 Are there wine experts? So are there people who claim to be better at at tasting and appreciating wine than say you or me? Well there there's certainly experts out there in terms of the level of training that they might have or or being a sommelier. You know certainly here at Brock University we have our cool climate enology and viticulture Institute. A lot of our students who are in that program know quite a lot about wine and when we have them come in as part of our participant pool they they sometimes those students come and participate and it's it's it's very easy to say oh well I'm an expert so what we in our research what we rely on is a wine knowledge questionnaire so we usually give this questionnaire to our participants to see an objective well it is an objective way of seeing how much knowledge somebody really has. But wine tasters like these these expert wine tasters who evaluate wines and give them scores out of a hundred that are used you know to put the medallions on the wine and things like that are they better at identifying and talking about wines than I am. That's a that's an interesting question I I know there are some studies that that show that experts really aren't experts and there are some studies that show that that they really are experts. I think at the end of the day the the scores that are given for for consumers again is used as a useful piece of information for the consumers and the the the judges or the the wine raiders as you call them they are probably more more knowledgeable than the average consumer so I think that that there is because they they do have training and they do have more expertise than the average consumer so I would say that that there is a basis for that. Having said that I think that it might also depend on the definition of of expertise so you know so I have two black wine glasses here and most people can't tell if there's you know when you lose those visual cues of the actual color if you're to sample these wines most people can't tell if the glass contains a red or a white. Now I haven't done an experiment like this with a trained sommelier but I'd like to one day and and you know so it's that that kind of thing where well you know can can a sommelier tell the difference they probably can but somebody like you I'm not sure I don't know if I can so we want to get our friends to run an experiment where they find out whether novices undergraduate students can tell the difference between wines on a whole bunch of levels can they tell the difference between red and white can they tell the difference between the grapes can they tell an expensive bottle from an inexpensive bottle without going into detail can you run through some of the things that they should really consider when they're designing a well controlled experiment to find a reasonably good answer to some of these questions. Well one way to in terms of looking at price having a you know having this wine in you know a brown paper bag so we don't get any other cues of where the wine is from and and what vintage it might be and and so on or if there might even be a price label on it we want to hide all that and we can you know pour from the brown paper bag into glasses so that again we're trying to if price is a variable you're looking at examining try to minimize any other influence that might affect the consumers judgment. If you can get a hold of these black glasses again we're trying to take away any other visual information maybe the respondent based on their own personal experience or something else that they might think that if it's a darker color red it might be more expensive whatever maybe if you want to kind of eliminate any of those other cues that they might use into their judgment try to isolate whatever variable it is to examine. If we did this properly using the experimental method we would probably take a sample of sommeliers a sample of maybe high knowledge consumers sample of low knowledge consumers and see after various trials so we might not just do one trial we might do several trials and with several different types of grape bridles so not just Pinot Noir versus Graversterminer but maybe also you know like you said a like a Malbec or Shiraz versus oak Chardonnay or something else so that over consistently over many trials and across different grape bridles with a representative sample for each category of consumer is there a statistically significant difference that would not be due to chance. If you guessed correctly by chance which is what you you said earlier well you know how do we know that I didn't just guess the correct one then it would be 50-50 that people said this was red and this was red it would be 50-50 right so what we're looking for for let's say you're in the group of you would say low okay well fair enough if we're looking at the group of low knowledge consumers we might see is the rate at which they're saying red 50-50 right or is it higher than 50-50 right so is it higher than chance and you use a statistical technique called chi-square which I won't get into to determine whether that probability or that rate of responding red for this one is is higher than 50-50 now we'll do that also for the high knowledge consumers we see is are they saying red for this one and red for this one 50% of the time or is it higher that they're saying red for the actual red one and we'll do the same thing for the Somalia group and that would be a proper test in to answer this question