Official News page 9

REAL LIFE NEWS: PRICEY WINE IS A CON

by Hazed

In more alcohol-related news, it turns out that people can't tell the difference between cheap wine and the more expensive stuff.

A blind taste test carried out at the Edinburgh Science Festival saw 578 members of the public taste wine without knowing how much it cost. They tasted a range of red and white wine, including popular varieties such as merlot, shiraz, chardonnay and pinot grigio, as well as champagne.

The result was that they couldn't tell the difference between a wine costing £5 a bottle (about $8) and that priced up to six times as much.

I should point out that this was comparing cheap and expensive versions of the same variety of wine... a cheap pinot grigio with an expensive one, for example.

The participants were asked to say which they thought was cheap and which expensive, and by the laws of chance they should have been able to make a correct guess half of the time - and that's exactly what the level of accuracy was. This shows that the volunteers could not distinguish between the wines by taste alone.

The research, carried out by the University of Hertfordshire, shows that when buying wine people who go for the more expensive option are really just paying for the label.

Personally, when I buy wine I search out the varieties of grape I like (pinot grigio or sauvignon blanc) that are on special offer in my local supermarket - I rarely pay more than a fiver a bottle!

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13072745

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