For whatever reason (probably incipient insanity on my part -- but maybe the use of the term
flowery prose in a comment above) this discussion got me to thinking about
oenophiles.
It is (i.e., it
should be) absolutely achievable to develop meaningful (i.e., statistically valid and defendable) correlations between measureable quantities (e.g.,, optical density, spectrophotometry, light scattering, pH, specific gravity, viscosity, and - of course - things like GC headspace analysis for volatile organics, ion chromatography, mass spectrometry, and other analytical techniques for the organic and inorganic constituents) of a bottle of wine and its perceived quality by, shall we say,
trained tasters.
Indeed, for all I know (we've been sort of out of the serious wine snob game for a couple of decades now) this has been/is being done.
I know that analytical labs do indeed carry out some fairly sophisticated quantitative analyses of wine.
Wine might even be more interesting than hifi because multiple senses are directly impacted by the experience of pouring, looking at, sniffing and tasting wine. Yeah, yeah, I guess visual and tactile enter into hifi, too, but perhaps less directly than with the whole wine-quaffing experience. Synaesthetics aside, I don't think that most folks
taste hifi, e.g.
I am guessing that the flowery prose is still winning the day in the wine journals, though(?).
