
'You Are Not So Smart': Why We Can't Tell Good Wine From Bad - Confusion
http://m.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/10/you-are-not-so-smart-why-we-cant-tell-good-wine-from-bad/247240/
======
prof_hobart
Interesting, but having seen wine experts reasonably regularly pick out not
just expensive v cheap, or white v red, but also grape variety, year, region,
and even in some cases specific slopes in blind tasting, I think it says more
about the expertise of the undergrads than about the ability of people to do
this in general.

I can certainly tell Coke and Pepsi apart in blind tasting. I've more than
once requested Coke, had it served in a Coke glass, thought "this tastes a bit
odd" and checked at the bar to find out that it was coming straight out of a
Pepsi dispenser.

~~~
andrewcooke
i don't think that is what is being argued. the claim the article is making is
that expectations are extremely powerful. that doesn't mean that someone,
carefully trained, and perhaps helped by an environment in which "cues" are
removed as much as possible (eg blind tasting) cannot pick up small
differences between wines.

so it's not that the undergrads are particularly dumb - it's that expectation
is often more powerful than experience unless you consciously control for it.
for example, i suspect it's easier to detect the difference between coke +
pepsi when you're given an unbranded glass than when you are given the two in
branded bottles, but swapped (and, importantly, not expecting it).

~~~
prof_hobart
I disagree. The statement that this article claims to be disproving is quite
clear - that "Wine is a complicated elixir, full of subtle flavors only an
expert can truly distinguish, and experienced tasters are impervious to
deception.".

The truth is that real experts _can_ distinguish these differences - many
trainees many not be able to, but that that's a different matter.

And as I've mentioned, I've been able to tell the difference between Coke and
Pepsi even when all environmental clues (my order, my expectation, the type of
glass) have told me that it's the other one. Again, it's highly likely that
these environmental clues often influence people a lot more than they realise,
but that doesn't equate to the claim that experts can't see through these
either.

~~~
colomon
Or to be more precise, the article claims that "experts" (meaning undergrads,
ie above average but by no means expert tasters) can be deceived, and then
acts as if that also means "Wine is a complicated elixir, full of subtle
flavors only an expert can truly distinguish" is false. It's a complete non
sequitur.

I agree with you 100% on the Coke versus Pepsi thing. Anyone who has spent
much time drinking wine has wines they like better than other wines; there
really are taste differences. (Note that I'm _not_ saying more expensive is
better; rather, that there are $15 wines I love, and $15 wines I don't like.)

------
DanielBMarkham
Oddly enough, I read this and came to the conclusion that the author was not
so smart.

The premise here, that there is some underlying objective version of reality
when it comes to consuming works of art (wine, food at restaurants, TV images,
or even haircuts.) is extremely flawed. This article is like comparing the
price of haircuts to the amount of hair removed. Yes, there is a metric, but
I'm not sure it has meaning.

You drink wine or eat in a nice restaurant _for the experience_ you receive,
not for where the food comes from. Expectations are part of that experience,
sure, but trying to assign it all to "expectations" is just a rhetorical
dodge. How can anything experiential not involve expectations? It can't. It's
ludicrous to think otherwise.

These things are not evidence of you not being so smart, they are evidence of
the wonderful experiential nature of being alive. Isn't it great that we can
plan and dream about a very inexpensive upcoming trip to the mountains and end
up having a better time than somebody who spent 100 times as much for a much
longer holiday? Or that we can spend an extra 40 dollars on a bottle of wine
and imagine how much better the experience will be -- thereby increasing our
eventual enjoyment? There's nothing dumb or not-so-smart about this. This is
the human experience. Anybody who has ever spent any time around children
understands that this subjectivity is a huge part of our makeup. In fact, to
suppose that somehow this would be news to anyone is to assume the audience
thinks of themselves as super-rational machines. Perhaps that's the problem:
I'm not a member of the target audience. Still, I didn't like it. These books
are the kinds you read and end up thinking "People are really broken! They are
pretty stupid!" which is most likely the same damn thing you thought before
you picked up the book in the first place.

~~~
gwern
Ah, delicious delicious meta-contrarianism:
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metaco...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metacontrarianism/)

But seriously, this is a good example of how meta-contarianism goes wrong. An
example would be the lottery. Contrarian position: 'the lottery exploits human
biases and rips them off, ruining lives.' Meta-contrarian: 'ah, but the
lottery lets you buy _hope_ , and is cheap at the price! You simply don't
appreciate what it does and expose your own intellectual shallowness by being
against it!' But really, the lottery just sucks, because if you want to buy
hope, there's a lot of better ways to buy hope and engineer superior lotteries
<http://lesswrong.com/lw/hl/lotteries_a_waste_of_hope/> eg. by running long-
drawn-out lotteries where you could win at any time over years! (Hey, if
people can enjoy a 1 in a millions chance of winning, then they can enjoy a 1
in a millions chance of winning.)

We can run the same analysis with fine wine. Contrarian: 'expensive wine does
not taste better as proved by blind-testing per OP, so it is simply a waste of
money and expensive positional signaling which makes us all worse off.' Meta-
contrarian: 'this is evidence of the wonderful experiential nature of being
alive, isn't it gre<http://lesswrong.com/lw/hl/lotteries_a_waste_of_hope/at>
how framing can make us happier?'

Well if that is so, why don't you engineer better framing? For example, if you
couldn't buy a particular fine wine but instead buy a 90% chance of the fine
wine and a 10% chance of an equally-good tasting wine (as measured by blind
testing), would peoples' enjoyment fall by more than 10%? Probably not, in
which case there's a clear utility gain here to make people happier at less
cost! Or, does their enjoyment fall by more than 10%? Then here's another
chance to win, by making the gamble the other way. (There's always a way to
exploit a bias, after all, that's kind of the point.) But the status quo is
not the best status.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
_Well if that is so, why don't you engineer better framing?_

Yes, I'd agree with that, and that's why the article rubbed me the wrong way.
I don't think the facts here are in contention at all, it's the tone and slant
of the piece.

And yes, the status quo is not always best. In fact, on HN we talk about this
issue of framing all the time, just in different, productive contexts: sales
pipelines, product positioning, social validation, etc. The list of productive
ways to discuss this issue are legion, and it's an awesome and useful thing to
talk about. In fact there's only one way to discuss this is a non-productive
manner: the way it was discussed in this article, as some sort of failing of
the human mind. (It's not a bug, it's a feature!)

I'm also a bit of an existentialist, and this plague of over-rationalization
and assuming that everything can somehow be tied to a scientific metric is
getting a bit old by now. Huge parts of life are experiential, and that's the
way they should be. The geek guy inside us all who thinks that it's all logic
and science can become his own caricature if given too much room to run. We
are not all little Mr. Spocks, able to get a "true" vision of reality by
ditching our emotional, subjective experience of life for some sort of
scientifically-valid viewpoint. That was the real emotional roots of my
disagreement, not social posturing or any desire to be a contrarian.

I'm going to say this a little differently in hopes the point will sink in:
yes, many experiences you have -- probably most experiences you have -- are
affected by the vagaries of the human mind. As startup founders, lots of us
would like to help you have an even better time of things without spending as
much of your resources. The entire purpose of an early-stage startup is to
create and shape a narrative that begins with you hearing about something and
ends with you being a little happier. Sometimes a lot happier. If you're
thinking of the human brain and human experience as something that's broken
about us and something that you can hack by making people do things they
wouldn't? This is the kind of thinking that gets you Farmville. I don't like
where that kind of clinical thinking ends up. It's wrong. It pisses me off.

In fact, your entire line of questioning around why wine has to cost so much
or lotteries charge for the dream of winning is exactly the reason I think the
startup and entrepreneurial communities rock. _We're always asking that
question too_. Many times we find answers that most people don't want to
accept, but that's okay. Most importantly we're doing something positive about
it. You're on the right track with your critique of my post. You just need to
keep going down this path to its logical conclusion.

~~~
mquander
Wait a minute, aren't the expensive wines a mechanism of "hack[ing] by making
people do things they wouldn't?" The wineries engineering this are the ones
taking advantage of human nature -- the same position Farmville's in.

The "clinical thinking" is just a tool for you and I to use if we want to be
happier in cheaper and easier ways than drinking $100 wine and playing
Farmville all day. It's my experience that by looking at my life with slightly
more Mr-Spock-ish eyes, I can understand something about where my desires and
instincts come from, and do a better job fulfilling them.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I think we're in danger of getting into either-or thinking here, and it's not
like that at all.

Of course you should be introspective to understand yourself better, but at
some point life is about _being alive_. It is both impossible and fruitless to
spend all your time in analysis. We call this "analysis paralysis" in the
computer world. There are a lot of reasons why this is bad -- the one that
comes to mind first is the idea that it's really possible to ever completely
understand yourself, that somehow you could sit outside your own head and
understand everything that's going on. At some point you just accept that yes,
the 100-dollar bottle of wine isn't as good, but yes, it's also really cool to
enjoy the fallacy that it'll be a better wine.

At the end of the day, the question about whether the folks charging $100 for
the wine have are exploiting folks or not is measured in two ways: as an
individual, are they happy making the trade? As a society, is this something
that we would be happy for everybody doing?

Farmville passes the first test but not the second. The expensive wine works
for both tests.

~~~
pessimizer
You definitely have to make a case that the expensive wine passes the second
test.

~~~
mquander
This is getting quite off-topic, but I agree; I think passing the second test
means that there are big industries and a great deal of labor devoted to
trying to brand and distinguish slightly different wines, which strikes me as
negative.

But very few activities would pass a "what if everyone in the world did this"
test :-)

------
ThomPete
I spent a year living in a building with a french winebar in the cellar.

I became really good friends with the owner and since I was working freelance
from home I would often go down in the afternoon and get a glass of wine.

I learned a lot about wine, but the most important things were the following.

Wine experts don't judge the quality of the wine but the quality of what the
wine is supposed to taste like based on it's appellation controléé
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellation_d%E2%80%99Origine_C...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellation_d%E2%80%99Origine_Contr%C3%B4l%C3%A9e)

Those criterias are the "objective" criteria and those are the ones uses to
judge a wine by. The particular taste of the wine is less interesting (i.e.
the experience that normal people would have of the wine)

Being a wine expert does not mean that you know good from bad wine but that
you know what any given wine 1) smelled like (cherry, toast bread with butter,
apple etc). The owner had a set of 100 little bottles each with it's own
smell.

You would be surprised how hard it it to pin point the correct word of the
smell of one of those bottles, even if you recognize the taste.

Once in a while I would be involved in some of the wine tastings and see him
and his friends guess if not the exact wine then the actual zip code.

One of the most important things he taught me was to find the balance of your
food and your wine.

It's one of the things I have found most enriching of my culinary life. That
and the ability to smell (not taste) whether a wine have cork (impresses the
girls and gives you an advantage in any business dinner)

~~~
veyron
URL should be
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellation_d%E2%80%99Origine_C...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellation_d%E2%80%99Origine_Contr%C3%B4l%C3%A9e)

~~~
ThomPete
Thnx fixed

------
conductrics
My wife is a scotch expert. She hosts tastings where they taste scotch of
three different ages. It used to be that after the tasting, most people would
rate the oldest one the best. She then started to do blind tastings (tasters
didn't know the age). Now the oldest is picked as the best around 30% of the
time.

~~~
andrewcooke
yeah; i'm in chile where the supply of scotch is limited, so i've started
drinking the local hooch, called pisco, which is a kind of brandy. there are
quite a few aged piscos available (the economy here is pretty good and people
are starting to have more disposable income). as i tried a few i noticed that
the ones in nice bottles, aged for longer (and more expensive), were
noticeably more complex. eventually i had enough different bottles to arrange
a blind tasting (my partner did the pouring etc; i was blindfold as they have
different shades). the results were amazing - my rating was all over the map
and completely inconsistent with what i was expecting. yet still, when i can
see the bottles, the expensive ones taste better :o)

tl;dr: brain - why are you so shallow?

[in my defense, my proudest wine moment was when i bought a bottle of cousino
macul cs on offer, took it home, tasted it, and thought it amazing (for the
price). when i checked my receipt i had picked up the reserve (not on sale,
twice the price) by mistake... (their labels were very similar a year or two
ago)]

~~~
conductrics
When I am trying a new whisky or brandy, I like to have a pour of something I
know, so I have a reference point. I have found that time of day, outside
temperature, what I am eating or have eaten, etc. really affects how much I am
enjoying the drink. Of course the main point of the article is that while we
think we are just using the current observation (the data), we often have
strong priors that often dominate our posteriors ;)

------
markkat
A friend of mine that is pretty versed with wines, and who used to be a
skeptic, wrote an interesting piece about this last year:
<http://www.triplesequitur.com/winespeak/>

It's an argument that changed my thinking on this. Wine tasting and critique
is not only about what's in the wine, it's also about what tasting the wine
enables us to do.

 _In a phrase, wine is liquid metaphor._

~~~
Retric
The problem with that is if people could quickly learn what PH meant if
everyone spoke in those terms. You don't order windows that are 3 banana's 2
pineapples and a grape wide because while most poeple could get a general idea
how big that was it's simply less well defined than 3 feet 2 inches or
whatever.

------
redxaxder
This was written as a series of blog posts before being compiled into a book.
The original is here:

<http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/02/24/fine-wine/>

------
hetman
I found one thing interesting. While I wouldn't be surprised my expectations
often affect my perceptions in much the way this article described, I noticed
one exception, namely the last example given: movies.

In fact the build up of expectations seems to usually result in me thinking
the movie is worse, and vice versa. I wonder if this is just some weird
reverse psychology or if something more interesting is going on.

------
tnicola
"In one Dutch study, participants were put in a room with posters proclaiming
the awesomeness of high-definition, and were told they would be watching a new
high-definition program. Afterward, the subjects said they found the sharper,
more colorful television to be a superior experience to standard programming.
What they didn't know was they were actually watching a standard-definition
image. The expectation of seeing a better quality image led them to believe
they had. Recent research shows about 18 percent of people who own high
definition televisions are still watching standard-definition programming on
the set, but they think they are getting a better picture."

They are actually getting the better picture. One cannot argue that modern TV
SD is not better than what we used to watch on CRT's. Everything has improved,
so it is a better picture. HD is mostly undetectable to human eye to make that
much of a difference. At least to me. Wide screen SD is a sufficiently
pleasant experience.

My husband claims to see the difference. I think he's conditioned to see it.

~~~
nitrogen
[Warning: HD evangelism ahead]

It really depends on how far away you sit from your TV, what the screen size
is, and how good your vision is. When I'm sitting three feet from my 28" HD
monitor, you bet I can tell the difference between HD and SD. My vision's not
quite 20:20, though, so on the couch 15' away from a 100" projector screen,
I'd have a hard time telling 720p from 1080p just based on sharpness, but the
larger size of any macroblock artifacts would give it away.

In the right conditions, I'm positive you'd see the difference, too. Try
renting both a DVD and Blu-ray of the same movie from Redbox, and watching
them a little closer to the screen. The Blu-ray will let you see more
individual hairs, individual distant bricks, etc. But even SD on an HD screen
can be better than SD on an SD screen, due to increased pixel density and
reduced flicker.

~~~
tnicola
Vision clarity definitely plays the part. And so does how far you are from
your TV. I am about 2.5 screen lengths away from the screen and the point is,
it isn't that much better that it warrants all the inconveniences that come
with watching an HD.

It requires another player. (In case of BluRay) It's harder to stream through
the internet. (In case of digital formats)

For those people, like me, who in 95% of practical uses do not see the
difference, the above disadvantages make it a no brainer.

I guess I am asking, is it really worth it all the trouble?

~~~
nitrogen
If you consume HD content the "legitimate" way by inserting a disc into a Blu-
ray player, then no, I don't think it is. You have to put up with 7 minutes of
unskippable previews in some cases, player updates that take two hours to
download and install, two minute load times on two-year-old players, etc.

If you front-load the inconvenience by buying the discs, ripping them all to a
hard drive, and using something like XBMC or Plex on an HTPC, then for any
serious watching where you sit down for the whole show, yes, it absolutely is
worth it. I wish more people had access to the convenience a media server
gives; it's what content _should_ be like in the digital age.

Edit: I'm usually about 1.5 screen lengths away, so that probably makes a
difference.

------
extension
The flaw in all these experiments is the assumption that the subject's
description of their own experience is accurate. It's not surprising that
people won't say that wine is white when it looks red, or that a fancy
restaurant has served them frozen dinners. If forced to choose between pepsi
on the left or pepsi on the right, they will make the choice one way or
another. Put people in strange situations and you will get strange behavior.
What was actually going through their head remains a mystery.

Regardless, nothing in the world will make me believe that I don't care what
my food tastes like.

------
bahman2000
so this clears up the iPhone vs. Android debate then :)

~~~
smithian
It would be very interesting to load android on a bunch of iPhones and test
the reactions of people shopping for phones... take one group and tell them
that this was the new iOS 6 and tell the others what you had done exactly and
rate the reactions :-)

~~~
ljf
Didn't they do that with Vista:
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/technology/04vista.html>

------
spazmaster
Too bad the test was with undergraduates, and not experts in the field for
20-30 years.

~~~
barrkel
More data for you:

[http://www.felixsalmon.com/2009/01/wine-tasting-datapoint-
of...](http://www.felixsalmon.com/2009/01/wine-tasting-datapoint-of-the-day/)

<http://www.felixsalmon.com/2007/11/pinot-contest/>

My own personal experience is that wine + food is most interesting. Both the
wine and the food can change their taste substantially when paired well. But
it's very rare that I can find a wine that I can stand in quantities to drink
without food.

------
goldmab
Can somebody find the actual text of the Brochet studies? I've seen them
referred to several times, but without citations.

------
giardini
non "in vino veritas" sed "in vino confusionem"!

------
Mfarewellp
« In 2001, Frederic Brochet conducted two experiments at the University of
Bordeaux. » I'm searching for sources. This is fud without sources.

~~~
Luc
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_tasting#cite_note-3>

~~~
Mfarewellp
« Not Found The requested document was not found on this server. »

~~~
dalke
That's why you get the title in the Wikipedia link and search for that text.
It comes back in the first hit.

