I'm always down for this kind of science. We actually did a similar experiment with rum a while ago, I was of the opinion that spirits denatured a little after they'd been open a while and didn't taste as nice, others disagreed and so we did an experiment.
Two bottles of rum were bought and stored for several months, one unopened and one opened with a modest amount imbibed from it. Then a brand new one was bought as a control. For each round of testing, while the rest of us were out of the room we had a volunteer pour out and label a sample per bottle per tester and record the labels before randomizing their order. Each tester then tried each of their samples and wrote down which bottle we thought the sample had come from. Afterwards we cross referenced the guesses with the original samples.
The end results were inconclusive but indicated that there wasn't much if any difference. My new hypothesis is that the effect I observed was actually due to the coke I was using as a mixer getting stale but much more data is needed.
Two bottles of rum were bought and stored for several months, one unopened and one opened with a modest amount imbibed from it. Then a brand new one was bought as a control. For each round of testing, while the rest of us were out of the room we had a volunteer pour out and label a sample per bottle per tester and record the labels before randomizing their order. Each tester then tried each of their samples and wrote down which bottle we thought the sample had come from. Afterwards we cross referenced the guesses with the original samples.
The end results were inconclusive but indicated that there wasn't much if any difference. My new hypothesis is that the effect I observed was actually due to the coke I was using as a mixer getting stale but much more data is needed.