Why We Can't Tell Good Wine From Bad (2011)

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/10/you-are-not-so-smart-why-we-cant-tell-good-wine-from-bad/247240/#

by JumpCrisscross • 13 years ago

56 79 13 years ago

If your not heavily into psychology but having a passing interest I can highly recommend the book "You are not so smart" http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1851689397/ref=as_li_qf_s... (aff link)

It is an excellent read and very eye opening

mitchty2• 13 years ago

Agreed, the book has one section on how "fight or flight" is a myth. At least in regards to disasters, everyone needs to read up on that chapter at least. We are a delusional creature is all I can think of after that book.

ZeroGravitas• 13 years ago

Can you expand slightly? I don't understand what part of "fight or flight" could be mythical, and Googling doesn't seem to bring up anything relevant.

JoeAltmaier• 13 years ago

And every wine 'expert' who read that will be totally confident that they can't be fooled so simply. Another part of the equation is the fiction we construct around ourselves to protect our ego.

Hey! I re-read it. The wine 'experts' tested were "undergraduates". Now I can legitimately suspect their research. Everybody knows freshmen are idiots. Especially freshmen flocking to a free wine-tasting.

See how easy that was? I can dismiss statistical significance with semantic juggling.

elemeno• 13 years ago

They were freshmen studying wine and wine making.

k2xl• 13 years ago

I'm not a wine expert, but I do know that wine experts are indeed out there and have to go through rigorous blind tests to earn accreditation. At highest levels you have to blind taste testing to be able to tell what kind of WATER droplets were mixed with different wines.

StavrosK2• 13 years ago

This didn't test wine experts, it tested undergraduates. We can extrapolate, but it's not as accurate.

netrus• 13 years ago

I guess it is reasonable to assume that a wine making undergraduate has much knowledge about wine as I, as a regular wine drinker, might collect in my life. If they cannot tell, I wont get to a point where I would.

talmand6• 13 years ago

I would imagine that wine makers that worry over wine experts are the ones that want to win awards. The wine makers that want to sell wine care more of what the customers think.

I'm not a wine maker though, so I admit I could be wrong.

seivan• 13 years ago

Isn't it a matter of taste? Me and my partner know what types of grapes we like or don't like, and that tends to remain.

taeric• 13 years ago

I do not think the argument is that you can not tell between grapes. Only between expensive and not. Also, it should be noted that you probably can tell between garbage and not. Just once you reach a good state, there is not much improving it. Evidence shows none, actually.

Similarly, I don't think anyone claims you can not tell the difference between tap water and bottled. Since, clearly, the local quality of tap water is very influential to this idea. However, differences between bottled waters is going to be just as crazy.

meaty2• 13 years ago

Wine experts are in the same class as tarot readers and homeopaths if you ask me.

ndonnellan• 13 years ago

Freakonomics did an interesting podcast on this, but the conclusion was essentially same: http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/02/27/the-days-of-wine-and-...

*not sure if they referred to the same study or not, but it's possible

Udo• 13 years ago

I can tell good wine from bad, I just can't tell the expensive from the inexpensive.

The expectations game is played by pretty much every single product on the market, but it's only working if the product image is something you choose to care about. Most people do choose to care about it simply because it serves as a reasonable filter and this combined with social proof can reduce the problem of choice with minimum effort. People choose a certain "class" they want to represent and they just go along with whatever is on the menu for it.

But it's also important to notice that, while we all might be doing it to varying degrees, this does not necessarily apply to everything you do. If you can live with the stigma of forceful association to these classes, you can make decisions purely on the personal merits of a product, though that doesn't mean it's always worth the effort.

I live in one of the wine-themed states of Germany, close to France. A significant amount of our agriculture is wine, mostly from small family-based winemakers (oh the cliché). Everybody drinks a lot of wine, and there is an insane amount of variants to choose from. I know what I like when I taste it, but I know this applies to my personal taste only. Like the article says, it's not really possible to tell how expensive a wine is by tasting it. But that doesn't mean it all tastes the same. Wines are hugely diverse and everyone would be well-advised to just decide based on personal preference. However, high-profile wines are often designed to offend the least number of people, so they're an easy choice to serve when you're hosting a dinner - as a common denominator they do have a purpose.

InclinedPlane• 13 years ago

Quite so. I had typed up as many or more words in a similar vein before abandoning them.

Wine is a subjective taste, just like all foods. There is no objective ranking of it. Don't worry about prestige or class or appearance of sophistication, find out what you enjoy and ignore all the baggage. I can't guarantee that I can reliably tell you anything about a wine just from tasting it, partly because I just don't care that much, but I can reliably tell you which wines I enjoy more than others.

sheri• 13 years ago

I think one of the points of the article is that the perceived 'goodness' of the wine comes from whether the wine is expensive or not. I don't remember where I read this, but packaging of a food product apparently has a non-trivial impact on the perceived taste.

I asked a sommelier in Paris once about what makes a good wine. She told me "A good wine is one whose taste you like".

ImprovedSilence• 13 years ago

>>A good wine is one whose taste you like".

Haha, indeed. I studied abroad in Italy, and one of my classes was a history and culture of food class, which included a day of wine tasting. I remember the "culture" part of that lesson was that Americans like their crazy expensive wine, simply because it is expensive, and fancy. Whereas Italy it is more generic, red or white, sweet or dry. Some go with red meat, others with fish. You go to the risterante, and pretty much get red or white "table wine", no expensive wine list or anything of the sort. The culture was not expensive fancy wine, just a good taste to compliment the flavors in your meal.

Now, I've put down a good bit of wine in my time, but nothing quite hits the sport for me like an $8 bottle of Chianti. I can tell a difference in brands too, and have my favorites, but the price per bottle for a great wine never seems to need to go above $10.

tcbawo• 13 years ago

I imagine the first X covers cost of production, where cheapo brands cut corners to satisfy the quantity crowd. After that, you start to see price heavily affected by market segmentation, and availability. The small batch shop need to sell above a certain price. At some point, it starts to mirror high fashion or art.

ahoyhere• 13 years ago

This may be true in the US but it's not true in Germany and Austria.

In Vienna, you can get a very tasty bottle of local white wine for $3, at any grocery store. Spend $10 and you'll have something amazing. It'll be fresh, crisp, and tasty. You can get giant jugs of wine for $15 or less, again local, again delicious. Maybe not what an expert would consider wonderful, but nothing like the sickly cheap whites you get in the US. (At least, all the ones I've tried.) In many restaurants in Austria, the house wine is the cheapest beverage other than tap water and single espresso.

The thing is wine is both a bigger industry, and a smaller industry, compared to the US. It seems like half the restaurants in Vienna have a house wine (and I don't just mean "their cheap brand" -- but house wine they, or their family, or their friends, make and sell).

There are practically infinite "brands" because making wine is such a tradition. And yet it's not super commercialized. Most of the time you go to a restaurant, you just order "white" or "red". With few exceptions, there's not the worshipping of the brand names or prices.

Heuriger are a kind of biergarten, but for wine; they make their own, that's all they serve to drink, and often you can dine among the grape vines that provide the grapes to make the wine you're drinking.

In the summer, you drink weissweing'spritzt… wine with soda water, with Almdudler (a local herbal soda), apple juice, or elderflower syrup and soda. You order the wine to the table by the liter (it's not coming in bottles), and you share with your friends. This would send a snobby wine aficionado into conniptions and I myself thought it was a bit sketchy at first, but damn, it's delicious (and fun - and cheap).

Every fall, sturm arrives in every lokale -- the fresh, immature wine. Suddenly everybody is selling it and everybody's drinking it (and everybody's got a raging headache the next day).

Wine is part of the cultural landscape there in a way that I've not seen anywhere in the US. Wine is practically like hot & cold running water in Austria -- practically a utility. It's omnipresent and, in true socialist fashion, cheap enough for everyone, all the time.

haberman• 13 years ago

"Most people do choose to care about it simply because it serves as a reasonable filter and this combined with social proof can reduce the problem of choice with minimum effort."

This reminds me of the most obnoxious question I have been asked by a salesman (in this case at a high-end audio shop): "how much are you looking to spend?"

This question was so backwards to me that I didn't know how to respond. To me, each product is a cost/benefit value proposition. How much I'm willing to spend depends on how much the product offers.

Evbn3• 13 years ago

The theory is that everything in stock is a great proposition, and you will get the best item in your budget. They aren't going to negotiate on price.

ctdonath• 13 years ago

he asked the experts to rate two different bottles of red wine. One was very expensive, the other was cheap. Again, he tricked them. This time he had put the cheap wine in both bottles.

Funny, these experiments never involve putting expensive wine in both bottles.

degenerate2• 13 years ago

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.

thisone2• 13 years ago

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.

tatsuke952• 13 years ago

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.

vidarh2• 13 years ago

> 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.

Gmo• 13 years ago

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.

andrewcooke2• 13 years ago

one of my favourite wines is cosino macul's don matias - a reserve cab that costs about $5000 pesos here (chile). they have a vineyard not far from us, that we take visitors to, so i feel it's kind of my "local". and it's an old, established family firm (although what that says in chile isn't necessarily so great).

anyway, they also have don luis, which is similar (and, confusingly, looks very similar), but not aged in oak, and so cheaper (say $3500). one day i was out shopping at the supermarket and saw don luis on offer. so i bought a bottle and, when i got home, cracked it open. it tasted pretty awesome. so awesome, in fact, that i decided to go buy some more.

but before i went out the door i took a second look at the bottle - somehow i had picked up a bottle of don matias (the more expensive reserve). oops. no surprise it tasted so good.

and that, for me, has always been the argument against the idea that you can't taste different wines [edit: more correctly, can't taste the difference between wines and, in this case at least, tell which is more expensive]. despite my expectations, thinking i was drinking a bottle of varietal, i recognised the better quality (or, at least, different taste) of the reserve.

now i'm no expert, and i can't recognise all wines, or the difference between many reserves and "super-reserves". but the difference between a plain and an oaked red (which, legally, is the difference between varietals and reserves in chile) is clear.

dfc2• 13 years ago

How is that an argument against the idea that you can't taste different wines? It seems to me that in order to make the case you should have recognized that it was Don Matias without looking at the label. As far as I'm concerned you drank a bottle of cheaper wine and thought to yourself, "wow. This was tasty, much tastier than I expected. Instead of wasting money on the fancy label I should buy this from now on."

Evbn3• 13 years ago

But he didn't. He drank the fancier wine.

TylerE• 13 years ago

In case anyone is curious...

Those prices converted to USD are $10.54 and $7.41, respectively.

vidarh2• 13 years ago

I don't think anyone has been claiming you can't notice the difference between wines, but that there is not consistent difference in taste based on price.

Furthermore, peoples taste is manipulated by expectation. That does not mean people are confused all the time. There are genuine differences. It is just that often the expectations can override them.

Note that you yourself, while you enjoyed the wine you thought was the cheaper variation, according to your own comment did not recognise the more expensive wine: You believed it was the cheaper wine until you saw the bottle, despite claiming at the end that the difference between these types "is clear".

If telling them apart is so easy, despite expectations, you should have noticed at the first sip of the bottle that it could not have been the varietal.

andrewcooke2• 13 years ago

maybe i didn't explain very well. i tasted the varietal and thought it was amazing value for money - that it tasted like a reserve. when i looked again at the bottle "it all made sense" - it tasted like a reserve because it was a reserve.

if you are claiming that is significantly different from me thinking "oh, i'm an idiot, i must have bought the wrong bottle and this is the reserve" on tasting it then i don't know what to say. you seem to be splitting hairs - in either case what is important is that taste was sufficient to detect a more expensive wine.

a stronger argument, it seems to me, against what i am saying is that it is a single case. to that i can only add that i've not had the same experience going the other way. i have never tasted a reserve and thought "ugh, i have been screwed". reserves taste like reserves - the oak is obvious. and that means that there is a clear change in taste when the price increases from varietal to reserve.

again: i am not claiming you can taste all price differences. but this one is clear and legally enforced for chilean wines.

TheCondor• 13 years ago

Okay, so here is the question... Why don't wine raters, the magazines and such, insist on blind testing?

They go to the vineyards, eat at selected restaurants, and literally make 'wining and dinning' part of the reviews.

tatsuke952• 13 years ago

Because that would reveal that the whole thing is a racket. They're all in on it.

nicw2• 13 years ago

More importantly, people shouldn't rely on what these wine raters say. This is their palate, not yours. And while it's a good 'nudge' to try one wine versus another, they are in no way the experts on your own tastebuds. I've been working on ways to map your palate and give you recommendations for this exact reason.

matwood2• 13 years ago

I can recognize good wine versus bad wine. The problem is expensive doesn't always equal good. Often the more expensive aged wine doesn't taste very good to someone who doesn't drink much wine because it's generally very dry.

There's also the matter of degrees. Going from the $1 bottle to the $10 bottle is a huge jump in quality and taste. Going from a good $10 bottle to the $50+ and the changes end up very subtle and not worth the money IMHO. I'm not a wine expert and when I had $1000 bottle before I felt it was mostly wasted on me since I have a hard time picking up on all of the subtle flavors.

The goal for all wine drinkers should be to find the least expensive bottle they enjoy drinking. I often come across these very nice bottles in the $7-$10 range that are great. The problem is as the word gets out their price goes up so I have to start the search over.

bunderbunder4• 13 years ago

I saw a very clear illustration of this at a blind whiskey tasting I attended recently. We tried a selection ranging from the standard cheapo stuff all the way up to one that as $150/bottle.

It turned out that the cheapest two whiskeys did tend to get rated the lowest - though interestingly enough most people rated the less popular brand markedly higher than the more popular one. Beyond that though, everything was all mixed. I didn't grind any numbers, but at a glance I didn't recognize any correlation between price and how well people rated it. There weren't even really any clear favorites; everyone had their own taste. The only really interesting thing there was that absolutely nobody had picked the $150 whiskey as their favorite.

matwood2• 13 years ago

I remember Mythbusters doing something like this with vodka. An expert came in and IIRC they were able to rank the various vodkas very effectively.

For me vodka (and tequila for that matter) is similar to wine. The cheap stuff I can tell is cheap because it really does taste bad. Once you're into any of the premiums it is all mostly good so it's harder to tell the difference in price bands. I can almost always pick out Grey Goose though because it has a subtle sweetness vodkas like Kettle and Belvedere to not have.

cglace• 13 years ago

Thats interesting because I can definitely tell the difference between the ages of scotches and other whiskeys.

I also can't stand the taste of cheap whiskeys for anything other than mixing.

Were the people at the whiskey tasting regular whiskey drinkers? Just wondering because it took me awhile to appreciate a good aged whiskey.

dysoco• 13 years ago

Why Are All The Titles Capitalized Like This ?

unwind• 13 years ago

Because http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case#Title_case.

martinced2• 13 years ago

It's nearly impossible to tell good wine from bad wine instantly. A wine may seem very good but give you a terrible headache the next morning.

Every time I drink some wine and someone tells me it tastes good I answer: "let's wait tomorrow".

The only wine which I know ain't giving headaches is champagne (unless you really* abuse it).

andrewvc• 13 years ago

I always wonder about the 'good alcohol won't leave you hung over' theory.

I mean, if I'm drinking a Jack and Coke or a Jameson Rocks I'm probably at a concert or a dive bar, staying up late and having one too many drinks. Whereas if I'm drinking a high-end single-malt neat I'm probably at an upscale bar and I'm apt to maybe opt-out of that one last drink.

Additionally, a lot of people have bad memories of low end alcohols from college, when they're doing shots of cuervo, popov, or other low end alcohols in excess. Vodka, in particular, has very little differentiation between brands (it's pure grain alcohol). I'd really love to see a controlled study where a group of people drink a high-end and a low-end vodka and describe their hangovers the next day.

nicw2• 13 years ago

It depends on the process. A more expensive spirit could use processes that uses less chemicals, but takes longer to filter.

Some wines are filtered using fining agents that contain gelatin, where some winemakers choose to use higher-micron (more expensive) filters. Or they use sanitation 'preservatives' like Velcorin. Any one of these processes could either trigger an allergy or add something that your body doesn't like processing.

The closest example is decaf coffee: how to strip out the caffeine. There is a chemical way (cheap but uses benzene) vs the swiss water process.

http://www.wisegeek.org/how-is-coffee-decaffeinated.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decaffeination#Swiss_water_proc...

martinced2• 13 years ago

Regarding the Pepsi / Coke test I'm a bit surprised... Apparently the letter 'M' and 'Q' were inducing people in error because people prefer M over Q.

But... From personal experience I can tell if coke is coming from a 20cl glass bottle (or a 33cl can) or a 25cl plastic bottle / 1 liter plastic bottle (tried with friends several times, they're always amazed). I can't differentiate 20cl glass from 33cl can and I can't differentiate small plastic from big plastic. But, simply, coke in plastic bottles doesn't have the "coke" taste. It just doesn't.

There's no way on earth you can make me drink Pepsi and I'll say it's coke. If often happen in restaurant: I ask if the coke they have is real coke. Typically people don't like but sometimes they do and serve me Pepsi. Than I get mean.

: )

talmand6• 13 years ago

To be fair, where I'm from when you say you want a Coke you are simply saying you want a brown soda of some type.

Stwerp• 13 years ago

Mountain Dew is coke as well.

meaty2• 13 years ago

Yes I can tell the difference between canned, glass and plastic bottled coke. Also Pepsi vs coke (pepsi is quite sour).

Wine on the other hand I find is just ego cock-waggling.

I prefer water to all, which tastes like shit in London, UK.

bane2• 13 years ago

Like many other folks here, I can tell good wine from bad too, in so much as I can tell wine I like from wine I don't like. Even better, I can usually find lots of wines I like that are under $12-10.

I even have regions I know have a higher probability of making wines I'll probably like.

But I've had some pleasant surprises. I don't typically like Virginia wines for example, but I was recently introduced to Virginia Chambourcin wines, most of which I've found great. Likewise I don't typically like most White wines, but the Viogniers from Virginia have typically been to my taste.

More importantly, over the last few years I've gotten to appreciate wines that I may not like on their own, but pair well with certain foods and round out the flavor profile, vs. wines I can just sit with and drink.

The truth is the difference between good and bad wine is not some pretentious expert's objective ranking, but whether you like it or not.

For the record, my three favorite wines at the moment are:

Penfolds Koonunga Hill Shiraz Cabernet - Australia - $10

Cantina Zaccagnini Montepulciano d’Abruzzo - Italy - $12

Santa Rita Cabernet Reserva - Chile - $10

All go well with various foods or just by themselves. And yes I steer towards full-bodied reds.

But context can be just as important, I've also enjoyed cheap house wine while eating just as cheap food at local family eateries in Italy. I probably wouldn't buy that wine, but in that milieu it just "worked".

One rule of thumb I like to use when selecting from wines I don't know is that generally, a deeper punt (the indentation on the bottom of the bottle) on the bottle leads to wines I like better -- it's supposed to help with collecting sediment before pouring. But of course there's always exceptions. Excelsior (South Africa) makes some stupid cheap ($6-7) but pretty good wines with a twist off top and a shallow punt.

There are more "fashionable" wines I just don't like. I've yet to meet a California Pinot Noir I liked for example (the central wine in the movie Sideways).

Just try lots of wines, get a feel for the flavors, start to catalog which ones you like and don't like and you'll eventually develop your own taste. There's no shortage of wines to try, and there's thousands of under $10 bottles you can experiment with.

Just go with that and have fun.

eob• 13 years ago

As a native Virginian, I can tell you we are proud of our Viogniers -- it's one of the kinds we do best!

bane2• 13 years ago

Growing up in NoVA, I never really cared for the local wines, but I was always trying Cabs and the occasional white. Popular wines to the public, but just not very good to grow in the wet Virginia climate.

I don't typically like many whites, but I'm really blown away with Viogniers that grow here. They really are rather spectacular. For my money, I can't think of another white I've had anywhere with as wonderfully complex a flavor.

If you haven't tried them, Virginia Chambourcins are also really excellent for the most part and really well suited to the climate.

Surio• 13 years ago

It is a book excerpt from 2011 - the actual book is very well written and documents a lot of cognitive biases.

zeteo3• 13 years ago

I was with him up till this:

>Vodka, for instance, has no flavor

Maybe not if you're doing shots, but on the rocks / straight definitely has flavors. Personally I dislike some expensive brands, and for the one that I like best I don't even like the branding.

talmand6• 13 years ago

I don't drink vodka but I'm curious.

Does it have flavors from the natural creation process or is it added in at some point? From the various flavor vodkas I've seen I've always assumed any flavor is added and not a part of the actual process.

zeteo3• 13 years ago

Vodka can be made from grain, potatoes or even grapes and the distillation process is somewhat different among producers. I'm not saying the resulting flavor variation is huge, but after a while you start to notice it.

john_fushi• 13 years ago

He probably did not express himself correctly. Good vodka is supposed to have a flavor as neutral as possible.

abraininavat2• 13 years ago

I have no doubt there are all kinds of "flavors" in your gallon jug of Popov.

zeteo3• 13 years ago

Hey buddy, just because you don't get along well with vodka doesn't mean everyone else is a drunkard. Thanks

twoodfin• 13 years ago

A friend of mine used to run blind themed wine tastings: Each of us would bring a Barolo, say. They'd go into numbered brown paper bags and we'd taste, make notes, rate, then reveal and taste some more. Typically these 8-10 wines would range from $25-$200/bottle, and other than the host we'd have no real idea of the selection until they'd been revealed. We'd typically intermix some suitable "matching" small plates so we could try the wines with and without food.

From a half dozen or so of these, my anecdotal conclusions: A good percentage of expensive wines are either very difficult to enjoy or flatly bad. On the other hand, the pre-reveal consensus winners for the night were very rarely bottles costing less than $40-50, and often were among the most expensive.

My guess is that if you asked two expert sommeliers to pair six wines with two six course meals, and gave one a budget of $200 for six bottles and another a budget of $1000, almost anyone with a passion for drinking fine wine could distinguish the more expensive wines and would enjoy them more.

talmand6• 13 years ago

Reading through this article it was easy to see that this was all bunk.

There's no way you can tell me that Pepsi and Coca-Cola pretty much taste the same.

The difference between the two is immense. I suspect that this person didn't obtain a sample of properly bottled Coca-Cola from Atlanta GA. Don't go for that canned stuff in cheap aluminum, if it's not in a glass bottle then you lose the subtle flavors of the syrup, as the metal changes it over time. Don't fall for that notion that other bottling plants produce a superior product because of the differences in local water. Every drinker that enjoys a good soda knows that the best location of water for Coca-Cola is where it was created.

Although, New Coke did indeed taste much the same as Pepsi, but that was a misguided attempt to market to a group of people that don't appreciate a fine soda. This was quickly stopped and shouldn't be mentioned again.

In fact, the only location that competes are those fine people south of the border who still insist on using sugar as opposed to corn syrup. I too enjoy a sugar Coke from time-to-time but nothing beats a bottle from the home plant.

I took the Pepsi Challenge back when it was offered and I don't recall seeing this M and Q business. The sodas were offered to me in plain, white cups. That day, I purposely chose Pepsi so that the young person behind the counter would feel good about their work, since they were employed by Pepsi.

sigkill2• 13 years ago

In India you get Coke and Pepsi in bottles. They use cane sugar, and indeed you can tell the difference between coke, pepsi and thumbs up. Simply put in order from the most acidic to most sweet it's almost like Thumbs Up, Coke, Pepsi. I couldn't tell, but I've tried multiple blind tests on my family and friends and they could. After a few times with them you indeed notice a taste difference.

talmand6• 13 years ago

Yes, Pepsi tends to taste more sweet than Coke. While Coke tends to be a bit more carbonated feeling in the mouth, if that makes sense.

If you never had it, New Coke was sweeter like Pepsi, from what I remember.

By the way, what's Thumbs Up? Local brand?

bitwize• 13 years ago

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011 film) was an absolute shitfest. The critics gave it rave reviews. So was the book, and the critics gave that rave reviews.

I'm not sure how critical opinion shapes my evaluation of a film. (My decision of whether to go see it on the other hand, is so shaped; I generally won't go to see movies that have been universally shat on in the criticsphere.) Maybe I would have had less fun seeing TGWTDT had it not been so acclaimed?

noonespecial• 13 years ago

I tried mightily when I was young to figure out how to be a wine connoisseur and appreciate the "finer" wines. All I was ever able to do was start to recognize the ones I liked.

Sideways be damned, one of my favorites is still the $9 Merlot with the kangaroo on the side.

What I did find enjoyable is that with quite a small amount of experience, you can learn to find your way around this little chart(1). You might not be able to taste the "expensiveness", but you can learn in relatively short order to identify different kinds of wine.

(1) http://winefolly.com/review/different-types-of-wine/

Pinatubo• 13 years ago

I can't tell $5 wine from $50 wine, but I can tell the difference between red and blue M&Ms blindfolded. Trailer park connoisseur.

abraininavat2• 13 years ago

So many people insisting that they can tell the difference between what they like and don't like. No one ever questioned this. It follows from the definition of "like".

Why We Can't Tell Good Wine From Bad (2011)

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