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Comment by locallost | Hacker News Reader

Color is very important for food. My favorite story is the one [1] with wine tasting, where the same white wine was tasted twice by the same people, in one case with tasteless red color added. The taste was reported to be completely different. While it might be contributed to wine tasting being total BS, my favorite part of this study was that its author became a wine maker :-).

[1] https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infam...

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The color of food and drink certainly has suggestive power, but the popular conception of what that wine study shows, i.e. that wine tasting is complete junk, is itself complete junk.

A reddit comment summarizes it best: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/4q6485/til_a...

I never said wine tasting was junk, but there is plenty of baloney in the reddit post. The worst part is the claim the author is not a scientist, merely an academic doing a study. Was his white coat missing? He did not attend Science University?

I also posted that the author is a wine maker, so it's clear he doesn't view the wine world as junk. My take away from it is that there's a lot going on in our head based on the input from the senses, that things are not black and white, and that it's difficult to rate things objectively because of it. And that this is completely fine, since we are humans and not machines, and if you can taste black currants in a wine and this makes you happy, knock yourself out.

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