Free Everything Is Bullshit: The Greatest Scams on Earth Revealed by Zachary Crockett Page B

sign that wine snobs are full of
it. For wine insiders, it’s easy to retreat to the safety of wine tastings,
where the value of fine wine is assumed, and to retort that these studies
somehow misunderstand wine. Neither response is quite right.
    To discern why, it helps to understand what people mean when
they say “taste.” Taste buds detect the sweet, sour, bitter, umami, or salty
qualities of food and drink, but there is not a sum of each taste that equals
the taste of fried chicken or fresh strawberries. Information from all five
senses informs our perception of taste.
    This is imminently apparent to anyone eating a meal with a cold and sinus congestion; smell and taste are closely
linked. The information provided by senses other than our taste buds can make a
surprisingly significant impact on how we perceive the taste of wine, and the
same is true for other foods and beverages.
    Take color, which can trick us into tasting a nonexistent flavor
in food in the same way it tricked the wine students tasting white wine dyed
red. As the New York Times reports in an article on food coloring:
    When tasteless yellow coloring is added to vanilla pudding,
consumers say it tastes like banana or lemon pudding. And when mango or lemon
flavoring is added to white pudding, most consumers say that it tastes like
vanilla pudding. Color creates a psychological expectation for a certain flavor
that is often impossible to dislodge.
    Sight is crucial to identifying common foods. At Dans Le Noir, a restaurant that employs blind waiters to
serve customers expensive dinners in a pitch black restaurant, diners are not
told the menu. An investor in the restaurant explains that “After dinner we
show them photos of what they ate and the menu, and they can’t believe it. They
might get the difference between carrots and peas, but they confuse veal and
tuna, white and red wine.”
    There are many other examples of how information garnered from
our other senses, including higher-order information, impacts our sense of
taste. The surrounding environment makes a difference — we get more
pleasure from food when surrounded by soft lighting. So too do our
expectations: our experience with similar foods in the past, branding and
packaging, and price tags all influence the taste and enjoyment we derive from
food and drink.
    This means that our enjoyment of good food is just as
susceptible to trickery as wine. Fish markets, restaurants, and sushi joints
present less expensive fish as their more prestigious (and supposedly better
tasting) peers unnoticed every day. This past year, Europeans happily ate up
meatballs containing horse meat , only expressing
outrage when regulators revealed its presence.
    Given the huge variation in wine prices, people react strongly
to findings that price has no correlation with pleasure in blind tastings. Yet
what these studies really tell us is that our idea of taste as a constant, even
if appreciated in subjectively different ways, is a fiction. Due to the
complicated way that we experience taste — as an amalgamation of
information from all five senses, our expectations, and how we think about what
we are tasting — taste is easily manipulated.
    True experts are less easily tricked. Master sommeliers have an
incredible ability to identify wine; to earn their certification, they must
pass an exam in which they identify a wine’s vintage from a blind tasting. To
see someone with the skill of a master sommelier taste is a remarkable
performance. She recites characteristics of the wine to identify the type of
grape, then the region, and finally the exact vineyard and date of production.
Given anecdotes like master French judges mistaking French and Californian
wines, however, the level of knowledge needed to be immune to trickery is
likely beyond reach of almost the entire market. Even when they start with
substantial industry experience, aspiring master sommeliers spend years doing
nothing but blind taste tests and