SMRs and AMRs

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Why so-called wine connoisseurs don't know s**t

The Legendary Study That Embarrassed Wine Experts Across the Globe

Posted by Ross Pomeroy August 19, 2014 RealClearScience

A LITTLE OVER a dozen years ago, "la merde... hit le ventilateur" in the world of wine.

Nobody remembers the 2001 winner of Amorim Academy's annual competition to crown the greatest contribution to the science of wine ("a study of genetic polymorphism in the cultivated vine Vitis vinifera L. by means of microsatellite markers"), but many do recall the runner-up: a certain dissertation by Frédéric Brochet, then a PhD candidate at the University of Bordeaux II in Talence, France. His big finding lit a fire under the seats of wine snobs everywhere.

In a sneaky study, Brochet dyed a white wine red and gave it to 54 oenology (wine science) students. The supposedly expert panel overwhelmingly described the beverage like they would a red wine. They were completely fooled.

The research, later published in the journal Brain and Language, is now widely used to showwhy wine tasting is total BS. But more than that, the study says something fascinating about how we perceive the world around us: that visual cues can effectively override our senses of taste and smell (which are, of course, pretty much the same thing.)

(Continued here.)

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