Here’s a summary of the story:
The experiment was run on California Cab, “of the quality one might serve at a dinner party amongst good friends, pleasantly palatable but not lastingly memorable.”
The researcher asked a party host to invite seven people to taste two wines and then to stick around for a party. He said a friend was considering buying several cases of wine, was down to the two choices, and wanted to find out which was preferred. The wines were in carafes so there were no labels, capsules, etc. In other words, it was all down to simple tasting.
But there was a trick!
Both carafes contained the same wine.
But one wine had been the target of intense meditation!
The researcher contacted a local spiritual organization for assistance. At home, he poured the wine into identical carafes and then put each of those in a styrofoam sleeve and drove to the meditation center. He took the two carafes into the house and put them in different rooms.
The groups would have a discussion and then close the meeting with meditation. When it was time to meditate, the researcher fetched one of the carafes, took it out of the styrofoam sleeve, and put on a table or chair in the middle of the room. The group was told: “Please dedicate your meditation to holding the intention that this bottle of wine is improved during the course of the meditation.”
The wine was then subject to 20-30 minutes of intense meditation.
After the meditation, the researcher thanked the meditators, put the carafe back in its sleeve, and put it back in the car, but he separated from the control carafe by placing one in the front seat and the other in the back seat.
This rigor and attention to detail is what makes the experiment so compelling.
The meditation sessions were usually Wednesday or Thursday and the tasting was Friday or Saturday.
The person hosting the party was not told about the meditation sessions and didn’t know which wine was treated and which was the control.
Over four years, he organized twelve wine tastings. In eleven of the tastings, the majority of tasters preferred the treated wine.
Clearly there are some flaws in the study. For example, we don’t know if the wine would be better if it were consumed directly after the meditation, or whether the thought waves had to integrate over a day or so.
And we don’t know if it would work with French wine.
If you want to read the original, it requires a subscription or $12 for the article.
https://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307(18)30066-1/fulltext
Water, Wine and the Sacred, an Anthropological View of Substances Altered by Intentioned Awareness, Including Objective and Aesthetic Effects
This paper discusses the ancient anthropological linkage of water and wine with sacred rituals after these substances have been the focus of nonlocal perturbation. The paper reports the changes produced can be both physical, as well as a subjective aesthetic reaction arising when individuals have a sensorial interaction with such treated substances. In making this argument the paper presents and discusses research done by others, as well as the author including reporting the results of a 12 part series of experiments in which groups of seven people tasted wine from one 750 ml bottle that had been decanted into two identical 375 ml carafes. The histories of the carafes were the same except that one, before the tasting, had been the focus of intentioned awareness by meditators, while the other was a control. Twelve sessions were conducted, 11 resulted in a majority preferring the treated wine, and one resulted in a tie. Using an exact binomial test, the p-value is Math Eq. Therefore, with 95% confidence we can say that the probability that a majority would prefer the treated wine is at least 0.76. The paper in its conclusion discusses the implications of the totality of this research.