Academia Stupidity

The image of Dons drinking old Clarets and rich Bordeaux whilst sitting down to sumptuous gourmet dinners may well be thanks to the minds of TV and film makers but it was certainly the case for hundreds of years in the older institutions of Oxford and Cambridge in the UK but if the "experts" at the University of Hertfordshire are to be believed they were wasting their money.

A group of psychologists from the university carries out a blind tasting with a range of cheap and expensive wines (the wines were up to £30 a bottle - that is not expensive.....) including champagnes and vintage champagnes costing up to £30 (!!!!! very cheap for a vintage champagne). Also tested were varieties such as Rioja, shiraz, claret, pinot grigio and sauvignon blanc.

Unfortunately no information is available to tell which countries each of the grapes came from.

578 people were then chosen at random at the Edinburgh Science Festival and asked to decide which were the cheap wines and which were the expensive ones.

By the law of averages you should be able to guess correctly 50% of the time and surprise surprise this is the result that they got.

Their conclusion from this experiment - a quote from lead researcher psychologist Professor Richard Wiseman " These are remarkable results. People were unable to tell expensive from inexpensive wines, and so in these times of financial hardship the message is clear - the inexpensive wines we tested tasted the same as their expensive counterparts."

What a crock of shit

Apart from the fundamental flaws in the experiment information - small number, no indication of age or sex spread, what was the percentage of wine drinkers in the sample - the conclusion that they draw has no correlation to the question asked.

The test group were asked to determine which were cheap and which were the expensive wines, not whether they tasted alike or which did they dislike.

There is an observed fact that people will indicate a wine is cheap if they do not like it and many good wines are far to dry for normal taste buds given the high level of sugar in everyone's diet these days.

I will bet my bottom dollar that the rioja all went into cheap wine category due to the high tanin levels but I have had some wonderful rioja and many of them were not cheap

A like or love of wine is all about developing your taste buds and learning about what you like and what works well with what. Many better wines go great with food, as they are designed to be, but are not so great on their own.

Many of the New World Wines are "processed" to achieve a taste level to suit most palates so if you were comparing an Australian Shiraz against a French traditional style Shiraz the latter would almost certainly be classified as cheap.

A final point on the topic is that price has got bugger all to do with it. Five years ago you could purchase Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc for about NZ$5 but the price these days is nearer NZ$30. Why? Because it is a great wine and become very popular so its price has risen drastically - nothing else has changed.

So the conclusion to be drawn from all this - a lot of people in academia know bugger all about wines and it seems not a lot about conducting experiments and then reporting on the information gathered in a concise manner

I suppose the only good thing about this report is that if a lot of people read it and act on it there will be more of eh better wines that I like left on the shelves and who knows maybe the shops will be forced to have a sale....