[HN Gopher] The Legendary Study That Embarrassed Wine Experts (2...
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The Legendary Study That Embarrassed Wine Experts (2014)
Author : Tomte
Score : 94 points
Date : 2021-02-14 10:53 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.realclearscience.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.realclearscience.com)
| milesvor66 wrote:
| I'm quite skeptic. As a person that rarely drink wine, I can
| recognize if a wine is red or white blinded, as other friends of
| mine. Also white wine hurts my stomach. Hovewer all the different
| flavours discussions regarding red wine are out of my
| discernment.
| january_fanatic wrote:
| The end of the article says:
|
| >> "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.
| keiferski wrote:
| This has been debunked repeatedly, but since "we showed those
| snobs!" makes for good clickbait, it inevitably returns.
|
| The studies listed never quite make it clear how "wine expert" is
| being defined. The one in this article says it used students, who
| clearly are _not_ experts in any sense of the word. Other studies
| just handwave away the question and say, "We asked wine
| experts." If you dig into some of them, it turns out that the
| designated "wine experts" were really some people that took a
| weekend course on wine testing.
|
| If you don't define your terms, your conclusions are not
| relevant.
|
| Edit, just to add an example more amenable to the HN crowd.
| Imagine a research study asks CS students or recent coding camp
| graduates questions about programming and computer science. Would
| you take their answers as authoritative? Because that's pretty
| much what is happening here, except with wine.
| graton wrote:
| > This has been debunked repeatedly
|
| Any sources to support that statement?
| keiferski wrote:
| https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2019/07/can-
| profess...
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| That article _doesn 't_ debunk Brochet's experiment. Here's
| what it says: "That said, important to note here is that
| while Brochet's studies are often cited as definitively
| showing how bad wine experts are at judging wines, in this
| case that they can't even tell the difference between red
| and white wines, that's not what that study actually showed
| at all."
|
| Brochet proved that most people who are reasonably
| knowledgeable about wine can be fooled into thinking that a
| white wine which has been dyed red is a red wine, as shown
| by their describing it in terms normally used to describe a
| red wine, because their senses of taste and smell were
| fooled by what they saw.
|
| It was not a blind taste test.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| Hmm. Maybe you read a different article from what you
| linked.
|
| "Our results indicate that both the prices of wines and
| wine recommendations by experts may be poor guides for non-
| expert wine consumers."
|
| "Much to my mortification I was dead wrong, as was everyone
| else in the room. The proprietor chuckled and informed his
| room... that the wines were actually the same wine; one was
| just warmer than the other."
|
| If anything, this article confirms the conclusions of the
| original. Again from your article:
|
| "Rather, this test simply showed how easily our perception
| of things is influenced by suggestion."
|
| This doesn't contradict the original conclusion, it
| confirms it.
| nojokes wrote:
| _Here 's how the research went down. First, Brochet gave 27
| male and 27 female oenology students a glass of red and a glass
| of white wine and asked them to describe the flavor of each.
| The students described the white with terms like "floral,"
| "honey," "peach," and "lemon." The red elicited descriptions of
| "raspberry," "cherry," "cedar," and "chicory."_
|
| I think what this study showed is that oenology try to fit the
| wine in front of themselves into the framework what they have
| been taught. You see red wine and try to fit it into this
| limited framework and describe it.
|
| I think they were fooled indeed.
|
| As a person who likes wine, I simply like to enjoy wine and not
| to describe it and try to figure out what that smell or taste
| resembles.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| > As a person who likes wine, I simply like to enjoy wine and
| not to describe it and try to figure out what that smell or
| taste resembles.
|
| I feel similarly about beer and coffee. I hear people talk
| about fruity flavors in coffee or other similarly weird
| descriptions of beer and I taste it and just taste the
| coffee. I can definitely taste the difference between fairly
| distinct varieties of coffee (or beer). But when people talk
| about getting cherry overtones in their coffee, I just shrug
| and enjoy it.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Sure. Only a small portion of people care about trying to
| analyze wine. But it _is_ useful for selling wine. I like
| wines with lots of non-fruit flavors. Seeing a description
| with things I have heard used to describe wines I remember
| liking is useful. So there is a place for descriptors even if
| I buy wine to enjoy rather than analyze.
| mpol wrote:
| And still I do like my Pinot Noir a bit watery red :)
|
| I don't really know what is happening in this context. Maybe a
| lot of people have not much taste, or cannot disciminate between
| different tastes or things?
|
| I don't understand anything about the words that go along with
| wine and beer reviews. I don't understand anything about using
| words like chocolate or nuts in describing the taste of wine or
| beer.
|
| I do know what I like in my mouth, but that is also very
| subjective. It also changes over time and can differ from day to
| day. Some days I like a bitter hoppy beer, some days a fresh
| pilsner. Some days I like a softer red wine, some days it may
| have a 'bite'.
| tasssko wrote:
| Novelty plays a part in this too.
| arbitrage wrote:
| 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.
| dazc wrote:
| I can't remember the reference but, from what I remember,
| the moral of the story from the 'Pepsi Challenge' was to
| disregard what people say they prefer the taste of and to
| pay intention instead to what people actually buy.
| rblatz wrote:
| I took part in a Pepsi challenge at a water park as a kid.
| I did and still prefer Coke, but the cute girl running the
| booth would get excited and give me a prize if I picked
| Pepsi. So not being an idiot I picked Pepsi, if you've ever
| had both it's extremely easy to tell the difference.
| ta988 wrote:
| 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 chocolate...
| ericbarrett wrote:
| I have witnessed with my own two eyes an experienced wine
| aficionado call the grape type, terroir (micro-region) and year
| of a brown-bagged wine, based on a single tasting. They were
| off by one year, but otherwise correct. There's a ton of BS in
| the wine world, but it's not all fake.
| alexose wrote:
| I have a few somm friends that can do this reliably. The
| process of elimination is really fascinating to watch.
|
| The reason it's possible, though, is because the majority of
| commercial wine conforms to distinct, repeatable styles. A
| grassy note in an amber-colored wine might narrow it down to
| a single grape variety, a hint of smoke might indicate the
| region. Then take the relative level of oxidation, and you've
| got a decent guess at the year. Index that against your
| mental database of all the possible wines that it _could_ be
| (price point, availability, etc.), and you 've got a good
| shot the exact bottle.
|
| The level of knowledge required to do this without a book in
| front of you is impressive, but it's not magic. More like 20
| questions with a relatively narrow target area. The usual
| tricks will fail when you try it with small producers, non-
| traditional production techniques, or AVAs that don't
| distribute widely.
| ta988 wrote:
| I have a friend that does that exclusively with small
| producers wines (he is the owner of a store for specialty
| wines now somewhere in France), same approach. He has a
| traditional training in oenology, but spends his time
| tasting and traveling around Europe to find new unique
| things. Much more interesting oenological work than people
| working only with the normalized big-ones.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| But its such a profound failure, it warrants skepticism of the
| field. Or at least of schools that purport to teach a skill,
| then fail at that entirely.
| jfengel wrote:
| And a seven year old article without a follow-up also
| warrants skepticism. People have pointed out problems with
| the headline conclusion.
|
| To the degree that "skepticism" means thinking hard and
| applying work to discern differences, it would be warranted.
| To the degree that it's interpreted as general doubtfulness
| without further effort or thought, that's actually the
| opposite of true skepticism.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Come on. We know that taste perception is very largely
| influenced by expectation. Every drink orange juice just to
| find out it's milk? Taste awful until you figure out "oh
| that's just milk".
|
| If it seems that wine chatter can be explained entirely by
| the power of suggestion, then Occam's razor suggests that's
| all there is to it. There's no need to invent magical
| barely-detectable subtle flavor attributes to fermented
| grape juice.
| whatanattitude wrote:
| But all republicans are racist amirite.
| im3w1l wrote:
| I suspect it wont replicate. Not because there was any flaw in
| the original. But because today's students have heard of that
| study and will be more suspicious.
| ndnfjttkrk wrote:
| Randomize the coloring?
|
| Or make it part of a bigger study, for example "we want to test
| if wine tasters are also good beer tasters"
| walnut_eater wrote:
| I'd like to point out a number of serious methodological issues
| with this study.
|
| 1. They tested whether the dye was tasteless on students who were
| not wine students, just students pulled off of the agricultural
| school campus. This study basically says "Group A, who aren't
| trained in tasting, say that there's no taste. However, Group B,
| trained in tasting, report a difference." (More on that
| "difference" below.)
|
| 2. They tested the dye as being tasteless when mixed with wine.
| If it's truly tasteless they should do the same test with water.
| I suspect they don't because it does have a taste, more in this
| below.
|
| 3. Even in their experiment on untrained students trying to show
| that it is "tasteless," the wine containing dye was in fact
| identified as tasting different 120/300 times (expected value
| 100/300 if there was no difference in taste). This is not enough
| evidence to show definitively whether the dye is tasteless or
| not. The raw evidence reported actually indicates that it is more
| likely to have a taste than to not have a taste.
|
| 4. The way that they asked the wine students to compare the wines
| is convoluted - overly complicated, as if to obscure the truth.
| The wine students were asked to compare wines by sorting each
| feature as belonging more to Wine A versus Wine B. So, if neither
| wine particularly has some feature, you would still be forced to
| assign the feature to one of the two wines. The only two wine
| comparisons done were true white wine versus true red wine, and
| then true white wine versus white wine dyed to look red. They
| never actually do a comparison of the white wine dyed to look red
| compared to true red wine, which would be the most informative
| comparison.
|
| I will transition here from methodological issues with this study
| to my opinion on this study.
|
| This study appears to have been designed with a specific outcome
| in mind, regardless of the underlying truth about people's
| ability to taste wine. The conclusions stated in the study are
| not supported by the evidence actually collected in the study.
| The best thing I can say for this paper is that they report their
| methods clearly enough for someone to be able to see that they
| are heavily flawed.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| > The research, later published in the journal Brain and
| Language, is now widely used to show why wine tasting is total
| BS.
|
| BS? Or simply subjective? Sure people are influenced by
| "experts", as humans when isn't that true? Fashion? Music? The
| list is endless.
|
| We want to believe we are autonomous and independent but more
| often we naturally conform to the norm around us. Third-party
| insights and guidance are why we survived.
|
| I like wine. But I drink what I like. My senses aren't
| necessarily the same as someone else's. I'm sure if I tasted
| enough wine I could become an "expert." But that doesn't appeal
| to me. It takes the enjoyment out of it. I don't think that makes
| experience and expertise BS. Merely subjective.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Wine tasters make strong claims, and love to point out what
| others are missing. Those claims are bunk.
|
| If they simply said "That dress is marvelous! It looks great on
| you! I love the daring neckline!" we could all accept that as
| effusive enthusiasm.
|
| But to pretend to have an entire lexicon, to write endless
| descriptive books about it, makes wine tasters an entire level
| of farce above anything else you care to name.
| barrkel wrote:
| You are wrong.
|
| I might have agreed with you 20 years ago, but I know better
| now.
|
| Practice describing the flavours of the wine you drink, and
| your flavour memory and perception will improve over time. I
| generally drink a glass or two every evening, and it's
| usually a new wine, one I've never tasted before. I've
| written hundreds of tasting notes. One of the most
| interesting things to come out of this is finding out
| something later - e.g. a notable region or producer - and
| then correlating this with past notes. I noted things myself,
| over multiple samplings, which I later found - via experts -
| were expected attributes within the category.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| That describes exactly, the power of suggestion of
| perception. If it can all be explained by association
| triggering memory-perception (and it can, as suggested by
| the idea that 20 years of conditioning make it vivid) then
| we can reasonably conclude that there's nothing to the wine
| thing except that.
| vagrantJin wrote:
| 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.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| 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.
| rectang wrote:
| This has profound implications for _how_ we legalize
| marijuana, where the same dynamic holds and the real money
| is in supplying the heaviest users.
| adonovan wrote:
| Exactly. The whole liquor industry would collapse overnight
| were it not for their hard-core alcoholic customers. But
| "Drink responsibly", everyone.
| jfengel wrote:
| Wine shouldn't be elitist. There are rich people playing
| stupid games for stupid prizes, which is tiny but highly
| visible because it lets people tell a story they want to
| tell.
|
| The vast majority of wine drinkers simply drink wine. Those
| who really enjoy it may search out something interesting and
| distinctive for special occasions. Those will be rarer and
| more expensive, and the experience is difficult to convey, as
| any purely sensual experience is difficult to convey.
|
| You can enjoy wine without participating in any of that. But
| don't be misled by the people putting on airs about it.
| That's just people being voyeuristic about the wealthy and
| seeking out snobbery to feel superior to. It's not about wine
| at all.
| RichardCA wrote:
| John Cleese did a program about this, 20 years ago.
|
| https://youtu.be/sHnz6KoYw_A
|
| (TL;DR - He does the experiment at 16:30)
|
| I took a wine class in college (my school had a Hotel/Restaurant
| Management program, and offered the class as a General Ed
| elective). Those classes are focused on the geography of the
| different wine regions and taught nothing about how to train your
| palate. And no one ever talks about the idea of Qualia and how
| that can be different for different people.
| ddek wrote:
| I've got a few issues with most of these studies.
|
| The media tends to make this worse, because these articles (and
| their accompanying social media discussion) seem to exist solely
| for writers and readers to claim superiority over the perceived
| _elites_. Those pretentious wine snobs, don 't they know an Aldi
| boxed wine tastes no better than their precious _Chateau Lafite
| Rothschild_?
|
| The argument is always the same: a classification of wine, such
| as price, region, or even colour; is irrelevant to the _quality_
| of the wine. I find the argument itself is valid, but not
| convincing because it 's totally orthogonal to what I'd like from
| a wine.
|
| I don't care about a wines _quality_ score, whatever that is.
| Wine has a deep and complex flavour, and different bottles have
| different flavours. Many flavours are acquired tastes - not
| everyone finds bitterness or tannin pleasant. This variety is
| what does it for me.
|
| Honestly, I find these studies ridiculous. Our sense of taste
| depends so much on our eyes and nose, that such trickery will
| always get you results. I don't doubt I'd fall for such a trick.
|
| Anyway, if using junk science to bash people for their preferred
| beverages is your favourite pastime, you do you. _Something-
| something inferiority compl-cough_
| yeetman21 wrote:
| seething "aficionado" detected. were you the one in the study
| and is that why you are so triggered?
| cbmuser wrote:
| I don't know why you're so upset about this article.
|
| The experiment basically just proves that wine "science"
| doesn't live up to scientific standards and therefore shouldn't
| be considered science.
|
| I do agree though that every wine tastes differently and that
| therefore wine drinkers have preferences.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| What about this experiment doesn't live up to standards? It
| seems well set up and supports the hypothesis that perception
| takes precedence to smell/taste when describing things.
| mrmonkeyman wrote:
| Tannines, complex flavours? Sure. Let's actually taste the
| difference between red and white first, sir, then we'll talk
| about the other bs.
| PopGreene wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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?
| mkl95 wrote:
| I think that raises questions about the quality of the wine
| more than about anything else. I'm more of a beer guy but I can
| easily tell white from red wine. Both taste and aftertaste are
| very different.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| You probably can't.
|
| You probably can make a difference between a red wine you are
| familiar with with a white wine you are also familiar with.
| Both served the usual way.
|
| Besides the color, red and white wines are typically served
| at a different temperature (that alone change things
| completely) and with different dishes. So of course, make all
| parameters different and they are going to taste different.
|
| I can usually make the difference pretty easily but I drank
| some white wines that I definitely would have thought were
| red if blind. But that's typically wine made to be paired
| with the main course and served at a higher temperature than
| usual.
|
| And sure, some wines are unmistakable. If a wine is loaded in
| tanins, it is most likely deep red and the taste is obvious.
| The opposite is not that easy.
| rsync wrote:
| With respect, and without any particular knowledge of your
| experiences, I _would suggest_ that your impression of "red"
| and "white" wine is shaped by very typical examples of both.
|
| There is an incredibly broad array of flavor, mouth feel,
| aromas, etc., in both red and white wine and while you and I
| might very reliably discern a Napa Chardonnay from an
| Argentine Malbec there are many white and red wines that are
| well off the spectrum of what we think of as "red" and
| "white" wines.
|
| I have done a lot of wine tasting all over the world and I am
| certain you could fool me with regard to red vs. white - if
| you chose interesting and unconventional examples ...
| jcelerier wrote:
| > is shaped by very typical examples of both.
|
| which is what everyone means by "red" and "white" wine.
| when you process your data points you're supposed to remove
| the outliers.
| nimih wrote:
| Scientists: We took a bunch of people who claim they can tell
| red wine from white wine based on taste, and successfully
| fooled most of them with food coloring.
|
| Internet commenter reading the study: I can definitely tell
| red wine from white wine based on taste.
| mkl95 wrote:
| Any Spanish person who claims they cannot tell red from
| white wine is probably a teetotaller. However you can buy
| extremely good wine for a few EUR here, which leads me to
| think these people may have been served some watered down
| stuff for budget reasons.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| Until you do a blind taste test on yourself, you don't
| _know_ that you can tell.
| pyramidal wrote:
| Gwern is that you?
|
| (Just kidding. I know he doesn't have a monopoly over
| blind/randomized self-tests.)
| [deleted]
| mxcrossb wrote:
| I wonder if this is just making it clear that the words we use
| for describing red and white wines are fixed, and not that the
| students really couldn't tell the difference in flavor between
| red and white wine. Does the visual information change our taste,
| or merely our vocabulary?
| touggourt wrote:
| As a professional cooker, I can confirm that vision is the most
| important part in tasting. I've read other studies that shows
| that taste is a brain build which include senses and feelings.
| Everyone has done a dinner with good friends, eating pasta with
| butter and drinking some basical wine -- do you remember how it
| was delicious ?
| tzs wrote:
| You can see this on nearly every season of "Hell's Kitchen",
| where they have a taste test challenge. Pairs from the two
| teams go head to head having to taste and identify things while
| blindfolded and with their hearing blocked.
|
| Here's the one from season 12 [1] where of the 16 items they
| were asked to identify, one team got 6 right and one team got 4
| right.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/b-YwHQh6RaM?t=398
| philliphaydon wrote:
| > I can confirm that vision is the most important part in
| tasting.
|
| Unless your name is Christine Ha.
|
| :)
| pcrh wrote:
| As they say: "On mange d'abord avec les yeux".
| dandare wrote:
| Are there any studies showing the opposite results?
| fbelzile wrote:
| 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 tasters assumed the wine didn't have food coloring and
| correctly used all senses available to them to do the tasting.
| It's very disingenuous to point out that they should have used
| more white wine descriptors. The wine was red, so they used that
| information to further deduct characteristics of red wine.
|
| I also find it peculiar that they don't mention the variety used
| for this study [1]. The color of the wine comes from how long
| skins are left with the must (skin contact) while making the
| wine. There are many wine varieties (white and red) that taste
| very similar. In some cases, you can have both a white and red
| coming from the exact same grapes (Pinor Noir, for example).
|
| [1] I did Ctrl+F for "variety" on the study:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20070928231853/http://www.academ...
| ahepp wrote:
| If you were asked to identify a mystery wine, color would
| certainly be an important piece of information.
|
| If you, as a wine taster, were asked to describe the taste of a
| mystery wine, I think it's somewhat disappointing if the color
| of the wine affects your perception.
|
| Isn't taste supposed to be a first-order sensory experience?
|
| I can't think of a more charitable interpretation of these
| results than "we have different vocabularies for red and white
| wines, even to describe the same tastes".
| watwut wrote:
| Wine tasters are taught to use color and other visual
| properties.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| 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_.
| matwood wrote:
| > The inescapable conclusion is, the supposed differences
| between white and red wine are imaginary.
|
| The problem is that white/red is a very large grouping of
| wine. There are very light reds with low tannins that could
| be hard to tell particularly if served at room temp. There
| are some robust white wines that fall into this same overlap.
| In general, red vs. white is normally pretty easy assuming
| typical red and white wine.
|
| Within these large groupings of white/red there are also
| other trick wines. Reds where the grape seems like a
| different grape due the region or wine process. Dry Rieslings
| are often tricky because most people assume sweet. So non-
| expert tasters being tricked by trick wines is not really an
| interesting find.
|
| The problem for most people with wine tasting is it's hard to
| do it in a way to learn. It's not enough to buy a bottle
| once/week. In one trip to France, I tasted 100+ wines over a
| 2 week period. Only when you have wines side by side, day
| after day do you really start to learn. Sommeliers taste
| 1000s of wines over many years, taking notes and actively
| working to learn the flavors.
| fbelzile wrote:
| I might get down-voted more, but I'm going to dig in because
| I don't think you know what you're talking about.
|
| 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...
| watwut wrote:
| > The inescapable conclusion is, the supposed differences
| between white and red wine are imaginary.
|
| You could conclude that only after blind test.
| futevolei wrote:
| I remember drinking crystal pepsi back in the day and it being a
| total mind f*ck. A few times I swore I was drinking 7up. So I
| would like to pile on wine experts here but I don't think this
| study proves they are idiots.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| It didn't actually taste quite the same as normal Pepsi though,
| right? The desire to make it transparent necessitated removing
| the caramel colour, which also affected flavour. It also lacked
| caffeine, which is a pretty noticeable flavouring too.
| futevolei wrote:
| I'm not sure, you might be right...or it might have tasted
| exactly the same but people thought it tasted different due
| to the visual effect.
| the-dude wrote:
| A friend of mine obtained a bottle of blue ketchup once.
| thinkingkong wrote:
| 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.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| <citation>
| NoSorryCannot wrote:
| It seems on the face of things that a good expert would know
| about these psychological heuristics and would deliberately
| blind themselves, according to some method suitable for the
| field.
|
| I doubt it's reliably the case that experts will be immune to
| the tricks of the human brain, unless they don't own one.
| tester756 wrote:
| >When people tasted the wines and the bottles were hidden,
| people accurately scored the wines.
|
| >All but the experts were susceptible to this effect.
|
| I dont understand
|
| If people managed to "accurately scored the wines", then what
| does "all but experts were suspectible" actually means?
| u678u wrote:
| Presumably it means some expensive wines are better than the
| cheap wines and easily detected. Some expensive wines were
| "enhanced" by a fancy bottle which even managed to fool the
| experts.
| esperent wrote:
| > All but the experts were susceptible to this effect.
|
| Even the experts, according to some studies, like the one
| described in the title article, or here:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-ta...
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| The one described in the title article was on students.
| rectang wrote:
| "We're secretly swapping their fresh brewed coffee with dark,
| sparkling Folger's Crystals."
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CoLiyUZXW4
| arbitrage wrote:
| Great point. Without rigor, expertise is rarely more than
| anecdotal.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Which asks the question: if no one else can tell the
| difference, are experts just able to detect what expensive wine
| tastes like, as opposed to what nice-tasting wine tastes like?
| lisper wrote:
| > are experts just able to detect what expensive wine tastes
| like, as opposed to what nice-tasting wine tastes like?
|
| A real expert can do both. The problem is that "nice-tasting"
| means different things to different people, and "nice
| tasting" may or may not have any correlation or even overlap
| with "expensive". The most expensive wines I've ever had have
| tasted horrible, borderline undrinkable, because they have
| all been very old wines, which I personally don't like. But
| some people (apparently) like the taste of very old wines,
| which are rare, and expensive to produce because they
| (obviously) have to be stored for a very long time.
|
| The main skill of a true wine expert is to be able to listen
| to someone else describe what they like and then pick a wine
| that matches that description or, even better, takes them
| just a little bit outside of their usual comfort zone.
|
| Wines don't become expensive because they are good. They
| become expensive for the same reason any other commodity
| does; the demand, for whatever reason, exceeds the supply.
| There are really good wines that are cheap because they are
| mass-produced, and really bad wines that are expensive
| because they are rare, but have just enough people with more
| money than sense willing to buy them for whatever reason.
| rleigh wrote:
| That's not what they are concluding. If they are tasting it
| blind (with no preconception), their taste _is_ accurate. It
| becomes inaccurate when there is external bias (like cost or
| a particular label). Note that the actual article was based
| on the assessments of students. I wouldn 't classify them as
| trained experts, as I'll detail below.
|
| I used to work in a brewery, and part of my job was beer
| tasting. We used the same nomenclature and tasting training
| as the wine industry. It's a qualitative assessment, but
| there is a lot of science behind it, and the training is
| actually quite difficult. You actually train on specific
| samples with a single taste, initially very unsubtle and
| clearly labelled. Then to pass certification you have to do
| it completely blind. Next level up you progress to subtler
| tastes and repeat. The really advanced people are genuinely
| capable of discerning very specific chemical compounds with a
| very high degree of accuracy.
|
| The point I want to make here is that this is an actual
| discipline in its own right, and the people practicing it in
| industry aren't quacks. They have to pass examinations which
| test their skills empirically and objectively against blinded
| reference samples. You can't get certified without it, and no
| one can pass without spending some serious effort getting the
| training. I didn't stay in the industry long enough to become
| an expert, but I have done the basics.
|
| We used to do assessment sessions where you would rank 40
| unlabelled samples lined up on a bench. Each one would be
| scored between 1 and 10 on a defined scale for several
| criteria. Both experts and novices like myself would do it,
| and then they would do stats on the results of 20 or so
| people to see how everyone in the expert group compared, and
| how the novices did compared to the collective expert
| assessment. So in industry, it is used in a semi-quantitative
| way. (We have stuff like GC and GC-MS for more exact
| quantitative measurements.)
| edmundsauto wrote:
| I want to push back on one of your central tenets.
|
| > f they are tasting it blind ... their taste is accurate
|
| It would be more accurate to say the tasting would be less
| subjective. I don't think "accurate" is a good word -
| people all taste things differently due to different taste
| buds and psychological wirings.
|
| But even then, removing the label doesn't mean people taste
| anything objectively. They are bringing in their own biases
| - maybe they are tired, hungry, or stressed.
|
| Finally, (and this is my primary point), to taste is not
| just to detect the presence of certain molecules. That may
| be (part of) the objective experience, but is only part of
| the puzzle. To taste something is to subjectively interpret
| my enjoyment and experience of something edible. Adding the
| label and cost can be part of that experience.
|
| Further, the effect of showing the label has a pretty
| consistent directional impact on ratings. What makes that
| any different than, say, blocking a specific taste bud
| receptor and changing what molecules are perceived? I
| suggest the only difference is the abstraction layer at
| which the influence occurs.
|
| Taste is inherently subjective. Removing a label does not
| make it more accurate. I argue further that labels/prices
| add no more subjectivity than a persons particular
| configuration of taste buds and neural wiring.
| barrkel wrote:
| I think you're muddling two meanings of the word taste:
| the aesthetic sense, vs the chemical detection system of
| your mouth and nose.
|
| The latter is not subjective. The experience might be,
| the qualia might be, and it will change with training and
| priming, but the raw detection is what the parent is
| talking about and that is objective.
| rleigh wrote:
| The first part of my reply could have been better. I
| should have said "unbiased" rather than "accurate".
|
| The training part is very much about learning to identify
| specific chemicals, or groups of chemicals. That
| absolutely is raw detection, as you say. Let me provide
| some examples. For the "level 1" training, the most basic
| stuff, samples would be things like: plain water, acid
| (very dilute sulphuric acid), alkali (very dilute sodium
| hydroxide), metal (copper and nickel metal coins in a
| bottle of water), rubber (rubber tubing cut up in a
| bottle of water), salt, sugar and a few others I've
| forgotten (this was 22 years ago), maybe some other major
| categories like aldehydes. Just for the record, you don't
| actually drink any of that stuff down, it's tasting only
| and its very dilute! When the solutions are all clear,
| being able to identify each blind from some anonymised
| samples is surprisingly difficult, especially when
| diluted so it's more subtle. But it's absolutely possible
| with practice.
|
| The higher levels are all more subtle things like many
| different flavour compounds. For wine and beer, almost
| exclusively aromatic hydrocarbons, along with esters and
| other flavour compounds. I never did this but it's the
| same process, but it's much more difficult. Instead of
| under 10, you have an industry-standard reference set of
| IIRC around 60 compounds, and you have to be able to
| identify each and every one blind when diluted in
| isolation. And obviously in a drink you have to be able
| to identify them all individually in combination as well.
| This is the part that takes the most time and effort to
| master. And it's these people that I wouldn't question
| too much regarding their skills, because they actually
| had to pass objective assessments to demonstrate those
| skills. This is really hard!
|
| This is why I'm a little disappointed that the original
| article mentioned using students. They would be unlikely
| to have achieved that level of competence. It takes many
| months, if not years, of regular practice to get to that
| level. I spent a year doing the basic training and then
| continual daily testing and monthly assessments, and
| while I still class myself as being at a very basic
| level, I'd still likely have more practical experience
| than them.
|
| Regarding subjectivity and the "experience" of taste,
| that's absolutely taken on board as well. But it's a
| separate question. For where I worked, every product had
| a spec sheet, mostly physical and chemical properties but
| also a taste profile. The professional tasters could make
| sure it met that profile exactly. The rest of us just
| made sure it looked and tasted as a consumer would expect
| it to.
|
| For those who are wondering about why those specific
| "level 1" tastes, they aren't random and they are
| actually serving an additional purpose. Those are to also
| pick up on product contamination. Metal and rubber from
| storage tanks and pipework. Acid and alkali from cleaning
| agents and coolant. I actually had to check for the
| latter once when we had a potential set of hairline
| cracks in a tank suspected of leaching coolant [in
| beverage production, they use very concentrated KCl since
| it's non-toxic if it leaks, but at pH14 it's nasty
| stuff].
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" If they are tasting it blind (with no preconception),
| their taste is accurate."_
|
| Very true, however there's a great deal of pretentious BS
| in the wine-tasting game. No matter how long one has been
| tasting wine, ultimately one has to have some degree of
| competence to analyze and then describe what one is
| actually tasting.
|
| That said, I'm sure people can be trained to develop
| wine-tasting skills and that they actually get better
| with experience--but ultimately one cannot make a silk
| purse out of a sow's ear no matter how good the training.
|
| I claim no great expertise in the wine-tasting/oenology
| game and I'm sure that I'd likely have been fooled by the
| dyed 'red' wine as described in the article (if I were to
| be so fooled then I would have had a certain class of red
| wines in mind when doing the comparison).
|
| Nevertheless, I do have little wine experience and I have
| found that it is often just sufficient to catch out the
| true BS artists. One only has to be marginally better at
| discriminating which wine is better than they are then
| their BS status becomes pretty obvious.
|
| I recall a couple of decades ago attending a rather
| expensive black-tie blind tasting of about 25 so-called
| experts with an engineering colleague of mine (he too had
| had some experience in tasting reasonable-to-good wines).
| As techies, we were the odd ones out, as we didn't work
| in the wine industry and most of the others did.
| Moreover, the master of ceremonies was a long-time well-
| known wine writer for a large newspaper and had a number
| of wine books to his name.
|
| As I mentioned, it was a blind tasting and the wines were
| the then newest (just released) first and second class
| Bordeaux growths with the exception of the Mouton
| Rothschild (it was either unavailable or too expensive to
| include). This much we all knew before the tasting. The
| aim of the exercise was to determine the best wines then
| rank them in order using the 3-7-10 scoring system.
|
| Anyway, like many blind tasting, it turned out to be
| pretty much of a shambles. The so-called experts
| including the wine writer were all over the place,
| mistaking first growths for second and vice versa. A
| final exercise for everyone was to guess the Lafite
| Rothschild, for without the presence of the Mouton, it
| was the most expensive wine there. _(BTW, it 's not the
| first time I've seen our wine writer in action and he was
| again true to form on this night.)_
|
| The only ones to get the Lafite correct were my colleague
| and I (I nearly made myself sick from trying to hide my
| smirks it was so damn funny)! Incidentally, the Lafite
| wasn't all that hard to guess, as it was true to form and
| it was also the best wine of the night.
|
| Now back down to earth. Every winter I used to attend a
| different group for food and wine dinners. They too were
| black-tie events and were held approximately a month
| apart. It was organized by a guy who owned a wine
| cellar/emporium and the dinners/tastings were held at the
| cellar. This guy was truly one of the best and up there
| with the likes of Hugh Johnson and Michael Broadbent--he
| was certainly the best I've ever come across. Most of us
| were awestruck by his ability.
|
| Incidentally, all four of these guys are in the Wiki
| _List of wine personalities:_
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wine_personalities.
| Thus is goes to show that sometimes BS can get one
| _almost_ everywhere.
|
| Incidentally, with respect to being fooled by the dyed
| white wine. It seems to me that if these oenology student
| were actually fooled then they must have been familiar
| with lighter style reds a la Provence or similar and
| comparing the wine with those reds. For I fail to see how
| any robust red--Bordeaux first growths, Californian
| (Stags' Leap Cabernet, etc.) or Australian Reds (Grange
| or similar) could ever be mistaken for a white or vice
| versa, irrespective of color or in a blind tasting, for
| these big red styles are just too distinctive to be
| mistaken for whites in any circumstances. Even neophytes
| should be able to tell the difference.
| rleigh wrote:
| > Very true, however there's a great deal of pretentious
| BS in the wine-tasting game.
|
| Absolutely agreed 100%. I've been to a few organised
| tasting events, and I think at that level it's pretty
| much all pretension and style over substance. It's for
| the experience and the entertainment, and at that level I
| have no problem with it.
|
| I just wanted to provide a perspective about how it's
| used industrially for wholly serious purposes, where
| people train to objective standards, and have to pass
| formal examinations to demonstrate their skill. You can't
| pass them with pretension, they are the real deal. The
| simple examination was tough enough for me, and that only
| increased my respect for the really skilled people.
|
| At the industrial level, the tasting is also done
| alongside and correlated with quantitative scientific
| analysis. The lab I worked in ran each batch through GC-
| FID (basic stuff), headspace-sampling GC-FID (volatile
| aromatics), alongside a battery of additional physical
| and chemical analyses (too many to list here, there are
| at least 20, the big brewers take product quality and
| safety really seriously). And we had GCMS and LCMS
| systems and other more detailed tests as options on
| demand to test more obscure stuff like metal content (for
| making Marmite yeast extract where iron levels are
| important, apparently).
|
| One of the key roles of the tasters isn't just at
| production, it's to assess how the character changes over
| time when assessing shelf-life, where there may be
| negative things like oxidation, bacterial contamination,
| lightstruck reactions, and other factors which influence
| the taste change over time. All very rare. Saw one
| example of oxidation in my entire time there, in a small
| batch for export. We would taste every batch once a month
| over the course of its entire shelf life. Bottles, cans,
| kegs, everything. That's where we would do group
| assessments where the qualified tasters and ourselves
| would taste everything blind.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Right, there's many issues here and I'll comment about
| them in a later post (I've run out of time).
|
| However one comment before I go, what you're describing
| seems not that dissimilar to the perfumery business.
| Training for that is intense and takes years.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Now do one for Stradivarius violins.
| mamon wrote:
| 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...
| optimalsolver wrote:
| 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...
| casion wrote:
| These studies are flawed in ways that every experienced
| musician recognizes they are: context.
|
| It's _common_ that instruments that sound amazing in a solo
| context will sound poor in a larger ensemble, or might
| sound great in one ensemble but not another.
|
| Personal context factors in: how does it feel, how stable
| is the neck, is it work in commonly stressed spots (usually
| good), is the design kind to your habits, etc...
|
| Business context: prestige, visual impact, lineage,
| historical accuracy, marketability etc...
|
| I could go on, but I don't think it's controversial to say
| that an instrument's sonic qualities alone, in a solo
| context, are NOT what drives value.
|
| I know that, as of this comment, nobody has made the claim
| or implied it yet, but it's important not to draw
| conclusions about one instrument being better than another
| based on studies like this. Imagine if someone went around
| comparing generics syntax across languages to 'experts and
| laypeople', and the comments filled with praise for the
| scrappy underdog. I think the average HN commenter would
| spot the BS right away. For music though?
|
| It's simply not what music is about.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Stradivarius violins are invariably played and sometimes
| owned by soloists, who either literally play solo, lead a
| concerto, or occasionally play with a pianist or as part
| of a small ensemble.
|
| First violin in an orchestra will usually have a more
| modest instrument.
|
| Edit to add: of course there's a lot of Veblenisation in
| music, and this gets silly when people who are really
| collectors try to do music and end up being just a more
| extreme kind of consumer.
|
| Hifi, guitars, synthesizers, and recording equipment are
| full of this - plenty of moderately wealthy doctors,
| lawyers, financiers and such of low-to-average talent
| buying vintage or custom signature whatevers and
| displaying them proudly on social media.
|
| But there are also professionals who are super-sensitive
| to tone and expression and have a (literal) track record
| of making choices that audiences respond to.
|
| Some of them have impressive collections too, but they're
| able to justify them for specific creative ends.
|
| The difference is that if you take an expert and give
| them an average instrument they'll do miracles with it.
| If you take a collector and give them a room full of
| classics they'll produce mediocre mush.
|
| But give an expert the classics and they'll wring an
| extra level of musical credibility and interest out of
| them. That zone is out of reach of the collectors, but
| audiences still appreciate it and pay for it when they
| hear it.
| casion wrote:
| I find your response somewhat strange. I'm saying that
| context matters, and your response is that... context
| matters?
|
| It would appear that I'm being misread to defend a
| specific instrument. I'm saying that there's more value
| to an instrument than simply a 1:n listening test. That
| goes for ANY instrument.
|
| Regarding people spending money on things they can't
| fully use (or sometimes appreciate), of course. That
| happens with everything.
| im3w1l wrote:
| I think he is saying that they are used by soloists which
| is also how they are compared. So the context is the
| same.
|
| Before going on a huge (but interesting) tangent.
| casion wrote:
| Sure, but thats not the only contingent of context.
| Location, piece, player, specific instrument, time of
| year etc...
|
| I'm in no way saying that this means a specific
| instrument is better, but specifically that we can't draw
| that conclusion from these types of studies.
|
| (I understand that you're not the parent, but it's still
| an interesting discussion)
| tyleo wrote:
| I don't know if I understand your point about generics
| syntax and a scrappy underdog. Are you trying to imply
| that a group of experts is better than the group of
| experts and laypeople at judging things? If so, I'm not
| sure that's true.
| casion wrote:
| No, I'm saying that generics syntax doesn't express the
| value of a language.
| analog31 wrote:
| Interestingly enough, all of the Strads in playable
| condition have been modernized to some extent. They have
| changed the shape of the bass bar, the neck length, and
| steel / synthetic strings. Meanwhile, the bow has changed
| as well.
|
| 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.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| 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.
| analog31 wrote:
| Watch out, a "strat" is a Stratocaster. ;-)
| fenomas wrote:
| Um. That article describes a study where the researchers took
| recordings of different violins, looked for a difference in
| the strads, and found one. That doesn't establish that strads
| sound different, it presupposes it.
|
| Surely if they wanted to show that strads sound different
| they'd need to test whether their method lets them predict
| whether an unknown recording is a strad or not?
| TwoBit wrote:
| They have. And modern violins in these studies scored better as
| I recall.
| analog31 wrote:
| Most musicians recognize that the subjective assessment of
| instruments is deeply problematic. We have not been offered a
| good alternative.
|
| I'm not a violinist, but a double bassist. The process of
| choosing an instrument is nothing short of nerve wracking. My
| last bass shopping episode took me more than a year. I'd love
| to be able to know with certainty that the sound I'm hearing is
| real and not biased by my expectations. With some of the
| instruments, I had to make minor changes to my technique, to
| accommodate physical differences in their geometry and setup.
| In one case, I asked the dealer to install a different type of
| strings, which he was glad to do.
|
| Now, do we know that different basses sound different? That
| would at least be a safe guess, given that they are
| _deliberately_ made to sound different for specific uses and
| player preferences, and there are radical differences in
| construction and dimensions. One of my basses is carved from
| solid chunks of wood, the other is made of plywood that is
| formed to shape in a mold.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| What would you measure? One feature of very good musical
| instruments is, they make it far easier to get the sounds you
| want. They are versatile and flexible, with a wide range of
| possible responses. They sound like what the artist intends,
| which is why they are so popular to play.
|
| So are you measuring the artist? How would you measure this
| quality in the instrument?
| amelius wrote:
| Or "audiophile quality" amps.
| leeoniya wrote:
| "most people use equipment to listen to their music, while
| audiophiles use music to listen to their equipment"
|
| Opus 160kbps (VBR)
|
| :D
| rectang wrote:
| 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 _need_ "golden ears" to be effective:
| you need an understanding of your tools and techniques and an
| appreciation for how they affect the gestalt.
|
| The human perceptual mechanism is prone to illusion, and
| unreliable for measuring and comparing fine detail -- that's not
| what it's for. You won't go wrong if you think of it as primarily
| designed by evolution to model and identify threats: to hear a
| twig snap while ignoring the wind blowing, to perceive that hint
| of unusual movement by something vaguely alligator-shaped in your
| peripheral vision while ignoring the waves.
|
| Enjoy wine, or that Stradivarius recording, accepting that you
| might be fooling yourself. Even if you might be wrong about the
| wine or the Strad, you know for absolute certain whether it is
| making you happy! Leave it to the critics to claim perceptual
| accuracy they don't possess and to risk being exposed.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| > Enjoy wine, or that Stradivarius recording, accepting that
| you might be fooling yourself.
|
| Yes, but it's also good to be aware that there are limits to
| your perception and take advantage. The 80% rule definitely
| works here. I don't drink wine, but at least with beer,
| tequila, and coffee, there is a pretty obvious gap between the
| cheap/ low end stuff and the good stuff, but paying
| significantly more for higher end brands isn't worth it.
|
| So focus on getting out of that low end category and really
| enjoy the good stuff because the supposed "great" high end
| stuff is rarely worth tripling what you pay (or more).
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| What I've found is that the difference between an $30 bottle
| of wine and a $8 bottle isn't necessarily quality, it's
| consistency: buying the same $8 bottle of wine 10 times can
| result in five great bottles and five so-so bottles, with a
| $30+ bottle, it's more like 1% of the time you get a bad
| bottle. So, when I'm giving a present or planning a party, I
| tend to gravitate to the more expensive bottles because it
| makes the outcome more certain.
| [deleted]
| ogre_codes wrote:
| Buying into the mid-range is fine. It's what I do with beer
| a tequila. Buying the $200 bottles is where I question the
| logic. Even the expert tasters struggle to differentiate
| between a good $20-30 bottle and a $400 bottle in double
| blind tests.
|
| I don't drink Sanka or Coors, I just use good coffee beans
| and drink good local beer. I don't spend $200 on exotic
| coffee beans feral cats have shit out.
|
| The only reason I put the $6 in parens for wine is because
| I don't drink wine and don't really know where the price
| point is for a solid mid-range wine is.
| turndown wrote:
| I don't drink coffee, and probably never will, but I
| remember listening to a podcast once where two coffee
| drinkers who derided the whole "eat coffee beans shit out
| by a civet" idea tried it and said it was the best coffee
| they had ever had. YMMV
| ogre_codes wrote:
| With wine, lots of people claim to be able to taste the
| difference between an expensive wine and a cheap one, but
| as soon as you did a double-blind test, they couldn't
| tell them apart.
|
| I would be extremely curious to see if the civet coffee
| was still there if there was double-blind taste test.
|
| And sure enough, someone has done it.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDXWgVr_z30
|
| The civet coffee doesn't even come in second place out of
| 5. Obviously not scientific.
| rectang wrote:
| Being an ordinary human, I will never know how trolls
| trolling trolls had a hand in bringing us this tale of
| Kopi Luwak.
|
| * you
|
| * the two Kopi Luwak drinkers
|
| * the merchant who sold them the Kopi Luwak
|
| * the modern day manufacturers and wholesalers of Kopi
| Luwak
|
| * the genius who came up with Kopi Luwak
|
| * the civet
|
| How many are civet shit true believers? How many are
| trolls -- some, none, all?
| ogre_codes wrote:
| There is also a lot of unethical/ inhumane sourcing on
| civet coffee at this point.
| twangist wrote:
| This seems like a flawed approach. These days, $8 bottles
| are a mass-produced affairs, generally full of additives
| for body, color, 'legs', and other attributes. They're very
| consistent affairs, as consistent as Bic pens or Cheetos.
| They are not charmingly rustic bottles from small
| struggling vintners.
|
| (Not sure where you live, but in major US cities $8 will
| get you only the most mass-market stuff - Frontera, Yellow
| Tail, etc.)
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| This just isn't true: I'm in SoCal, and you can get a
| very good bottle of wine at Trader Joe's for $8 (TJ store
| label), but there's no guarantee that buying another
| bottle with the same label tastes as good.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| So you buy the $8 wine and the $30 wine. Since it's
| almost certain all the wine from the same batch is going
| to be similar quality. If you get a good $8 bottle you go
| back the next day and buy a couple cases of the good/
| cheap stuff. If the cheap stuff is not-so-good, drink the
| $30 wine and use the cheap stuff to cook with.
|
| This way you are guaranteed good wine.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Sure. But lets have a good time mocking those deluded critics
| as well. That's good fun too!
| whiddershins wrote:
| On this topic, what resource do you think is a really good one
| for learning mastering?
| gwynplaine wrote:
| The book Mastering Audio by Bob Katz covers a lot of ground.
| rectang wrote:
| Try messing around with buss processing and track sequencing
| while referencing other recordings in the same genre. Just
| make sure to keep the unprocessed tracks around, and err on
| the side of "less is more". There's a lot of overlap between
| the aesthetic skills needed for mixing and those needed for
| mastering.
|
| The profession of mastering is much more than that, but
| generally when people ask this question they want to know
| about the aesthetics, not about stuff like thoroughly
| grokking many source and delivery formats, etc.
| trianglem wrote:
| That's like enjoying a diamond you overpaid for or an art
| forgery. Just because it makes you happy doesn't mean you
| haven't been swindled.
| rectang wrote:
| So, buy cheap wine and enjoy it without regrets! :)
|
| I know, that's empty advice. Drinking expensive wine is
| usually about signalling social status; it's not really about
| taste.
| trianglem wrote:
| Well I don't really drink but it's the principle of the
| matter! I want to be happy and content without being
| swindled.
| xirbeosbwo1234 wrote:
| >Even if you might be wrong about the wine or the Strad, you
| know for absolute certain whether it is making you happy!
|
| I also know for absolute certain that I can't afford expensive
| wine and that there are people who look down at me because the
| wine I drink shows I have an "unrefined palate".
|
| Normally the concept of "elitism" is hogwash, but this is a
| pretty clear-cut example. Expensive wine serves to make one
| seem refined and worldly. It enables rich people to pretend
| they are more cultured, more intelligent, and just plain
| _better_ than the plebs because they think they have the taste
| to appreciate a $500 bottle of wine.
|
| Expensive wine is a tool of oppression. I actually don't think
| that's hyperbole. It is a small tool that doesn't do anywhere
| near as much damage as the prisons or the war on drugs or Fox
| News, but it has the same effect.
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| Sour Grapes is a documentary about someone who sold a bunch
| of counterfeit wine to elites that couldn't tell the
| difference, worth a watch.
| stickfigure wrote:
| That's probably not a wholly fair characterization. Part of
| the takeaway is that the perpetrator had a sophisticated
| palate and spent a lot of time mixing already high-end (but
| not $thousands/bottle) wine to work out the recipes.
|
| I'm as skeptical as anyone that someone can distinguish
| between a $2k and $200 wine. But to someone that drinks
| wine daily, the difference between $6 and $60 wine (red, of
| similar varietal and style) is pretty dramatic. Yeah, some
| rich guys got suckered, but I don't think they were chumps.
| u678u wrote:
| Its kind of a social pressure though, it would be interesting to
| know if the students were new or experienced. If you are a new
| student and go into a clinical settings and someone gives you
| "red wine", you'd be pretty brave to say it tastes like white
| wine.
|
| A good test would be to have a double blind study where they had
| to judge if this wine was red wine or colored white. I'd imagine
| most could easily tell.
| ndnfjttkrk wrote:
| To me red wine tastes very differently from white wine.
|
| Am I fooling myself? Are they really indistinguishable?
|
| Is it possible that the experts were afraid of using white
| attributes for a red wine, like in social consensus experiments?
|
| Did anybody ran a test in the dark, where you cant see the wine
| at all?
| ta988 wrote:
| This is how most degustations of flavors experiments in
| oenology schools are made these days. Dark glasses and red
| light.
| quercusa wrote:
| Color definitely sets expectations. But I assume the red-tinted
| white wine was served at red wine temperature, which would give
| it a very different set of flavors.
| watwut wrote:
| People have strong tendency to describe things how they think
| they "should be", especially when someone is looking.
|
| Obviously you can tell red wine from white. But if they color
| them wrong, you will trust your eyes mood then your taste.
| barrkel wrote:
| You are not fooling yourself. That said, there is huge variance
| within the simple categories of red and white, and I could see
| some particularly acidic red being mistaken for a white.
|
| One way of subverting expectations is to try orange wine: white
| wine fermented with skins. Orange wine has tannins and can show
| some aspects you'd associate with a red, e.g. pepper. Yet it is
| still more on the citrus rather than berry end of the flavour
| spectrum.
| jcampbell1 wrote:
| The visual processing part of the brain can completely overwhelm
| auditory processing: see the mcgurk effect.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2k8fHR9jKVM
|
| I am not at all surprised that there are also olifactory
| illusions which are impossible to "unsee".
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