April 25, 2025, 1:24 p.m.
The Pudding's Latest: Wine Animals, Music DNA, and Reality TV Apologies
The Pudding
Hello subscribers to The Pudding, as well as our special supporters on Patreon.
We’ve got 3 new stories coming at you!
Can the animal on a wine label help us predict quality and price? We used ChatGPT Vision to identify animals on close to 1,500 wine labels to give it a try.
How sound is passed down over generations: Songs have a far more complex and concealed musical history, spanning genres, cultures, and even centuries.
The apologies of the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City: What can we learn from watching reality stars apologize?
Let’s jump into it!
The Pour-igin of Species
Have you ever bought a bottle of wine based on the label alone? Yeah, us too. Turns out, if a wine has an animal on the label, that can help you predict price and quality.
Collaborator Fox Meyer noticed some patterns after manually collecting data in New Zealand supermarkets and pitched us this idea. Using ChatGPT Vision, Jan and Fox categorized the labels into 16 animal groups and found which ones give you the best bang for your buck.
Read the essay
If you’re interested in more animal labels, give Karl a follow. He’s amassed a personal collection nearly five times as large as our dataset. And if you just like good wine, check out our friends over at Pour Decisions and The New Wine Review.
If you like this story, consider our other essays about wine and beer:
How Sonic DNA Connects Generations of Music
Along with collaborator Stephen Lurie, Jared traced how Edvard Grieg’s 1876 classic “In the Hall of the Mountain King” becomes the theme song to the 1980s cartoon Inspector Gadget, and then impacts modern music, generations later.
Music DNA is made up of borrowed beats, loaned lyrics, and multipurpose melodies. These are not you grandparents’ samples.
If you like this story, consider our other essays about generational music:
The Real Apologies of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City
Think you can’t learn anything from watching reality TV, think again.
We catalogued the good and bad apologies from each cast member over 94 episodes of the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City (hey, we’re messy, and we’re here for the drama).
In this piece, Michelle brings you the “receipts, proof, timeline, and screenshots,” and walks through why we’re all bad at apologies.
If you like this story, consider our other essays about TV:
Quick asides
Have a cool essay idea that you want to make? Check out our pitch guidelines.
Want to hire our team to create data-driven, visual stories? Visit our sister studio, Polygraph.
#stuff-we-love at The Pudding
Here are some special links shared on our Friends of The Pudding Slack (get access via Patreon)!
The History of Slipping on Banana Peels, Secret Base (video)
Excitable cells, Johannes Enevoldsen
Small Data, Krazam (video)
Thanks for reading!
The Pudding team