The Weird World of Expensive Wine

[xoxoxoBruce]

The Weird World of Expensive Wine is a long article explaining how wine is priced by history, vintage, and scarcity.

But wait a second. Isn’t this all bullshit? A study has shown that tasters can’t even really tell the difference between a glass of red and a glass of white. Another study has shown that people don’t do better than a coin flip in guessing whether a wine is cheap or expensive. Another study has shown that people, unaware of a wine’s price, might actually enjoy more expensive wines less.

“We observe that people’s preferences in blind tastings are actually inversely correlated with price, i.e., on average, when they don’t know what they’re drinking, people prefer cheaper wines,” Goldstein said.

But maybe it’s not about the wine at all. Maybe you can actually taste the money. A 2008 paper found that telling people a wine cost more than it did resulted in more positive reviews from the drinkers. But, moreover, a higher faux price increased “blood-oxygen-level-dependent activity in medial orbitofrontal cortex, an area that is widely thought to encode for experienced pleasantness during experiential tasks.” More expensive wine may actually taste better, for literally no other reason than the price on its sticker.