OP was asking about how accurate our taste buds are but I thought it was interesting. It doesn’t have to do with taste in the mouth. It has to do with flavor receptors other places in the body. They may have applications to treating anorexia and diabetes.
an excerpt from the article:
The other recent revelation in taste research is that the receptors that detect bitter, sweet and umami are not restricted to the tongue. They are distributed throughout the stomach, intestine and pancreas, where they aid the digestive process by influencing appetite and regulating insulin production. ......Taste buds are simply a way of sensing chemicals, so they can have functions unrelated to detecting the flavour of food. And they are surprisingly common in the body (see ‘The secret lives of taste receptors’), although their presence is sometimes baffling. “We don’t know the function of these receptors in more places than we do know them,” says Finger. (Thomas Finger, co-director of the University of Colorado’s Rocky Mountain Taste and Smell Center in Aurora.) It is not surprising that some of the better-understood examples are in the digestive system. The T1R2/T1R3 sweet receptor is found on K- and L-type enteroendocrine cells in the intestine. These cells secrete hormones called incretins, which in turn stimulate insulin production. The sweet receptors neatly explain a phenomenon that had mystified physiologists for more than 50 years: that eating glucose triggers significantly more insulin than injecting it directly into the bloodstream. Neuroscientist Robert Margolskee, now associate director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, realized that if there were receptors in the intestine that could detect glucose and trigger the release of hormones, this would provide the missing link for the so-called incretin effect. In 2007, his hypothesis proved correct as his team found the sweet receptor on L cells in the human duodenum2 and showed that these cells produce the gastrointestinal incretin hormone GLP-1, which stimulates insulin production and sends a satiety signal to the brain. Blocking or deleting these sweet receptors decreases insulin release.