You Are So Full of It

(Via Felix Salmon again)

Cracked has published a list of the 6 most statistically full of sh!t professions.

Here's just a sample:

#5. Wine Tasters

One thing we all can be sure about is that people that make their living writing about wine must be able to sniff out differences between wines much better than us plain ordinary folk.

Sure, Joe Consumer actually likes cheaper wines better, but that's because Joe Consumer is a stupid Philistine. The experts can tell the difference between a 2006 and 2007 Stag's Leap Cabernet Sauvignon in their sleep because everyone knows 2006 was a pedestrian year for Napa Valley reds.

Hell, they are so good they can tell the difference between two bottles of the same wine. In one experiment, wine experts were given two bottles of the same wine, only one was labeled a "vin de table" (France's version of "Night Train") and one was labeled a "grand cru" (top-rated vineyard since 1855). Want to guess what happened?

According to the article: "Whereas the tasters found the wine from the first bottle 'simple,' 'unbalanced,' and 'weak,' they found the wine from the second 'complex,' 'balanced,' and 'full.'" Not only were their tasting skills put to shame, it didn't even occur to them that nobody buys a $40-plus bottle of wine for a university experiment.

Not only can professional wine tasters be convinced that the same bottle of wine was both award-winning and hobo juice, but they could even be convinced that the same bottle was both red and white with the cunning use of food coloring.

Hilarious. The other listings (while not completely discredited) richly deserve the beating they get.