Step one: taste it

The model is built. Now run it, one step at a time.

Back on the slide about what changed inside Vincenza, her practice came down to the same four steps on every bottle:

1. Taste the wine.
2. Guess a price.
3. Be told the correct price.
4. See how far off the guess was.

This is step one, and it is the only step where the wine itself matters.

So she tastes the bottle that arrived a few slides ago, and the four units settle on their numbers:

cabernet 1, viognier 0, plummy 0.5, apricotty 0

Read it slowly, because this is a real bottle now and not an example. It is a cabernet, so the cabernet unit is 1 and the viognier unit is 0. There is a plum taste, but only a moderate one, so plummy sits at 0.5. There is no apricot at all, so apricotty is 0.

Four numbers. That is the entire bottle, as far as the model is concerned.

Notice what is not here. No price, no opinion, no judgement about whether this is a good wine. Just a record of what she tasted.

Turning that description into dollars is step two.