Knowledge training
Wine Cognition
Your weekly practice.
Spaced repetitionCalibrationMastery map
Vinademy Mind Studio.
Wine Knowledge & Cognitive Training
An adaptive trainer to practise wine like you practise a language: questions with confidence levels, flashcards, causal chains and blind cases that adjust to your level and schedule your reviews. No glass needed, in ten minutes.
Without a glass10-minute sessionsEssential and ExpertFree
Mind StudioSession 03 · 7/10
LevelEssentialExpert
Infer · Blind case
High acidity, moderate alcohol, grapefruit and wet stone. Which origin best explains the evidence?
- Uco Valley, high altitude
- Sancerre, Loire
- Marlborough
Confidence
Submit
Your mastery map
78%Accuracy
12Reviews
5Streak
Today's reviewsMoleculesFermentation
DetectInferExplain
Fig. 01Adaptive session · mastery map
Train your judgement.
Training
Short sessions · a result to share
Quick challenge
Wine IQ Challenge
How well do you really know wine?
Start
Perception training
Blind Tasting
Can you identify the wine?
Start
Coming soon
Decision training
Wine Master Strategy
Can you take a wine to market?
Vinademy Labs
Train your judgement, not just your memory.
You don’t just come here to read about wine, but to retrieve, compare and justify what you know about it, in short sessions designed around proven principles of cognitive psychology.
Each session combines questions with confidence levels, cards that ask you to explain before flipping them, causal chains to sequence and blind cases where you choose between competing hypotheses. The system records your answers, adjusts the difficulty to your level and schedules reviews for your next visits.
56% vs 42%
Recall after one week when practising by answering questions, compared to re-reading the same text.
Roediger & Karpicke, 2006
78 %
Learned to recognise styles better with mixed examples. The same 78% believed that grouping them was equal or better.
Kornell & Bjork, 2008
White → red
Simply dyeing a white wine red with an odourless food colouring is enough for 54 oenology students to describe it using red wine aromas. What we see changes what we believe we smell.
Morrot, Brochet & Dubourdieu, 2001
Why tasting is trained this way
Tasting expertise is, above all, organised knowledge.
When comparing expert tasters with beginners, the difference is rarely in olfactory sensitivity. In the study by Parr, Heatherbell and White (2002), experts and novices showed comparable sensitivity, but experts were better at identifying and recognising wine-relevant odours. The advantage lay in memory and knowledge.
Perception can also be trained, though in a very specific way: following targeted sensory training, professionals’ detection thresholds dropped only for the compounds practised (Tempere et al., 2012). And what we know or expect conditions what we perceive: colour alone is enough for a white wine to be described as a red (Morrot et al., 2001).
That is why we separate the work. Labs trains the conceptual and reasoning side: which molecule, which process, which cause, and how to separate evidence from interpretation. The perceptual part is trained with wine in the glass, in our courses and Systematic Tasting sessions.
Applied cognitive sciences
Six principles, one practice.
These are not gamification tricks. They are techniques backed by decades of research. The review by Dunlosky et al. (2013), which evaluated ten study techniques, ranked retrieval practice and distributed practice as the most useful, far ahead of re-reading or highlighting.
01
Retrieval practice
The evidence
Attempting to remember consolidates knowledge more than re-studying. One week later, those who had practised with questions remembered 56% of the content, compared to 42% for those who had re-read it. Retrieval also outperformed concept mapping.
In the Labs
Each exercise asks you to answer before seeing the solution: questions, cards and causal chains. The correct answer never appears first.
Roediger & Karpicke, 2006 · Karpicke & Blunt, 2011
02
Spaced repetition
The evidence
Spreading reviews over time improves long-term recall compared to massing them. The optimal interval between reviews increases the longer you wish to retain what you have learned.
In the Labs
Each concept has its own schedule. If you get it wrong, it returns in the next session; if you answer correctly with confidence, the interval lengthens. When you return, the session prioritises what needs reviewing.
Cepeda et al., 2006 · Cepeda et al., 2008
03
Interleaved practice
The evidence
Mixing categories instead of grouping them helps you learn to distinguish between them, even if it feels more difficult. With painting styles, most learned better with interleaved examples and yet believed the opposite.
In the Labs
A session mixes perception, vineyard, fermentation, texture, molecules and reasoning—just as it happens in a real glass—and avoids two consecutive questions from the same module. If you want focus, you can choose a specific module.
Kornell & Bjork, 2008 · Dunlosky et al., 2013
04
Desirable and adaptive difficulty
The evidence
Conditions that make learning more effortful at the time, such as retrieval, spacing or interleaving, typically produce more durable learning. Elo-type models, like those used in chess, allow for the simultaneous estimation of the learner’s level and the difficulty of each question.
In the Labs
A model estimates your level in each module and selects questions you can solve with effort: around seven out of ten within your reach, not all of them. Your mastery map shows this level and highlights where you have the most room for improvement.
Bjork & Bjork, 2011 · Pelánek, 2016
05
Confidence calibration
The evidence
Knowing how much you know is a skill in itself, and people tend to overestimate their accuracy. Errors made with high confidence, once corrected, are corrected especially well (the hypercorrection effect), though they may reappear over time if not reviewed.
In the Labs
Before checking an answer, you declare your confidence. At the end, you see your calibration—confidence versus actual accuracy—and errors return in the next session to consolidate the correction.
Lichtenstein, Fischhoff & Phillips, 1982 · Butterfield & Metcalfe, 2001 · Butler, Fazio & Marsh, 2011
06
Explaining and reasoning with hypotheses
The evidence
Explaining in your own words why something is the case improves understanding (self-explanation). And seeking only data that confirms your first idea is one of the best-documented reasoning biases: confirmation bias.
In the Labs
Cards ask you to explain the concept before flipping them. In blind cases, you compare three hypotheses and see how each piece of evidence changes their probability, using a didactic Bayesian model.
Chi et al., 1994 · Nickerson, 1998
The Vinademy method
Detect → Infer → Explain.
It is the same method we use in the masterclass, the programme and the tasting sessions. Labs turns it into a habit: each type of exercise trains one of the three steps.
01
Detect
What we perceive.
Separating evidence from interpretation. What is in the glass is evidence; what requires deducing something not present in it is a hypothesis.
- Classifying phrases: evidence or hypothesis?
- Perception questions and sensory biases
- Thresholds, interactions and adaptation
02
Infer
What could have caused it.
Connecting each observation with its possible causes in the vineyard and the winery, and keeping several hypotheses open at once.
- Causal chains to sequence
- Blind cases with three hypotheses
- Vineyard, fermentation and molecule questions
03
Explain
Why we believe it.
Defending the causal chain and the conclusion with an honest level of confidence, and revising it when the evidence does not support it.
- Self-explanation cards
- Declared confidence for each answer
- Calibration: confidence vs accuracy
Part of Vinademy Labs
Three ways to train: what you know, what you perceive and how you decide.
Rigour
What Labs is, and what it is not.
It is
- Conceptual and reasoning training for wine, in short and frequent sessions.
- Practice built on learning techniques with solid, replicated evidence.
- A question bank reviewed against oenology and sensory analysis literature: each question is documented with its source.
- A supplement to our courses and group tastings.
It is not
- A substitute for tasting wine: smell and taste are trained with a glass.
- An exam or a certification.
- A profile that leaves your browser: without an account, your progress is saved only on your device.
- A predictor of real origin: blind cases use a didactic probabilistic model.
The evidence cited comes primarily from research on learning and memory in general, and from studies on tasting expertise. Its application to wine in an adaptive trainer is our design proposal, and we continue to measure how it performs.
Sources
- Butler, A. C., Fazio, L. K. and Marsh, E. J. (2011). The hypercorrection effect persists over a week, but high-confidence errors return. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18, 1238–1244.
- Butterfield, B. and Metcalfe, J. (2001). Errors committed with high confidence are hypercorrected. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27(6), 1491–1494.
- Bjork, E. L. and Bjork, R. A. (2011). Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning. In Psychology and the Real World. Worth Publishers.
- Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T. and Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380.
- Cepeda, N. J., Vul, E., Rohrer, D., Wixted, J. T. and Pashler, H. (2008). Spacing effects in learning: A temporal ridgeline of optimal retention. Psychological Science, 19(11), 1095–1102.
- Chi, M. T. H., de Leeuw, N., Chiu, M.-H. and LaVancher, C. (1994). Eliciting self-explanations improves understanding. Cognitive Science, 18(3), 439–477.
- Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J. and Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58.
- Karpicke, J. D. and Blunt, J. R. (2011). Retrieval practice produces more learning than elaborative studying with concept mapping. Science, 331, 772–775.
- Kornell, N. and Bjork, R. A. (2008). Learning concepts and categories: Is spacing the “enemy of induction”? Psychological Science, 19(6), 585–592.
- Lichtenstein, S., Fischhoff, B. and Phillips, L. D. (1982). Calibration of probabilities: The state of the art to 1980. In Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge University Press.
- Morrot, G., Brochet, F. and Dubourdieu, D. (2001). The color of odors. Brain and Language, 79(2), 309–320.
- Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2(2), 175–220.
- Parr, W. V., Heatherbell, D. and White, K. G. (2002). Demystifying wine expertise: Olfactory threshold, perceptual skill and semantic memory in expert and novice wine judges. Chemical Senses, 27(8), 747–755.
- Pelánek, R. (2016). Applications of the Elo rating system in adaptive educational systems. Computers & Education, 98, 169–179.
- Roediger, H. L. and Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255.
- Tempere, S., Cuzange, E., Bougeant, J. C., de Revel, G. and Sicard, G. (2012). Explicit sensory training improves the olfactory sensitivity of wine experts. Chemosensory Perception, 5(2).
A few minutes a day
