There’s plenty of hard evidence that people are vulnerable to priming effects and other biases when tasting wine.
There’s also plenty of hard evidence that people can tell the difference between wine A and wine B, under controlled (blinded) conditions. Note that “tell the difference” isn’t the same as “identify which would be preferred by experts”.
So, while the link is factually interesting, and evidence that some large-scale deception is going on, aided by such priming effects as label, marketing campaigns and popular movies can have, it seems a stretch to call it “proof” that people in general can’t tell wine A from wine B.
Rather, this strikes me as a combination of trolling and boo lights: cheaply testing who appears to be “on your side” in a pet controversy. How well do you expect that to work out for you, in the sense of “reliably entangling your beliefs with reality”?
I think I’m entangling my beliefs with reality very well, by virtue of extracting all available information from phenomena rather than retreat to evidence that agrees with me. (Let’s not forget, I didn’t start out thinking that it was all BS.)
For example, did you stop to notice the implications of this:
There’s plenty of hard evidence that people are vulnerable to priming effects and other biases when tasting wine.
How does that compare to the priming effects for other drinks? Does it matter?
So, while the link is factually interesting, and evidence that some large-scale deception is going on, aided by such priming effects as label, marketing campaigns and popular movies can have, it seems a stretch to call it “proof” that people in general can’t tell wine A from wine B.
But what would be the appropriate comparison? They were passing of as expensive, something that’s actually cheap. Where else would that work so easily, for so long? Normally, if you tried that, it would be noticed quickly, if not immediately, by virtually everyone.
What if you tried to pass off 16 oz of milk as 128? Or spoiled milk as milk expiring in a week?
Then, factor in how much difference is claimed to exist in wine vs. milks.
They were passing of as expensive, something that’s actually cheap. Where else would that work so easily, for so long?
Art forgeries. (Which shows that the value of the painting is determined by the status of the artist and not the quality of the art.)
If I can paint a painting that convinces experts that it was painted by [insert expert painter here], does that mean I’m as good an artist as said painter? (Assuming that my painting isn’t a literal copy of someone else’s.)
Art forgeries. (Which shows that the value of the painting is determined by the status of the artist and not the quality of the art.)
Which, like wine, is another example of a path-dependent collective delusion that’s not Truly Part of our values. (That is, our valuation of the work wouldn’t survive deletion of the history that led to such a valuation.)
If I can paint a painting that convinces experts that it was painted by [insert expert painter here], does that mean I’m as good an artist as said painter? (Assuming that my painting isn’t a literal copy of someone else’s.)
Very nearly yes, it does, modulo a few factors. If you produced it after the artist, then you are benefiting from the artist’s already having identified a region of conceptspace that you did not find yourself. (If the art is revered because of the artist’s social status, that it wasn’t even much of an accomplishment to begin with.) To put it another way, you produced the work after “supervised learning”, while the artist didn’t need that particular training.
If you can pass off a previous work of yours as being one of the artist’s, that definitely makes you better.
Which, like wine, is another example of a path-dependent collective delusion that’s not Truly Part of our values. (That is, our valuation of the work wouldn’t survive deletion of the history that led to such a valuation.)
Who is “we”, here?
The problem I have is not that you’re wrong, for the people you’re talking about; it’s that you (probably) overestimate the size and/or importance of that population. You’re not telling the whole truth, in effect. There are plenty of people who like paintings for the way they look, and would happily buy the work of a lesser-known artist at a cheap price if they liked it. Yes, some people use art to status-signal, but some people also actually like art. (There may even be a nonempty intersection!)
There are plenty of people who like paintings for the way they look, and would happily buy the work of a lesser-known artist at a cheap price if they liked it. Yes, some people use art to status-signal, but some people also actually like art. (There may even be a nonempty intersection!)
Sorry if I sound dodgy here, but I don’t think I’ve said anything that contradicts this. My criticism is of these two things:
1) the idea that the elite-designated “high art” is non-arbitrary. (I claim it’s a status-reinforced information cascade that wouldn’t regain the designation of high-art if you deleted knowledge of which ones had been so classified.)
2) the excessive premiums paid for artworks based on both 1) and the fact that they are the originals (a “piece of history”).
Never have I criticized or denied the existence of people who buy artworks because they simply like it and it appeals to them. I just criticize the way that we’re expected to agree with the laurels attached to elite-designated high art. As I said before, I would have no problem if art were just a matter of “hey, I like this, now get on with your lives” (as it works in e.g. video games).
You seem to want a contest. The other option, where we are both “on the side of truth”, appeals to me more.
We’re fortunate in having different experiences in the domain of taste. I’m one of those people who like wine, and I’m confident I can identify some of its taste characteristics in blind tests. So, predictably I resent language which implies I’m an idiot, but I’m open to inquiry.
Our investigation should probably begin “at the crime scene”, that is, close to what evidence we can gather about the sense of taste. So, yes, we could examine similar priming effects on other drinks.
I have a candidate in mind, but what I’d like to ask you first is, suppose I name the drink I have in mind and we then go look for evidence of fraud in its commerce. What would it count as evidence of if we found no fraud? If we did find it? Which one would you say counts as evidence that “people can’t tell the difference” between wines?
We’re fortunate in having different experiences in the domain of taste. I’m one of those people who like wine, and I’m confident I can identify some of its taste characteristics in blind tests. So, predictably I resent language which implies I’m an idiot, but I’m open to inquiry.
If someone was long ago made aware of powerful evidence that an expensive pleasure he currently enjoys can be replicated with fidelity at a sliver of the cost, and he hasn’t already done the experimentation necessary to properly rule this out, then you’re right. There are explanations other than that he is an idiot. But they’re not much more flattering either.
I can tell you that if I were in this position for another beverage, I would have already done the tests.
I have a candidate in mind, but what I’d like to ask you first is, suppose I name the drink I have in mind and we then go look for evidence of fraud in its commerce. What would it count as evidence of if we found no fraud? If we did find it? Which one would you say counts as evidence that “people can’t tell the difference” between wines?
The no-fraud case is positive but weak evidence of for people telling the difference because it can be accounted for by honesty on the part of retailers, fear of whistleblowers, etc. Finding fraud is unlikely but strong evidence against the claim that people can tell the difference—because it crucially depends on the priming effects (or some other not-truly-part-of-you effect) dominating.
I’d prefer a blind comparison on the cheap substitutes like Cyan suggested.
And I’d be glad that you’ve identified a product I’m overpaying for!
You mean, replicate the pleasure from expensive wine? (I’m going to assume you genuinely like the act of drinking wine.) Easy: accept that it’s an illusion, then buy the cheap stuff (modulo social status penalties) and prime it the way good wines are. (This may require an assistant.) Gradually train yourself to regard them as the same quality. If you can trained to put it on a pedestal, you can probably be trained to take it off.
If it’s unavoidable that you discount the taste due to your residual knowledge that the wine is low-class, then accept that you’re overpaying because of a unremovable bias. (Not a slight against you, btw—I admit I was the same way with CFLs for a while, in that I couldn’t discard the knowledge, and thus negative affect, that they’re CFLs rather than incandescent, and thereby pointlessly overpaid for lighting.)
On the more realistic assumption that you’ve simply been trained to like wine via a process that would equally well train you to like anything, get some friends together and train yourselves to like V8. (The veggie drink, not the engine.)
inding fraud is unlikely but strong evidence against the claim that people can tell the difference—because it crucially depends on the priming effects [...] dominating.
Wait, can you expand on how fraud in the trade of a non-alcoholic drink is “strong but unlikely” evidence that people cannot tell the differences between wines?
Such fraud might be evidence that people cannot tell the difference between tastes more generally, but that seems like a higher hurdle to clear.
Wait, can you expand on how fraud in the trade of a non-alcoholic drink is “strong but unlikely” evidence that people cannot tell the differences between wines?
Where did I say that? The claim you quoted from me was about “what would be evidence of people’s ability to distinguish that non-alcoholic drink”, not wines.
You’d check for people’s ability to distinguish wines by fraud in wines, and people’s ability to distinguish specific non-wine drinks by fraud in specific non-wine drinks.
I thought I made that very clear, and if not, common sense and the principle of charity should have sufficed for you not to infer that I would get the “wires crossed” like that.
(ETA: By the way: is there a shorter way to refer to a person’s ability to distinguish foods/drinks? I’ve tried shorter expressions, but they make other posters go batty about the imprecision without even suggesting an alternative. Paul Birch suggests “taste entropy of choice”, but that’s obscure.)
And, to preempt a possible point you may be trying to make: yes, fruit drinks may be fraudulently labeled as real fruit juice, but that’s not a parallel case unless people claim to be able to distinguish by taste the presence of real juice and purchase on that basis.
So we’ve averted misunderstanding, good. My question remains: what does fraud (or non-fraud) in non-alcoholic drinks tell us about whether people “really can tell the difference” between wines?
Just to be sure what you’re claiming, btw: if I did a “triangle test”, blinded, on two arbitrary bottles of wine from my supermarket, and I could tell them apart, would you retract that claim? Or is your claim restricted to some specific varietals?
How could I have explained my position better so that you would not have inferred the point about fruit drinks?
My question remains: what does fraud (or non-fraud) in non-alcoholic drinks tell us about whether people “really can tell the difference” between wines?
It doesn’t remain. If people can tell the difference, you don’t gain from fraud. If they can’t, you could gain from fraud. Where’s the confusion?
Just to be sure what you’re claiming, btw: if I did a “triangle test”, blinded, on two arbitrary bottles of wine from my supermarket, and I could tell them apart, would you retract that claim? Or is your claim restricted to some specific varietals?
I accept that you could tell red from white, so it couldn’t be completely random. I’d want a test over the two varieties they said were swapped in the story, or within the same variety, but significant cost difference.
How could I have explained my position better so that you would not have inferred the point about fruit drinks?
I have inferred nothing about fruit drinks. In this comment you replied to me with an allusion to “other drinks”. Later in the same comment you referred to milk. In other words, you primed me to think about non-alcoholic drinks. Later in the exchange, you ruled out the possibility that fraud in non-alcoholic drinks will provide any evidence relevant to your original claim. So we’re better off dropping this line of inquiry altogether.
I’d want a test over the two varieties they said were swapped in the story
The story mentioned three varietals: merlot, shiraz and pinot noir. It seems likely that in the next few days I will be able to procure half-bottles of a Merlot (vin de pays, 2005) at €6.5/l and a Pinot Noir (Burgundy, 2005) at 14€/l. The experiment will set me back about 10€.
Do you consider the experiment valid if I buy the bottles myself, and have a third person prepare the glasses? Would you care to stipulate any particular controls? Are you willing to trust my word when I report back with the results? Do I have to correctly identify the cheaper and the more expensive wine, or just to show I can tell the difference? What will you bet on the outcome?
There’s a difficulty that affects tests like these: you can be much more sensitive when you know you’re being tested, so it wouldn’t tell as much about people who can be fooled when given wine that they didn’t expect something was wrong with. The test would have to be made slightly more difficult in order to account for your preparation.
Here’s what I would consider a fair test: I pick three wines, (or imitations of wines) and then do a modified version of the triangle test: I can make all three the same, all three different, or just two the same, and not tell you which. To pass, you have to correctly rank their prices and identify which, if any, are the same. (You’d be allowed to count two different ones as effectively the same prices if they differed only by a few Euros.)
And of course, the test would have to be triple blind, etc.
You can be much more sensitive when you know you’re being tested
Why thank you. So, you are expecting that in some situations people actually can tell wines apart?
Here’s what I would consider a fair test
Sounds complex. I might play, but you’d have a) to pick three wines I can actually pick up in my local supermarket chain, Monoprix; they have an online catalog; b) to write the instructions with enough precision that a local confederate can carry them out. I’m willing to do the work myself for the simple case (have done so in the grandparent), but not if the rules get too baroque.
There’s one thing I object to. Why do I have to rank them by price? I am not claiming that the more expensive wines are systematically better, taste-wise, than the cheaper ones. I do claim that the very good stuff is more likely to be found in the more expensive bottles. There is no reason to expect that price will be systematically correlated with my idiosyncratic, relatively untrainted tastes.
If I have to rank them by price via recognition, I’d have to have tried them out beforehand. If your hypothesis is correct that shouldn’t affect the results, since you’re claiming my discrimination of “better” comes from priming effects.
Why thank you. So, you are expecting that in some situations people actually can tell wines apart?
Sure, just like how, if you put enough effort in, you can tell any two drinks apart. The difference is that people make these claims about wine without have done the exercises necessary for precise discernment, yet claim these subtleties matter to them.
Sounds complex. I might play, but you’d have a) to pick three wines I can actually pick up in my local supermarket chain, Monoprix; they have an online catalog; b) to write the instructions with enough precision that a local confederate can carry them out. I’m willing to do the work myself for the simple case (have done so in the grandparent), but not if the rules get too baroque.
You’re really not grasping the concept of biasproofing, are you? “A confederate” taints the experiment. Your purchasing the wines taints the experiment.
There’s one thing I object to. Why do I have to rank them by price? I am not claiming that the more expensive wines are systematically better, taste-wise, than the cheaper ones.
Okay, well, the wine cheerleaders do, so this is one way you break from them and agree with me.
If I have to rank them by price via recognition, I’d have to have tried them out beforehand. If your hypothesis is correct that shouldn’t affect the results, since you’re claiming my discrimination of “better” comes from priming effects.
Does not follow: if you’re told in advance which has the label “good”, you can spit that information back out latter. My claim is that a judgment of good dependent on being told in advance that it’s good is not a genuine judgment of good.
You’re really not grasping the concept of biasproofing, are you? “A confederate” taints the experiment.
Not performing the experiment taints it even more. But perhaps by now we’ve learned enough of each other’s claims. I leave it to you to find a way forward.
If “top winery” means “largest winery”, as it does in this story, I don’t see how it says anything about the ability of tasters to tell the difference. Those who made such claims probably weren’t drinking Gallo in the first place.
They were passing of as expensive, something that’s actually cheap. Where else would that work so easily, for so long?
I think it’s closer to say they were passing off as cheap, something that’s actually even cheaper.
Switch the food item and see if your criticism holds:
Wonderbread, America’s top bread maker, was conned into selling inferior bread. So-called “gourmets” never noticed the difference! Bread tasting is a crock.
If people made such a huge deal about the nuances in the taste of bread, while it also “happened” to have psychoactive effects that, gosh, always have to be present for the bread to be “good enough” for them, and cheap breads were still normally several times the cost of comparable-nutrition food, then yes, the cases would be parallel.
(Before anyone says it: Yes, I know bread as trace quantities of alcohol, we’re all proud of what you learned in chemistry.)
If “top winery” means “largest winery”, as it does in this story, I don’t see how it says anything about the ability of tasters to tell the difference. Those who made such claims probably weren’t drinking Gallo in the first place.
If people who can tell the difference are a big enough demographic to sell to, then they are employed by all wineries, regardless of quality. But an alternate explanation is that Gallo was tacitly in on the scam—they got as much PN as Sideways demanded, without moving the market.
Ah, I misunderstood the comment. I just assumed that Gallo was in on it, and the claim was that customers of Gallo failing to complain constituted evidence of wine tasting’s crockitude.
If Gallo’s wine experts really did get taken in, then yes, that’s pretty strong evidence. And being the largest winery, I’m sure they have many experts checking their wines regularly—too many to realistically be “in” on such a scam.
That could be a general name for the phenomenon. As it relates to wine tasting (and maybe we could stretch it a bit), I’d propose “the Nuances of Toast Effect”, for a particularly memorable phrase in this Dave Barry column.
This seems to suggest that it is easier to tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi than it is to tell the difference between regular and diet. I can tell the difference between all of them, but the first is a lot harder and I think that experience is pretty common. Most diet drinks use aspartame as a sugar substitute and aspartame leaves a very distinctive aftertaste in my mouth.
Wait, is that supposed to be harder? I’m not sure I could tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi, but I think I could tell the difference between regular and diet.
I don’t like cola very much, so if you gave me a drink of fizzy black stuff, I wouldn’t be able to identify which brand it was. Also, other sodas have a tendency to give me heartburn so I’ve been drinking them much less than I used to.
Oh, look honey: more proof wine tasting is a crock:
A French court has convicted 12 local winemakers of passing off cheap merlot and shiraz as more expensive pinot noir and selling it to undiscerning Americans, including E&J Gallo, one of the United States’ top wineries.
Cue the folks claiming they can really tell the difference...
There’s plenty of hard evidence that people are vulnerable to priming effects and other biases when tasting wine.
There’s also plenty of hard evidence that people can tell the difference between wine A and wine B, under controlled (blinded) conditions. Note that “tell the difference” isn’t the same as “identify which would be preferred by experts”.
So, while the link is factually interesting, and evidence that some large-scale deception is going on, aided by such priming effects as label, marketing campaigns and popular movies can have, it seems a stretch to call it “proof” that people in general can’t tell wine A from wine B.
Rather, this strikes me as a combination of trolling and boo lights: cheaply testing who appears to be “on your side” in a pet controversy. How well do you expect that to work out for you, in the sense of “reliably entangling your beliefs with reality”?
I think I’m entangling my beliefs with reality very well, by virtue of extracting all available information from phenomena rather than retreat to evidence that agrees with me. (Let’s not forget, I didn’t start out thinking that it was all BS.)
For example, did you stop to notice the implications of this:
How does that compare to the priming effects for other drinks? Does it matter?
But what would be the appropriate comparison? They were passing of as expensive, something that’s actually cheap. Where else would that work so easily, for so long? Normally, if you tried that, it would be noticed quickly, if not immediately, by virtually everyone.
What if you tried to pass off 16 oz of milk as 128? Or spoiled milk as milk expiring in a week?
Then, factor in how much difference is claimed to exist in wine vs. milks.
Who’s optimally using evidence here?
Art forgeries. (Which shows that the value of the painting is determined by the status of the artist and not the quality of the art.)
If I can paint a painting that convinces experts that it was painted by [insert expert painter here], does that mean I’m as good an artist as said painter? (Assuming that my painting isn’t a literal copy of someone else’s.)
Which, like wine, is another example of a path-dependent collective delusion that’s not Truly Part of our values. (That is, our valuation of the work wouldn’t survive deletion of the history that led to such a valuation.)
Very nearly yes, it does, modulo a few factors. If you produced it after the artist, then you are benefiting from the artist’s already having identified a region of conceptspace that you did not find yourself. (If the art is revered because of the artist’s social status, that it wasn’t even much of an accomplishment to begin with.) To put it another way, you produced the work after “supervised learning”, while the artist didn’t need that particular training.
If you can pass off a previous work of yours as being one of the artist’s, that definitely makes you better.
Who is “we”, here?
The problem I have is not that you’re wrong, for the people you’re talking about; it’s that you (probably) overestimate the size and/or importance of that population. You’re not telling the whole truth, in effect. There are plenty of people who like paintings for the way they look, and would happily buy the work of a lesser-known artist at a cheap price if they liked it. Yes, some people use art to status-signal, but some people also actually like art. (There may even be a nonempty intersection!)
Sorry if I sound dodgy here, but I don’t think I’ve said anything that contradicts this. My criticism is of these two things:
1) the idea that the elite-designated “high art” is non-arbitrary. (I claim it’s a status-reinforced information cascade that wouldn’t regain the designation of high-art if you deleted knowledge of which ones had been so classified.)
2) the excessive premiums paid for artworks based on both 1) and the fact that they are the originals (a “piece of history”).
Never have I criticized or denied the existence of people who buy artworks because they simply like it and it appeals to them. I just criticize the way that we’re expected to agree with the laurels attached to elite-designated high art. As I said before, I would have no problem if art were just a matter of “hey, I like this, now get on with your lives” (as it works in e.g. video games).
Often the worth of an artist stems from inventing new possibilities. Copycats are lesser.
You seem to want a contest. The other option, where we are both “on the side of truth”, appeals to me more.
We’re fortunate in having different experiences in the domain of taste. I’m one of those people who like wine, and I’m confident I can identify some of its taste characteristics in blind tests. So, predictably I resent language which implies I’m an idiot, but I’m open to inquiry.
Our investigation should probably begin “at the crime scene”, that is, close to what evidence we can gather about the sense of taste. So, yes, we could examine similar priming effects on other drinks.
I have a candidate in mind, but what I’d like to ask you first is, suppose I name the drink I have in mind and we then go look for evidence of fraud in its commerce. What would it count as evidence of if we found no fraud? If we did find it? Which one would you say counts as evidence that “people can’t tell the difference” between wines?
You can easily test yourself if you have a confederate. I recommend a triangle test.
If someone was long ago made aware of powerful evidence that an expensive pleasure he currently enjoys can be replicated with fidelity at a sliver of the cost, and he hasn’t already done the experimentation necessary to properly rule this out, then you’re right. There are explanations other than that he is an idiot. But they’re not much more flattering either.
I can tell you that if I were in this position for another beverage, I would have already done the tests.
The no-fraud case is positive but weak evidence of for people telling the difference because it can be accounted for by honesty on the part of retailers, fear of whistleblowers, etc. Finding fraud is unlikely but strong evidence against the claim that people can tell the difference—because it crucially depends on the priming effects (or some other not-truly-part-of-you effect) dominating.
I’d prefer a blind comparison on the cheap substitutes like Cyan suggested.
And I’d be glad that you’ve identified a product I’m overpaying for!
What would you suggest I do, to replicate the pleasure I get from wine?
You mean, replicate the pleasure from expensive wine? (I’m going to assume you genuinely like the act of drinking wine.) Easy: accept that it’s an illusion, then buy the cheap stuff (modulo social status penalties) and prime it the way good wines are. (This may require an assistant.) Gradually train yourself to regard them as the same quality. If you can trained to put it on a pedestal, you can probably be trained to take it off.
If it’s unavoidable that you discount the taste due to your residual knowledge that the wine is low-class, then accept that you’re overpaying because of a unremovable bias. (Not a slight against you, btw—I admit I was the same way with CFLs for a while, in that I couldn’t discard the knowledge, and thus negative affect, that they’re CFLs rather than incandescent, and thereby pointlessly overpaid for lighting.)
On the more realistic assumption that you’ve simply been trained to like wine via a process that would equally well train you to like anything, get some friends together and train yourselves to like V8. (The veggie drink, not the engine.)
Wait, can you expand on how fraud in the trade of a non-alcoholic drink is “strong but unlikely” evidence that people cannot tell the differences between wines?
Such fraud might be evidence that people cannot tell the difference between tastes more generally, but that seems like a higher hurdle to clear.
Where did I say that? The claim you quoted from me was about “what would be evidence of people’s ability to distinguish that non-alcoholic drink”, not wines.
You’d check for people’s ability to distinguish wines by fraud in wines, and people’s ability to distinguish specific non-wine drinks by fraud in specific non-wine drinks.
I thought I made that very clear, and if not, common sense and the principle of charity should have sufficed for you not to infer that I would get the “wires crossed” like that.
(ETA: By the way: is there a shorter way to refer to a person’s ability to distinguish foods/drinks? I’ve tried shorter expressions, but they make other posters go batty about the imprecision without even suggesting an alternative. Paul Birch suggests “taste entropy of choice”, but that’s obscure.)
And, to preempt a possible point you may be trying to make: yes, fruit drinks may be fraudulently labeled as real fruit juice, but that’s not a parallel case unless people claim to be able to distinguish by taste the presence of real juice and purchase on that basis.
So we’ve averted misunderstanding, good. My question remains: what does fraud (or non-fraud) in non-alcoholic drinks tell us about whether people “really can tell the difference” between wines?
Just to be sure what you’re claiming, btw: if I did a “triangle test”, blinded, on two arbitrary bottles of wine from my supermarket, and I could tell them apart, would you retract that claim? Or is your claim restricted to some specific varietals?
How could I have explained my position better so that you would not have inferred the point about fruit drinks?
It doesn’t remain. If people can tell the difference, you don’t gain from fraud. If they can’t, you could gain from fraud. Where’s the confusion?
I accept that you could tell red from white, so it couldn’t be completely random. I’d want a test over the two varieties they said were swapped in the story, or within the same variety, but significant cost difference.
I have inferred nothing about fruit drinks. In this comment you replied to me with an allusion to “other drinks”. Later in the same comment you referred to milk. In other words, you primed me to think about non-alcoholic drinks. Later in the exchange, you ruled out the possibility that fraud in non-alcoholic drinks will provide any evidence relevant to your original claim. So we’re better off dropping this line of inquiry altogether.
The story mentioned three varietals: merlot, shiraz and pinot noir. It seems likely that in the next few days I will be able to procure half-bottles of a Merlot (vin de pays, 2005) at €6.5/l and a Pinot Noir (Burgundy, 2005) at 14€/l. The experiment will set me back about 10€.
Do you consider the experiment valid if I buy the bottles myself, and have a third person prepare the glasses? Would you care to stipulate any particular controls? Are you willing to trust my word when I report back with the results? Do I have to correctly identify the cheaper and the more expensive wine, or just to show I can tell the difference? What will you bet on the outcome?
There’s a difficulty that affects tests like these: you can be much more sensitive when you know you’re being tested, so it wouldn’t tell as much about people who can be fooled when given wine that they didn’t expect something was wrong with. The test would have to be made slightly more difficult in order to account for your preparation.
Here’s what I would consider a fair test: I pick three wines, (or imitations of wines) and then do a modified version of the triangle test: I can make all three the same, all three different, or just two the same, and not tell you which. To pass, you have to correctly rank their prices and identify which, if any, are the same. (You’d be allowed to count two different ones as effectively the same prices if they differed only by a few Euros.)
And of course, the test would have to be triple blind, etc.
Why thank you. So, you are expecting that in some situations people actually can tell wines apart?
Sounds complex. I might play, but you’d have a) to pick three wines I can actually pick up in my local supermarket chain, Monoprix; they have an online catalog; b) to write the instructions with enough precision that a local confederate can carry them out. I’m willing to do the work myself for the simple case (have done so in the grandparent), but not if the rules get too baroque.
There’s one thing I object to. Why do I have to rank them by price? I am not claiming that the more expensive wines are systematically better, taste-wise, than the cheaper ones. I do claim that the very good stuff is more likely to be found in the more expensive bottles. There is no reason to expect that price will be systematically correlated with my idiosyncratic, relatively untrainted tastes.
If I have to rank them by price via recognition, I’d have to have tried them out beforehand. If your hypothesis is correct that shouldn’t affect the results, since you’re claiming my discrimination of “better” comes from priming effects.
Sure, just like how, if you put enough effort in, you can tell any two drinks apart. The difference is that people make these claims about wine without have done the exercises necessary for precise discernment, yet claim these subtleties matter to them.
You’re really not grasping the concept of biasproofing, are you? “A confederate” taints the experiment. Your purchasing the wines taints the experiment.
Okay, well, the wine cheerleaders do, so this is one way you break from them and agree with me.
Does not follow: if you’re told in advance which has the label “good”, you can spit that information back out latter. My claim is that a judgment of good dependent on being told in advance that it’s good is not a genuine judgment of good.
Not performing the experiment taints it even more. But perhaps by now we’ve learned enough of each other’s claims. I leave it to you to find a way forward.
If “top winery” means “largest winery”, as it does in this story, I don’t see how it says anything about the ability of tasters to tell the difference. Those who made such claims probably weren’t drinking Gallo in the first place.
I think it’s closer to say they were passing off as cheap, something that’s actually even cheaper.
Switch the food item and see if your criticism holds:
Wonderbread, America’s top bread maker, was conned into selling inferior bread. So-called “gourmets” never noticed the difference! Bread tasting is a crock.
If people made such a huge deal about the nuances in the taste of bread, while it also “happened” to have psychoactive effects that, gosh, always have to be present for the bread to be “good enough” for them, and cheap breads were still normally several times the cost of comparable-nutrition food, then yes, the cases would be parallel.
(Before anyone says it: Yes, I know bread as trace quantities of alcohol, we’re all proud of what you learned in chemistry.)
If people who can tell the difference are a big enough demographic to sell to, then they are employed by all wineries, regardless of quality. But an alternate explanation is that Gallo was tacitly in on the scam—they got as much PN as Sideways demanded, without moving the market.
Ah, I misunderstood the comment. I just assumed that Gallo was in on it, and the claim was that customers of Gallo failing to complain constituted evidence of wine tasting’s crockitude.
If Gallo’s wine experts really did get taken in, then yes, that’s pretty strong evidence. And being the largest winery, I’m sure they have many experts checking their wines regularly—too many to realistically be “in” on such a scam.
So you’ve convinced me. Wine tasting is a crock.
I love this kind of thing.
Shall we name this phenomenon the “Emperor’s New Clothes Effect”?
That could be a general name for the phenomenon. As it relates to wine tasting (and maybe we could stretch it a bit), I’d propose “the Nuances of Toast Effect”, for a particularly memorable phrase in this Dave Barry column.
I can’t even tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi.
One’s in a red can, the other in a blue one ;-)
oh well, me neither actually.
Really? How much soda do you drink? The difference is readily noted by me. I can even tell the difference between regular and diet Coke.
This seems to suggest that it is easier to tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi than it is to tell the difference between regular and diet. I can tell the difference between all of them, but the first is a lot harder and I think that experience is pretty common. Most diet drinks use aspartame as a sugar substitute and aspartame leaves a very distinctive aftertaste in my mouth.
Wait, is that supposed to be harder? I’m not sure I could tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi, but I think I could tell the difference between regular and diet.
I don’t like cola very much, so if you gave me a drink of fizzy black stuff, I wouldn’t be able to identify which brand it was. Also, other sodas have a tendency to give me heartburn so I’ve been drinking them much less than I used to.
Is this unusual?
I have heard people remark they can’t tell the difference. My father for example.