New Masters of Wine... and their papers?
Yes, it's that time of year again, I think. Wait, what time is it? Ah yes, it's time for a new batch of Masters of Wine! With the announcement came their bios as well as a one liner about their research papers wherein one in particular stood out, "Influences of classical music on the perception of a Brut non-vintage Champagne."
Given this quite broad theme for papers now, I'm going to propose someone pick up the following topics:
"Why do some people just not like Sherry?"
"Does drinking wine make people a pompous ass, or is it that pompous asses drink wine?"
"What do certain tattoos say about wine-drinking tendencies?"
"Is there such a thing as drinking too much wine?"
British losing their drinking edge
Apparently, it's come to pass. After too many months without pubs open where you can have a casual evening tossing back six pints before heading home for a whiskey, the British are having trouble drinking as much as they want to. We all knew heavy drinking was going to be a potential victim of the pandemic, the warning signs where there, but we just didn't know it would come after only a year of lockdowns.
Airplane wine lands, in your home
"These were not wines we'd buy. [...] They were wines at the bar of a corporate event." If that description whets your appetite, then you'll be happy to know that American Airlines (the United States's Worst Airline for 2020) is now offering their mid-shelf wines for home consumptions. Oh yes.
Massive tasting study confirms that organic wine tastes better
A highly-scientific, double-blind study pitted wines made from the same vineyard, in the same year, by the same winery against one another. Grapes were subjected to "conventional" vineyard treatments to make one wine and then they were cleaned grape by grape and converted into organic grapes to make another set of wines. After tasting thousands of these wines (including placebo wines made from dyed stale beer) a highly-trained tasting panel of the most intolerable wine critics in the world has now certified that the organic wines do indeed "taste better".
Ha ha, no they didn't. Basically, they ran 200,000 tasting scores and found out that organic or biodynamic wines scored a bit higher by critics which tells you nothing as it's not comparing the same wines made under the same conditions nor by the same core group of critics. Ah... yes, there's also the fact that all but one of the sources they used don't even taste blind so it could even be that they saw the label and thought, "Huh, organic, must be better, 99 points!" I'm pro-no potentially-toxic shit in the vineyard, but I'm also pro-doing quantitative, replicable studies. Maybe that's just me.