Wine expertise
By sylvie | January 3, 2010
Thursday morning I got mail at work, which turned out to be an unsolicited book. As I noted on Twitter, I was somewhat confused by this.
OK, wtf? I just got a book on wines (what a coincidence) from a publishing company becoz of my blog. To review I guess. Why?
A book on wines for a blogger who writes about research in HCI? Talk about a strange choice.
I took the book home to read it since I am interested in wines, but I had no intention of blogging about it. So what changed my mind? Well, it turns out that the first few chapters of the book present the results from a bunch of research studies looking at whether people (both novices and experts) enjoy the same wines when they have no access to the information about the wines (in other words, blind taste tests). I found it particularly interesting since I’m thinking about expertise these days.
The rest of the book presents cheap wines, but since this is aimed at an American (USA) public, it’s of little use to a Canadian such as me.
So if you want a summary of research on wine expertise, you could grab this book. Although you could also just go do a search on Psychological Abstracts, which would save you the $15 this book would cost you.
The book: The Wine Trials 2010, Robin Goldstein & Alexis Herschkowitsch, Fearless Critic Media, 2010.
I got it for free.
