Does All Wine Taste the Same? (2012)

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_...

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.

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.

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