_rege

This one comes up again and again on reddit and it's still bullshit, because everyone's too excited about the anti-snob circlejerk to actually read the paper.

Some things to consider:

1. The experiment was designed to attempt to fool the subjects into misinterpreting the wine they were tasting. The entire purpose of the experiment was to demonstrate how a tasting could be manipulated to give misleading results.
2. The "trick" wine was white wine colored as red, then served in a red wine glass and served at red wine temperatures. White wines are typically served at around 45F and reds at more like 65F, and yes, they taste completely different at these different temperatures.
3. The conclusion wasn't even that they couldn't tell red from white - the conclusion was that when evaluating what they thought was red wine, they used lexicon associated with red wine to describe it. They evaluated it the way they thought red wine was supposed to be evaluated. The study is always cited as saying that "experts could not tell red wine from white wine" when that was not even a part of the study. The fella that ran this study has been very outspoken about this gross misinterpretation of his study (his name is Frederic Brochet, google it up).
4. The subjects were not experts, they were undergraduate students in a wine program who were specifically selected because of their inexperience. Part of the purpose of the study was to evaluate whether their methods for evaluating wine were impacted by the vernacular of well-known tasters

Some further bullshit about the article, is that it wasn't just an experiment run by "a scientist", it was run by a wine expert who also had a PhD in psychology who wanted to make a point about how testing procedures were flawed."

This is in reference to the following TIL, the same information that Adam used in his wine snob episode

http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/4q6485/til_a_scientist_invited_wine_experts_to_give/d4qrhna

Might seem like an inappropriate question but could you pull your face off?

Maybe send Bob Ewell to Belize.