The Los Angeles collector and scientist Bipin Desai (www.bipin.com) organised an extraordinary series of tastings at the end of April 2002 to test the quality of the 1982 vintage in Bordeaux against other great vintages. His method was to serve flights of three of four different great vintages of the same wine, always including 1982, blind to a group made up of wine collectors and commentators or professionals. The professionals (whom Bipin calls 'journalists' in his reports on the results) included my fellow British Masters of Wine Clive Coates and Serena Sutcliffe, France's tasting guru Michel Bettane and...