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Another somewhat famous study involved taking a cheap wine and an expensive wine and swapping the bottles. When people tasted the wines and the bottles were hidden, people accurately scored the wines. When the bottles were visible, people preferred the wine in the expensive bottle. All but the experts were susceptible to this effect.
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I think the gripe with things like wine tasting is the "elitist" nature of it all. Tasting a lot of wines and beers either makes you an expert or a drunk or an expert drunk or drunk expert? Either way, theres no certainty that a drunk isn't an expert or vice versa.
Expert drunk. In Iowa wine and spirits are sold mostly my state-run stores. They record the interesting fact that 90% of their sales are to 10% of their customers. Which actually puts that 10% at 81X the money spent on alcohol vs the rest of the population. That's a lot.
>> "The fact that there are no specific terms to describe odors supports the idea of a defective association between odor and language. Odors take the name of the objects that have these odors."
This idea is wrong. Odors take the name of the objects that have these odors ... IN ENGLISH. Other languages have rich vocabularies for odor categories. Actually, even English has a few specific terms that describe odors, such as 'musty', so the quoted "fact" is also wrong.
Here is one of the first academic studies to document this https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00100... and the author has other papers which shows the same facts in other languages.
Wine tasting is an art of deduction. The first step of any wine tasting is to look at the color, rim variation, legs, etc. From there, you take account the smell and taste. At a professional level, this is always done in a particular order to help narrow down possible characteristics for the next step. If you change the color of the wine, you'll send the wine taster down a completely different mental flow chart. The…
Reading that, I'm confused about the conclusion. The wine tasters were looking for flavors, and said they found them. If they weren't there, they should have said so. The inescapable conclusion is, the supposed differences between white and red wine are imaginary. They are not in the wine, but in the taster's head. In the 'mental flow chart', the chart they use to make up words about what they're tasting .
I'm not sure of the qualifications held by the tasters in the study and the quality of the descriptors used, but I've spent quite a bit of time with people training for the advanced level of The Court of Master Sommeliers. At first, I was a skeptic of wine tasting but they completely changed my mind after doing a number of blind tastings with them. They would usually be able to pick out the variety of grape(s) used along with a rough part of the world the wine came from during blind tastings.
> differences between white and red wine are imaginary
In most cases, they're not. There are some exceptions such as light bodied reds that can be very similar in taste to some orange or white wines, but largely, each wine has different chemical composition (different polyphenolic profiles) and a good sommelier can tell the difference. Here's the deductive tasting format used by 'the court' if you interested in all the different things you can look for in a wine: https://www.mastersommeliers.org/sites/default/files/ES%20Ta...
I don't understand. Why would anyone think of a student as an expert? I'm not saying that oenologists aren't full of it. I'm saying that this study doesn't prove what this article claims it does. Why doesn't the author report on a study with established experts instead?
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That has been done multiple times. It is easy: just record the sound and compare acoustic signatures. And yes, Stradivarius is different. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/may/21/scientists-f...
This double-blind study found that experts preferred modern violins to Strads in listening tests: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/million-dollar-strad...
There is a growing sentiment among violinists that the Strads and their ilk are being surpassed by new fiddles, and are possibly also in decline.
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This double-blind study found that experts preferred modern violins to Strads in listening tests: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/million-dollar-strad...
The experts do prefer the more modern sound, but the core of the study proves that strats are different. They have a special sound. If that's what you want to hear then you need a strat. And we should not discount the psychological effects on the player of playing and living with such a legendary object. Great paintings are more than pixels. Great instruments are more than sound boxes.
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Novelty plays a part in this too.
So does the amount imbided in a single go. Sipping tastes different from drinking and gulping. If an 'expert' doesn't know that, and isn't controlling for those variances, then their opinion is not going to be terribly rigorous. Notably, Pepsi Cola made great use of these types of tricks for their advertising campaign re: "Take the Pepsi Challenge". Much of taste is more subtle and experiential than many realize.
I used to make a living as a mastering engineer, where the job description is to make many tiny changes near or even beyond the threshold of perception, which when summed may add up to a perceptible whole. How to do this? It's simple: isolate and magnify. Zoom in to where your senses become reliable, make a change informed by your knowledge and experience which you predict will be beneficial, then zoom out. You don't…
You cannot say a whole field is fake because of a single experiments on students of that field. Neither can you by looking at people using their diploma but lacking the real expertise. I know chemistry PhDs I would never let run even the simplest experiment... They still boast on social media that they are experts, same with people selling wine and lying to clients to make them believe the wine is good or taste like…