Tag: wine
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Health and Alcohol Intake (Men, Women, Wine)
A longitudinal study of almost 20,000 U.S. women is showing signs that moderate alcohol consumption (“one or two alcohol beverages a day”) can lower the risk for obesity and inhibit weight gain: Over the course of the study, 41 percent of the women became overweight or obese. Although alcohol is packed with calories (about 150…
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More Psychology of Wine
Most psychology studies focusing on my good friend, wine, rely on applying the scientific method to the tasting of different wines, and this is done in one, relatively simple way: blind tasting. Finance blogger at Reuters, Felix Salmon, isn’t a fan of blind tasting, and after reading his eminently-quotable piece on the subject I tend to…
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The Psychology of Wine
On Vines and Minds is an excellent summary of the history and psychology of wine (pdf/html). Some topics of note: Music radically influences our purchasing habits: classical music increases the amount we’re willing to spend while characteristically French music sways us toward wine from that region (similarly for German music/wine). Colour affects the brain’s response…
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Menu Consultants (or: Tips to Hack Restaurants)
A short piece in Time profiling Gregg Rapp: a “menu engineer” who optimises restaurant menus to maximise profits. The first step is the design. Rapp recommends that menus be laid out in neat columns with unfussy fonts. The way prices are listed is very important. “This is the No. 1 thing that most restaurants get…
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Higher Price Makes Cheap Wine Taste Better
Obvious stated, still fascinating. Mind Hacks: Higher price makes cheap wine taste better: A new brain scanning study has supported what we’ve suspected all along, more expensive wine tastes better partly because we expect it to. […] What the volunteers didn’t know was that there were only three different wines, and two of them were…