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Has anybody actually read the original study?[1] Brochet did not serve the wines to "wine experts". From the study, emphasis mine: "The wine comparison test was
by andolanra 13y ago
Has anybody actually read the original study?[1] Brochet did not serve the wines to "wine experts". From the study, emphasis mine: "The wine comparison test was carried out by 54 undergraduates from the Faculty of Oenology of the University of Bordeaux. The sex ratio was 1:1."
Somehow, the results were transformed into, "Wine experts cannot tell the difference between red and white wine!" but that's not a thesis supported by the original paper. What we can conclude is that French undergrads sometimes use similar words to describe both red wines and red-tinted white wines... and that's about it.
[1]: http://www.stanford.edu/class/linguist62n/morrot01colorofodors.pdf http://www.stanford.edu/class/linguist62n/morrot01colorofodo...
- rpedroso 13y agoThey're not just any undergrad students, they were Oenology students -- they might not be experts, but they certainly know more about classifying wines by scent, flavor profile, etc than a layperson.
- contingencies 13y agoMore to the point, they were French!
- toyg 13y agoUndergraduates in most settings will still be extremely prone to conform to recently-acquired knowledge as dogma, probably even more likely than a layperson. "Uh, they said data must be normalized, so here's 15 db tables to represent an employee..." maps the same as "Uh, they told me to use this and this word for red wines, so here's this and this word..." The paper implies that they sampled "experts", when they really just sampled "students" or "disciples". Quite the difference. (Besides, it's dramatic how scientific research keeps oversampling university undergraduates to such a large extent, purely out of practicality.)
- Zimahl 13y agoThe sex ratio was 1:1. Whenever I drink, that's the ratio I'm targeting as well :)
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]