Using the cheap wine for the experiment means the professor had to drink the good wine to empty the bottle. The worst part about this "experiment"? White vs red. You'd have to be fresh off the street to think they taste the same. This entire article is trash. These undergraduates are as much "wine experts" as 11 year olds are "education experts" just because they attend school every day.

> You'd have to be fresh off the street to think they taste the same.

... or have your senses fooled by false expectations. Have someone try it on you. I mentioned this article at work, and one of the more experienced wine drinkers in the office immediately went "oh, yes, I had someone fool me with that".

The thing is, even when we can taste the difference between two things when our expectations aren't being manipulated, a lot of that ability goes straight out the window when someone messes with our biases. Messing with peoples expectations about taste is one of those things childrens TV has been doing for decades for fun, because it's one of those things that always delights, and it's trivially easy to do.

In this case, give these same students a closed container and ask them to distinguish the red from the white wine, and I'd be very surprised if any of them had any problem.

What is being tested here is not their taste, but how taste can be overridden by expectations.

Great final point; your explanation and mention of children TV shows casts a different perspective than the article author was able to do. I can see this working now, I just don't like the spin/focus on the price and taste of wine. This is more a study on the brain.

They were oenology undergraduates, which means they are actually neck-deep in studying and applying this stuff. They will have careers in this field, some as "experts". They may not be "experts" in the sense of having some celebrity pedigree, but that doesn't matter to me, since I think it's nonsense.

I once visited a place where they do very regularly tasting of a lot of food and beverages. When visiting, the director told us that they had once a blind tasting between red and white wine, and that was involving some fairly seasoned wine drinkers. They could not tell red from white apart.

I could not believe it, but I visited a winemaker recently in Burgundy, and asked the guy what he thought of this experiment. And he confirmed it, in a blind test, he and a lot of people can't distinguish red from white wine.

what I find funny about this is that the reason I don't like most red wine and most regular tea is because I can taste the tannins.

I would find it sadly ironic if someone like me could pass the red vs white test simply because our taste buds are screwed up.

re white vs red.

In the experiments with white vs red I've heard of, the tasters described the tinted wine with adjectives generally used with red wines.

It's all very subjective. Do they use "red wine" adjectives because the wine looks red or because of it's taste characteristics.