Friday Fun

Hey Kari,

Trust you had a nice Thanksgiving holiday with family and friends.

At our extended family get together, I decided to perform an unscientific but fun little experiment in wine tasting. Some Asians are pretty sensitive to alcohol and I'm one of those. When I partake which isn't often, I can only take small amounts and thus am not sophisticated.

I put brown paper to cover the labels. The three wines to be tested were Trader Joe's "Two-buck chuck" Merlot. The Charles Shaw wine collection has been all the rage in California because it is often sold for a mere $1.99/bottle. This has spawned many urban legends about the origin of this wine. Critics are divided on how good it is. Here is a favorable review.

The second wine was an Italian Merlot that I bought for $15.99/bottle. The third was a Chilean Merlot that sold for $6.99/bottle.

Seven people took part in the survey and here were the results:

Rating:	Montes Merlot ($6.99)	Falesco Merlot ($15.99)	Charles Shaw Merlot ($1.99)
Like!!	4	2	1
Like!	2	3	2
Like	1	2	4

What do you think? Indeed, the sample size is too small, but I thought the results were interesting nonetheless. Perhaps this result might influence those hosting parties about how much money to spend on the wine they serve? Would be curious to know if any of our readership have tried similar "experiments?"

Cheers,
Rene

UPDATE: If you assign a first place vote 1 point, 2nd place vote two points and a third place showing 3 points, then the $6.99 wine wins with 11 points compared to the $15.99 which got 14 points beating out the $1.99 that garnered 17 points.