"Anders Tørneskog" in ...
>
> Adding points awarded I get 402. ... should have been 396 :-)

(My hasty transcription, no doubt!)

> A quite another point is whether proper statistical analysis
> could confirm the claim that the number one wine with 36
> points really was better that the second one with 42 points.
> Most often the "winner" in such rankings trumpet
> his score as a proof of superiority which it isn't.

I gather that this can happen, though it is not how these points were used
in this particular tasting.

The "preference" rankings were understood by these tasters as a ritual to
add structure, flow, to the tastings. The ranking results become a novel
by-product of the tasting notes that are the real result. Different
"rankings" than I reported could have resulted from the same tasting with an
unflawed bottle of the Richebourg, or with the tasters in different moods
and seeking different things, or had our twelfth taster also ranked the
wines. In years past, I objected to this ranking step for its obvious
absurdity of forcing a complex appraisal into a trivial, rigid ordering and
then combining this across different people. I later saw that it is more
important as a useful ritual, it helps organize the procedure. With some
wines and some tasters, the rankings correlate to each other closely, and
sometimes not at all. This time, the most expensive wine "ranked" lowest,
and the cheapest highest, which might interest someone. Anyway it
interested me!

-- Max