In the January/February 2025 issue [link is to PDF], Xiao-Li Meng explained how his acquisition of a wine club’s inventory led to a statistical taste-test by the Happy Team. Continuing the three-part series, he explains the particular links between this wine, some chocolate and quite a lot of whiskies… This article is based on Xiao-Li’s publication in a wine magazine, FONDATA, titled “Seeking simplicity in statistics, complexity in wine, and everything else in fortune cookies.” Enjoy the second glass from Xiao-Li’s bottle!
“Chocolate [wine] is happiness that you can eat [drink]…”
Astute readers may have wondered about a complication that I had deliberately delayed discussing. How could we serve wine to students under 21? The short answer is that we couldn’t and wouldn’t. The longer story requires another glass, and a box of chocolate, if you want to double your indulgence.
Wee Lee did remind me of the possibility of obtaining an education waver of the age limit. For a popular course on wine tasting that he took from a school of hotel management, the course was permitted to conduct wine tasting for underaged students as long as they promise to sip but not to swallow. Whereas I certainly should trust students’ sip-but-not-swallow promise no less than a president’s smoked-but-didn’t-inhale confession, I had no confidence that such a waiver would be granted to a statistical course, no matter how charming or persuasive its instructor might be. Besides, not everyone enjoys wine as aqua vitae, nor should alcohol be foisted upon anyone at risk of allergic or otherwise adverse reactions, physically or spiritually.
Fortunately, my creative Happy Team came up with a tasty solution: chocolate tasting for those who cannot or won’t touch alcohol. It is particularly fitting for the Happy Course, since, as Ursula Kohaupt said, “Chocolate is happiness that you can eat”. Indeed, although chocolate itself may prompt allergic reactions or guilty feelings, I have yet to meet a soul that finds it unsavory.
The creativity of the Happy Team did not stop there. Since “wine is happiness that you can drink” (h/t Ursula Kohaupt), why not double the happiness by devouring both concomitantly? This happy thought led to an experiment in chocolatier-ing and pedagogy, which in turn created the most unexpected and cogent teaching moment in my entire journey as a teacher.
The chocolatier-ing experiment was carried out by my teaching fellows, who learned from scratch about making chocolates, with and without a wine filling. The pedagogical experiment randomly mixed the two types of chocolates with 1/3 wine laced and 2/3 without, and then invited 20 students (who didn’t mind being doubly happy) each to devour one chocolate and report (via “clicker”, a personal response device in the pre-iPhone era) if it was filled with wine or not. The resulting percentages were displayed after everyone responded. The experiment was repeated for another 20 students, but with the percentages from all 40 students computed and displayed; and then again for another 20 students, with a total of 60 responses accumulated.
The experiment was intended to illustrate three key notions in statistical estimation. The first is survey sampling, that is, learning reliably about a large population from a small representative sample. The second is the law of large numbers, which may be as intimidating to some as the law of the state. But all it says in practical terms is that the more chocolates get consumed, the closer would be the reported percentage of wine injected with chocolates to 33.3% (which was unknown to the students). The third is the confidence interval, commonly constructed as the estimate plus or minus the margin of error; this corresponds to having 95% confidence, that is, in repeated experiments, the interval so constructed should cover the truth 95% of the time.
These theoretical notions assume that our experiments or data behave just as we design. The double-happiness experiment reminded us once more that theorized happiness could be real-life misery if we naively mix wishes with reality. When none of the first 20 students reported to have consumed a wine-centered chocolate, my panic kicked in. Even without understanding the confidence interval calculation, what would be the chance that none of the 20 students got a wine-filled chocolate when supposedly each would have 33.3% chance of enjoying such a dose of double happiness? It is about 3 per 10,000. Events with very small probabilities (such as winning a lottery or being struck by lightning) of course can happen on a lucky or unlucky day. But when they happen, a healthy dose of suspicion that something went wrong is always wise.
The first thing to check was if somehow, we hadn’t put in 1/3 of wine-filled chocolates or we hadn’t mixed them thoroughly with the unfilled ones. Upon double checking, both possibilities were ruled out, and we further mixed the chocolates before the second replication. But this did not correct the problem, and indeed by the time we had all 60 reports, only 17% of students reported having consumed wine-filled chocolates. The 95% confidence interval was (5%, 29%).
So what went wrong? The answer became clearer when some students complained that it was hard to tell if a chocolate was filled with wine or not. I immediately realized that I had been given a perfect case for teaching the concept of “control” in experimental design. A critical design flaw with the double-happiness experiment was that each student was only given one chocolate. Without a regular chocolate to serve as a control for the purpose of comparison, many students who got the wine-filled chocolates were unable to detect the extra wine flavor, given that the minuscule amount of wine was surrounded by an overpowering amount of chocolate. This is essentially the same reason why a clinical trial requires a control treatment, often a placebo, for the comparative purpose of determining if there is an extra efficacy attributable to the experimental treatment only.
An embarrassed teacher might have claimed that the flaw was by design for pedagogical purposes. And indeed, the students might not have been able to tell because my shift from discussing the sample survey to experimental design seemed seamless. But the truth is that I had failed to practice what I preached. The experiment was originally designed to illustrate a sampling survey, not experimental design, which was the subject for the wine and chocolate tasting events scheduled at the end of the semester. Nevertheless, good design principles apply everywhere. A simple pre-comparative tasting would have revealed the problem, but somehow it just never occurred to me. Ironically, retrospectively I felt fortunate to have been presented with the embarrassing design flaw, because if we had realized it earlier, we might have nixed the double-happiness experiment all together and lost the great pedagogical lesson. It was essentially impossible to find any wine sufficiently pungent to compete with the savory chocolate without a control comparison. But implementing a controlled experiment would have been too time consuming (and potentially confusing) in the amount of class time that we could allocate to it.
However, we ultimately did find a solution, after desperation compelled a change of spirit(s): bourbon, which probably was not entirely coincidental. Teaching the Happy Course opened up a club of whiskeys (or whiskies)—and this time they were all Zero-Buck Chucks—for me.
Whiskies: uisge beatha
For the purpose of reifying the modules even more for students, each of them ended with a speaker who had practiced what they preached or preached what they practiced. Since the module on wine and chocolate was the last one, its speaker also served as the grand finale speaker of the Happy Course. As such, we obviously wanted to find a most memorable one. At that time, being a newbie to wine, I knew too little about the wine community to come up with a single suggestion. However, years before I had come across an article on classifying whiskies by statistician and whisky connoisseur David Wishart. It was just a curiosity then, but the article stayed in my memory partially because any qualified statistician would wonder if the author was somehow related to the John Wishart of the Wishart distribution. Indeed, there was a rumor then that David was the son of John Wishart. This potential connection made it even more intriguing when I suggested that my teaching fellow Casey should invite him as the grand finale speaker. Casey quickly located his contact information, and his response to our invitation was equally swift, and positive.
As we excitedly anticipated his visit, something unexpected happened. Bottles of whiskies with all kinds of shapes and labels arrived at my office, daily, to a point that my department got worried and inquired about their sources. I had no idea other than that it must have something to do with David’s visit. Indeed, as we learned later, David called many distilleries and informed them of his upcoming visit and asked them to send me some samples. It was a clear testimony to David’s influence in the world of whiskies. I ended up receiving 40 bottles. At the time I had little idea about which was which. But I sensed the attractions that they held for whisky aficionados, especially when paired with David’s presentation. We therefore advertised the grand finale lecture as a general seminar, with a whisky testing to follow.
David’s lecture on December 7, 2010, gave an overview of a rich history of whiskies, from Medieval monks distilling beers into whiskies to Prohibition-era doctors prescribing whiskeys for medical purposes. It also introduced novices like me to the world of whisky making—I no longer had to pity myself for not understanding the peating process. Most importantly, David showed how he analyzed nearly 1000 tasting notes containing over 500 terms describing single malt whiskies. The analysis resulted in 12 cardinal flavors (Body, Spicy, Sweetness, Winey, Smoky, Nutty, Medicinal, Malty, Tobacco, Fruity, Honey, and Floral), a great demonstration of gleaning simplicity from complexity. This 12-flavor category, together with a five-point scale (not present, low hints, medium notes, definite notes, pronounced), enabled the clustering of Scottish whiskies into groups of similar ones, which “helps you choose a single malt whisky that suits your palate, not someone else’s”—the emphasis was David’s. (Much of his lecture was nicely summarized in his article on “The Flavour of Whisky” in Significance.)
The 40 bottles provided the most engaging post-seminar reception for many attendees, who got to test/taste David’s classifications. Of course, 40 bottles of fine whiskies couldn’t possibly be consumed over one post-seminar reception, even with many colleagues attending from other departments. Thanks to the longevity of whiskies, this engaging event was repeated multiple times in the subsequent two years until I was appointed dean of the graduate school of arts and sciences. These events clearly made an impression on their attendees, one of whom wrote to me that “I know how you became a dean: you bribed everyone!” You might not appreciate this inside joke if you are not in academia. Many faculty consider becoming a dean to be going over to the “dark side”, and hence a process necessitating bribes to seduce the wary. Hence it properly reminded me to replenish my free whisky club in order to “bribe everyone” to make my deanship a bit less dark.
By then, Casey had graduated and became an instructor herself, so naturally she took over the Happy Course when my schedule no longer permitted me to be its instructor. When she asked me to suggest a grand finale speaker, I told her to try David again. Beyond the self-serving replenishment need, I thought it would be particularly fitting for an arts-and-sciences dean to inject a bit of new holiday spirit(s) by organizing a history-and-science rich presentation, followed by a “tasting/testing what you just learned” holiday-season gathering. David responded to Casey’s invitation again most promptly, and the trip was confirmed right away partially because the time of the planned lecture (November 29, 2012) was just about a week before his two-year visa for the visit in 2010 would expire. Lo and behold, just like two years earlier, Casey started to receive bottles daily. But unlike me, Casey meticulously documented the bottles, reminding me how the collection might bribe even a conscionable soul.
The list of whiskies from David Wishart’s visit in November 2012: Smokehead (The Rock Edition); Gordon and McPhail Reserve (distilled 1975); Glengoyne 10 YO [10-year-old]; Aberlour 12 YO; The Balvenie 12 YO; two The Glenlivet 12 YO, a DoubleWood and a Signature; Laphroaig 10 YO; Powers Irish Whiskey 12 YO; Redbreast Irish Whiskey 15 YO; Ardmore; Scapa 16 YO; Tobermory 10 YO; Deanston 12 YO; Glennfiddich 12 YO; two Tullibardine, Aged Oak Edition and Old Vine Zinfandel Finish; two The Tyrconnell Irish Whiskey, 10 YO and ?? YO; Bruichlladdich 10 YO; Connemara Irish Whiskey; two Cutty Sarks, a Storm and a 10 YO; two Ben Nevis, a McDonald’s Celebrated Traditional Ben Nevis, and a 10 YO; four The Macallans, 10 YO, 12 YO, 18 YO, and 25 YO; two Highland Parks, 12 YO and 18 YO; Bunnahabhain 12 YO; and a Ledaig 10 YO.
David’s 100-slide presentation on November 29, 2012, was an eye-opener to many who didn’t expect that the nerdy subject of statistics could be this intoxicating. The subsequent tasting event, the dean’s seasonal toast, was a mouth-opener to some who were there initially only for hors d’oeuvres. A sip or two of Macallan 25 was all it took to change their conviction (or claim), though I worried that soon they would also get a taste of regression towards the mean.
Completely unexpected was the fact that the tasting event turned out to be far more romantic than planned. Just as the Macallan 25 was disappearing rapidly (before many bottles were touched), so did all the lighting—apparently there was a power outage. A great benefit of being a dean was the readily available help. Several staff members immediately went to Harvard Square to buy candles and lanterns. The tasting was in a graduate common room with a grand piano, and an extremely talented student attending from my department was also a concert pianist. When the mellifluous Chopin meets a mature Macallan, surrounded by candles and lanterns, the romantic feeling is almost mandatory.
Word got out quickly that the dean was a whisky aficionado, and that the dean’s seasonal toast should not be missed. The 5pm appointments at the dean’s office also became the most popular one, because a whisky club was erected underneath the dean’s desk (and fortunately, no thermodynamic knowledge was required this time). Some on the waiting list tried to convince me that since the graduate school aims to attract talent globally, it is always 5 o’clock somewhere. Unconvinced, I managed to pass on a few half-bottles to my successor five years later. But that also meant that the dean’s seasonable toast in the years in between were fueled by something else. Wine, that is.
Xiao-Li dedicates this edition of the XL-Files to the memory of David Wishart, who died in 2020. You can read a little more about David at https://wishart.org/index.php/notablewisharts/david-wishart-1943/