re: Piling on Wine - Is Wine bullshite? (link)

"sheeple" is one of those words that says more about the speaker than the people he's talking about.

It's definitely not just wine. The organic food industry lives on this as well. People think if its organic, it is healthy and also tastes better and more fresh. Give someone a juicy tomato from Walmart and tell them it's from your organic garden and see how they react.

We are all susceptible to it, but its not a personal attack against anyone. We rely on "if its expensive, it must be good" because we simply don't have the time or expertise to examine everything we buy. Which is fine, but marketers prey on that.

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We rely on "if its expensive, it must be good"

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I wonder if this is the old labor theory of value -- organic requires a lot more time and effort, so it must be superior. See also craft beer.

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Give someone a juicy tomato from Walmart and tell them it's from your organic garden and see how they react.

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Well this is just politeness. If you give me a tomato and say you grew it yourself of course I'm not going to bite into it and say "this tastes like shite." If you told me it'd come from Walmart I'd have no such compunctions.

I would like to see a taste test on this though.

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I hear differing opinions as to whether one tastes better than the other

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hence the reason I posted. I'll bet you dollars to donuts that properly finished, grain fed steaks will win over a strictly grass fed product 75% of the time or better.

As for the omega fat issue, I eat steak for pleasure and flavor...fat composition or content isn't on my radar when I want to indulge myself with a steak.

Lastly, as to whether cows fare better on grass as opposed to a grain finish diet...I don't know where to start...



I'm fooling...I do know where to start. Literally thousands of times I've stepped out of a truck and either shook a bucket of corn, or poured a sack of grain into a trough, and watched every damn animal within eyesight or ear shot run at breakneck speed (for a damn cow) through belly deep grass to get a mouthful of that grain. I'd love to know more about where this idea comes from.

Just how bigga boy are you...?

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I actually agree with the study.. Not because I have a problem with wine drinkers, but because I think humans are easily "fooled" by our preconceived beliefs.

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It appears that a lot of these studies are conducted by psychologists to show just how big a role perception plays with respect to making judgments. I don't think these psychologists are out to punk the so-called wine experts as much as they are trying to show that, in general, experts are fallible and many have track records that aren't any better than flipping a coin. Too often people blindly follow what "experts" say and pay them a lot of money for sub-par information/advice. I think one reason that psychologists study wine experts because a lot of people enjoy wine tasting; it's something they can relate to, whether they themselves enjoy tasting or have that snobby friend whom they can't stand drinking with.

In a different study, a bunch of radiologists were given a series of chest x-rays and told to give diagnoses based on these images. However some of the x-rays showed up multiple times (just like the wine study), and some of these radiologists gave different diagnoses each time the same x-ray image came up.

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But I'd bet if you told someone a $7 glass of wine costs $50, they would have a much higher opinion of it than if they knew the real price. It's fairly blatant to me.. We are all susceptible to this.

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This is very true. Another study involved two different bottles, one cheap and one expensive, but they both contained the same wine. This time the subjects were hooked up to brain scanners to measure brain-wave activity while tasting. The result was that brain-wave activity was more intense while the subjects were tasting the "more expensive" wine, although both wines were the exact same.

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I'd love to know more about where this idea comes from.

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The Internet. Haha I'm sure that it's propaganda from both PETA and farmers that are peddling grass-fed beef. Supposedly grain diets are awful for cows and really screw up their insides, and supposedly they would die premature deaths (due to their grain-heavy diets) if they weren't slaughtered. Evangelists of the Paleo Diet push the omega fat issue, though grain-fed beef still has relatively low levels of omega 6 when compared to other forms of meat.

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Supposedly grain diets are awful for cows and

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they would die premature deaths (due to their grain-heavy diets)

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Well, as to the latter statement, I fully agee with them. If all goes well, that steer's head and hyde will come off @ 60 days after he switches to a grain diet.

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This time the subjects were hooked up to brain scanners to measure brain-wave activity while tasting. The result was that brain-wave activity was more intense while the subjects were tasting the "more expensive" wine, although both wines were the exact same.

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This is fascinating. Next time a restaurant charges some ridiculous markup on wine, just think - they may actually be doing you a favor