In wine there is truth. Over the weekend, The Wall Street Journal helped bring this truth to light.

People have different tastes, and expectations and environment can drastically alter what they taste. It’s all very psychological. A bottle of Bordeaux that costs $150, and has won numerous awards is believed to be spectacular before the bottle is opened. No matter your personal preferences, this Bordeaux has got be good. Put it in a box with a push-button dispenser instead of a crystal decanter, and I think we can all agree that our expectations will change. It begs the question of the accuracy of ratings and the personal biases that are applied when a neutral perspective would really be more valued.

The various studies speak to so many of the human biases that we apply to all things. One study of wine competitions illustrates “that the probability that a wine [that] won a gold medal in one competition would win nothing in others was high.” To follow up on this study, defining parameters were set and it was found that “the distribution of medals…mirrors what might be expected should a gold medal be awarded by chance alone.” Even with a purportedly systematic rating system, randomness persisted.

Asset class performance is random, and so fund performance is also random. We cannot truly compare stocks to grapes, or indexes to grape vines, though certainly some metaphors can be poetically woven. What we can do is take a step back and recognize our own behavior patterns and the effect they have on our decisions.

Leonard Mlodinow is the author of the WSJ article, for his bio and other information, please click here.