Bourgogne Party

Posted on May 19, 2023 by Vova Ulianov

Updated on May 26, 2023

Some people want to see the world a better place. I didn’t watch the Ocean’s Twelve movie. But I guess they depicted something similar to what happened this Friday. Twelve people, eight magnificent bottles from Burgundy and only 90 minutes to taste them blindly, rate and attempt to guess. A bit stressful in a therapeutic way. Vova Ulianov knows how to finish this daunting week. And he sets a high bar when it comes to wine tasting events. Bravo.

Any rules? All bottles are served blind, and no one except the waiter knows the order. All wines are revealed at the end. The list of wines is known upfront. What? You say it’s easy? Believe it or not, only 25% of participants guessed at least half of the bottles.

Anyway, here is the list of wines in the order they were served.

Scores

Scores
	Wine #1	Wine #2	Wine #3	Wine #4	Wine #5	Wine #6	Wine #7	Wine #8
Vova	4.20	4.30	3.90	4.00	4.30	4.00	4.20	4.40
Diana	3.90	4.00	3.80	4.10	4.40	3.80	3.70	4.00
Serhii	4.00	4.20	4.20	4.10	4.10	4.00	4.30	4.00
Andrii	4.10	4.30	4.10	4.00	4.40	3.90	4.10	4.10
Viktoriya	4.10	4.00	4.20	4.00	4.30	3.70	4.00	4.20
Roman	4.10	4.20	4.00	4.30	4.20	4.10	4.00	4.20
Mykola	4.30	4.10	4.00	4.30	4.20	4.10	4.00	4.30
Anya	4.10	4.20	3.90	4.20	4.30	4.10	4.10	4.30
Maksym	4.15	4.28	3.95	4.20	4.55	4.44	4.50	4.25
David	4.30	4.20	3.70	4.00	4.10	4.30	4.00	4.30
Anastasiia	4.20	4.20	4.00	4.30	4.10	4.00	4.00	4.10
Boris	4.20	4.00	3.80	4.00	4.40	4.10	4.30	4.20

Results
	rms	sdev	favourite	price	QPR
Wine #1	4.1390	0.0121	2.00	5490.00	0.5389
Wine #2	4.1664	0.0118	1.00	2490.00	1.2395
Wine #3	3.9653	0.0221	0.00	2450.00	0.9259
Wine #4	4.1268	0.0152	1.00	1950.00	1.4883
Wine #5	4.2814	0.0189	4.00	10900.00	0.3381
Wine #6	4.0495	0.0366	0.00	5900.00	0.4354
Wine #7	4.1047	0.0383	1.00	2390.00	1.1687
Wine #8	4.1975	0.0144	3.00	2271.00	1.4253

How to read this table:

rms is root mean square or quadratic mean. The problem with arithmetic mean is that it is very sensitive to deviations and extreme values in data sets, meaning that even single 5 or 1 might ‘drastically’ affect the score.
sdev is standard deviation. The bigger this value the more controversial the wine is, meaning that people have different opinions on this one.
favourite is amount of people who marked this wine as favourite of the event.
price is wine price in UAH.
QPR is quality price ratio, calculated in as 100 * factorial(rms)/price. The reason behind this totally unprofessional formula is simple. At some point you have to pay more and more to get a little fraction of satisfaction. Factorial used in this formula rewards scores close to the upper bound 120 times more than scores close to the lower bound.