If you send me to the store to get a bottle of wine you better tell me what you want otherwise I’m going to make an educated guess based on price, location, and score. Why? Because I cannot tell the difference between a wine snob bottle of wine and Boone’s Farm bum wine. The good news…apparently neither can most people.
The other day the Edinburgh Science Festival conducted a blind taste test in which they gave 578 people champagne, merlot, pinot grigio, sauvignon blanc, shiraz, and a few other types of wine ranging from $5 to $43. After swirling, swishing, and downing the beverage, participants were asked to choose which bottles they thought were expensive, and which the believed to be of the bum variety.
Science Festival Guest Director and Professor of Psychology, Richard Wiseman, found that wine drinkers could only correctly identify expensive white wines 53% of the time, and expensive reds 47%. Sweet! I’m in the top 50 percentile.
“It’s not about price, but about quality” say the wine snobs as they marched around the room stomping their feet and shaking their fists, “The taste test was ridiculous and unfair.” To show that elementary school rules apply in the real world, the wine industry plans on conducting their own test taste to show the world there needs to be a difference. Hmm, I wonder how that’s gonna turn out?
But that’s not what annoys me most about this story. After reading the dozen or so posts each and every one ignored the real human element. What happened when people were told that what they were drinking was nothing more than Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill? My guess is that it went something like this:
Seriously, you should never try to pull a fast one on an inebriated fat guy.
Can you tell the difference between good and bad wine? How about beer or spirits? Share your thoughts below or send me an e-mail at TiTy@y2kemo.com. BTW, the video above is on Hulu so it’s US only, supports only Flash-enabled devices, and requires the use of a plugin just so I can share it on WP :/
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