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Does Blind Tasting Work? Another Look

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2019

Kevin W. Capehart Open the ORCID record for Kevin W. Capehart [Opens in a new window]
Kevin W. Capehart*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, California State University, Fresno, CA, 93740; e-mail: kcapehart@csufresno.edu.
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Abstract

A study entitled “Does Blind Tasting Work? Investigating the Impact of Training on Blind Tasting Accuracy and Wine Preference,” published in the Proceedings issues of this journal, analyzed the effects of training on blind wine tasting accuracy (Wang and Prešern, 2018). I point out two issues with that study and reanalyze their data. I find that the effects of training on accuracy are small, even without controlling for self-selection bias that may produce upwardly biased estimates. To the extent training works, it does not seem to work well and it may only work as a selection device. (JEL Classifications: C91, D83, L66)

Keywords

blind wine tastingtrainingwine expertise
Type
Shorter Papers and Comments
Information
Journal of Wine Economics , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , August 2019 , pp. 309 - 320
Copyright
Copyright © American Association of Wine Economists 2019

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Footnotes

The author thanks Oxford University's Qian Wang for providing data from their study and answering questions about the design of their study. The author thanks without implicating the editor, an anonymous reviewer, and Elliott Morss for comments on earlier versions of this paper. The author declares that he has no relevant or material financial interests related to the research described in this paper. Data and code for replicating the results of this paper are available as supplementary files.

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