In 2011 a team of researchers from the University of Padua in Italy and Macquarie University in Australia compared the discriminatory abilities of trained sommeliers to amateur wine drinkers and to sommeliers-in-training. It was a brutal test—the tasters were exposed to fifty aromas, ten of which were common household smells like shoe polish or garlic, and forty were wines. And of the wines, they were trying to specifically identify just ten Italians—five red and five white. The other thirty were there to distract their noses. Oh, and they weren’t allowed to drink the wine—just sniff. Like I
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