Classic Wines

Money No Object? Oh But It Is...

Here's a bit of fun. Granted this is probably nothing we don't already know, but it is always better to have it as a result of some cold, hard data courtesy of our buddies at Stanford.

Here is the study:

The researchers recruited 11 male Caltech graduate students who said they liked and occasionally drank red wine. Guess you need that to start, eh? The subjects were told that they would be trying five different Cabernet Sauvignons (we can only assume Napa,) identified by price, to study the effect of sampling time on flavor (clever.) In fact, only three wines were used - two were tasted twice. The first wine was identified by its real bottle price of $5 and by a fake $45 price tag. The second was marked with its actual $90 price and by a fictitious $10 tag. The third wine, which was used to distract the participants, was marked with its correct $35 price, call it a control. A flavor-neutral water was also given in between wine samples to rinse the subjects' mouths. The wines were given in random order, and the students were asked to focus on flavor and how much they enjoyed each sample.

And the results:

The participants said they could taste five different wines, even though there were only three, and added that the wines identified as more expensive tasted better. And what kills me is that this might technically be correct. How? The researchers found that an increase in the perceived price of a wine did lead to increased activity in the brain because of an associated increase in taste expectation. The results, while puzzling, actually make sense. The brain encodes pleasure because it is useful for learning which activities to repeat and which ones to avoid, and good decision making requires good measures of the quality of an experience. So if you have had a lot of bad wines that were cheap, and some good ones that were expensive, naturally your brain would make the association. But the brain is also a noisy environment, and thus, as a way of improving its measurements, it makes sense to add up other sources of information about the experience. In particular, if you are very sure that an experience is good (perhaps because of previous experiences), it makes sense to incorporate that into your current measurements of pleasure. Most people believe, quite correctly, that price and the quality of a wine are correlated, so it is therefore natural for the brain to factor price into an evaluation of a wine's taste.

So what does this mean? Well the wineries are ecstatic. Their wine actually tastes better to you and I simply because of the price, if it is in fact, expensive.

We've all seen it, if not done it, we look at an unknown bottle of wine, and upon finding that it costs $125 bucks, we say to ourselves, "Man, that must be good." And this study tells us why we tend to do that.

Thanks to the Stanford News Service website at: http://news-service.stanford.edu for portions of this article.