

Does All Wine Taste the Same? (2012) - pmoriarty
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/frontal-cortex/does-all-wine-taste-the-same

======
3r3rni9
For the record and for those still skimming: the author, Jonah Lehrer, was
fired from Wired, resigned from the New Yorker, and lost his book deals after
a massive 2012 plagiarism scandal (hence the note prefacing the article), and
apparently remains fairly unrepentant:

[http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/06/07/jonah_lehrer_...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/06/07/jonah_lehrer_book_proposal_on_love_did_he_plagiarize_adam_gopnik.html)

------
steve_g
My family did a test at a Christmas party just a few days ago. We did a
blindfolded tasting of four cheap wines, two red and two white. The goal was
solely to distinguish between red and white wines. On average, each person
made one incorrect determination (n=8, avg=1.1, mode=1).

It wasn't very scientific - it wasn't double-blind, each person knew the
number of reds and whites, and it's pretty clear the order in which the wines
were presented made a difference. In any case, I think our findings were
reasonably consistent with the article.

It was also a fun time.

~~~
vwoolf
_It was also a fun time._

Yeah. I've done something similar, but with either people and three reds,
mostly to see if a) my friends could determine the wine type and b) which one
they liked best. The answer to a was no and the answers to b were all over the
place.

------
_almosnow
And the same thing happens on science and tech...

