With Darren and Adam away, former TRC host Jon Abrams joins Pat and Elan for an evening of skeptical musings. Pat leads off the show by answering a listner submitted question, whether or not you need to wash your fruits and vegetables before eating them. Jon then talks about wine competitions and the consistency of their results. Elan closes the show by tackling the controversial question of whether GIF is pronounced ‘gif’ or ‘jiff’.
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SHOW NOTES
Washing Fruits and Vegetables
Health Canada – Safe Handling of Fruits and Vegetables
FDA: Seven Tips for Cleaning Fruits, Vegetables
Napa Valley Register – Cleaning Bananas
University of Maine – Testing Commercial Washes
Wine Competitions
The Guardian: Wine-tasting: it’s junk science
An Examination of Judge Reliability at a major U.S. Wine Competition by Robert Hodgson (pdf)
Expensive wine and cheap plonk taste the same to most people
GIF Pronunciation
In the podcast, you mentioned an intriguing study about the effect of labels on wine discrimination. I went to the sources provided in the show notes (a wonderful resource, by the way) but could not find a specific citation. However in the Guardian article on wine junk science I did find what appears to be the source…only to find that the link to Brochet’s 2001 study only goes back to the “odor” article. Here’s the graf in question:
“… the Guardian article on wine junk science Hodgson isn’t alone in questioning the science of wine-tasting. French academic Frédéric Brochet tested the effect of labels in 2001. He presented the same Bordeaux superior wine to 57 volunteers a week apart and in two different bottles – one for a table wine, the other for a grand cru.”
I did note that in the Morrot “Odor” article there is a footnote to Brochet 1999 “Influence of the context on the perception of wine” which sounds like it could be the study in question, but that’s just a guess.
Do you have a source for the actual label experiment besides the passing reference in Morrot?
Thanks for the segment about wine competitions.
You guys did a far better job than the Freakonomics podcast on the same subject. You were fair, did your research and still produced an entertaining show without stooping to populist snob-bashing.