I know a lot of people who like wine. I like it, too — but sometimes shake my head at the prices involved in enjoying vino.
So I was amused recently to read this story, on how the price people pay for wine affects their perception of its value.
Basically, some California Institute of Technology scientists told people they were giving them five wines to taste, showed them five different prices, and then took MRI scans of the tasters to watch how the pleasure centers of their brains lit up to indicate how much they were enjoying the wines they tasted.
What they didn’t tell them was that they were only giving them three different wines, not five, and they were showing them the $90 bottle of wine both at $90 and at $10, and giving them the $5 bottle of wine at $5 and at $45.
No mention of where the final wine was priced, but presumably it was mid-range.
The scientists were surprised at how strongly price correlated to pleasure — the $5 wine was much more pleasurable when offered at $45, and the $90 wine didn’t taste anywhere near as good when it was offered at $10.
Well, isn’t that interesting?
It bears saying, first of all, that certainly the vintners’ craft still has value — it ain’t only determined by the numbers on the price label. Controlling tannins, polyphenols, polysaccharides, and bioflavonoids, etc., obviously matters, no one would say that this means there is no difference in wines, they are all somehow equal until a label is stuck to the bottle.
Of course not.
Rather, I think it says that the picture is a bit more complicated than solely the chemical properties controlling flavor that go into each bottle — another part of the equation is what happens in people’s heads.
And while I’m on people’s heads, part of the equation is also the varying sense of taste. People with many more tastebuds, super-tasters, are obviously going to be better equipped to discern quality. And that’s what price is supposedly correlated to, right?
Some of you may recall Hans Christian Anderson’s tale of The Princess and the Pea. As a prince hopes to find a “real” princess (emphasis on the quote unquote, there) a young woman happening upon the castle is tested by sleeping on 20 mattresses and 20 feather beds, under which are three little peas.
Asked the next morning how she slept, she claims to be black and blue from those hard peas under the mattresses, and thus she is shown to be the true princess, a young lady of sensitivity and discernment.
Some oenophiles remind me of that self-same princess.
And it’s great that they have the palates to discern great from good from okay from mediocre from bad. I mean that — in a world all too often coarse and brutish I sincerely congratulate them on their discernment. Yet I can’t help but also feel that sometimes, too, there might be a bit of ego and pecking order that gets into this — each wants to be the princess who can sleep on the most mattresses and still find the pea.
As competition so often rears up in our species, it becomes a stratified, pecking order game — the conspicuous consumption Thorstein Veblen wrote so brilliantly about in his Theory of the Leisure Class. As the well-off peacock their wealth by consuming lavishly, it triggers the pecuniary emulation of the rest of society, commonly called “keeping up with the joneses.”
Now we find out that for many people simply knowing they are tasting a pricey wine becomes part of the pleasure. It’s not just a matter of the vintner’s craft and their conspicuously refined palates; it’s also the cerebral perceptions of the taster, as filtered through his or her wallet.
I don’t mind paying $5 or $10 for a decent glass of tasty beverage for my meal. But I’ve long felt that having to pay the same amount, for one bottle of wine, as you’re spending on the whole meal’s food for several people, is a bit much.
But so long as people want to feel they are more discerning than others, you can’t blame the wine merchants or the restaurants from charging the high prices.
The day after this story appeared on SFGate, a second one came out explaining further that the 20 tasters (admittedly not wine professionals) preferred the $5 bottle of wine over the others, when they assumed it cost more.
This cheers me no end. I think the next time I order a $6-8 glass of Chianti with an Italian meal I’m going to close my eyes, sip it, envision a $90 price tag, and savor it all the more.
Hi, I introduced you to someone you might like to meet over at bugbear.
Maybe there is so little education regarding wine that for most people price is the only mental tag they have to judge quality? My favorite vino was a $12 white, judged, obviously, on taste.
Thanks, Amuirin. Stevo, that might be the case. But I have to say that, living here in northern California, I know a lot of people who feel they have at least done quite a bit of research, and much of that on-site in Napa & Sonoma counties wine tasting rooms, as well as ordering wine in restaurants where the list is a legal-sized, padded booklet with embossed pages and double-digit crooked numbers.
My problem with the study is how small the test-group was. I’d be a bit more impressed if it was at least 200 people, rather than just 20.
p.s. I’ll bet that $12 white is plenty tasty. But then, I think people are paying waay too much for wine.
I’ll admit to being somewhat guilty on this one…I shop for wine by going to Safeway, and seeing what is the biggest bang for my buck, within my price range. If they have a $45 bottle of wine on sale for $30, that’s a $15 break, but still, I’m not about to pay $30 for a bottle of wine. However, if they have an $18 bottle of wine on sale for $11, I’ll snap that one up, and assume that it’s better than the bottle that’s regularly priced at $11.
All of that being said, when I get home and open the bottle, I have been known to regret my purchase, and wish I had gotten the tried and true $11 bottle to begin with. Sometimes the price can indicate more care and such, but sometimes that doesn’t matter, and what I like is what I like.
I have a good Spanish plonk I drink that’s under $10 a bottle. Others appear to like it as well. And though I have been occasionally surprised at the quality of something much more expensive, as often its gone the other way, and in general, the difference in price on the good one does not justify the small increase in quality. I do think that there probably are consistently fine expensive wines out there but I exist in a state of enough pleasure already.
One thing one worries about is that if you upgrade your brand you will have a hard time going back. If you are or remain rich its not an issue but for us regular folks, money is always of some concern.
And we always have to be protective of our right to prefer cheaper alternatives and defend that they actually are better. I would prefer a 6$ bottle of good English oatmeal stout to most $30 bottles of wine.
J - I shop for wine the same way; I’m a sucker for the: discount! value!
I also think it’s worth laying in a case or so of the $11 type wine, just as backup. Esp. when I find the case discounted to $10.50 per bottle. What the heck, I know I’m going to drink it some day, anyway, so this is an investment. As I once read aloud to my wife, with no small irony in voice, “you’ve got to spend to save.”
aos, I really liked this:
and feel it’s a wise person who recognizes it.
And as a craft-brew fan and homebrewer, I also laughed at:
Skol!
Yes, I think that could happen, aos, if it were more than a one-off ’special occasion’ thing.
I’m quite fine with my 5€ Spanish ‘house wines’, and sometimes go up to about 10€ for something a bit special. With my limited income it would be foolish of me to spend more, so it’s probably better not to know how good 50€ wine is.
Though I’d love to have Dom Perignon again (last time was when I moved to England in 1990 and bought it at the duty free shop).
You pay $10 for a glass of wine, Ben? Wow!
Yes, I meant that mostly as a range, but it’s all too easy to do. Hence my grumbliness about it, I guess.
Most of the places I go I can get a wine I’m going to enjoy for $5 or $6, but to give you an idea of how it escalates, I looked online for the wine lists of some of the places I visit. Several of them post the lists without the prices, but these all have their prices. If they only offer it by the bottle, I’m figuring about four glasses per bottle.
We like this German restaurant here in Alameda a lot; it blows the stereotypes Americans have about German food out of the water. (The first time I ordered their herring appetizer, Mrs. Ombud wasn’t interested. But when she tasted it she was stunned — she’d never had it fresh like that before.) Here’s their list; several bottles over $40:
http://www.speisekammer.com/wine.html
Here’s where we went with my family when they visited SF:
http://juliuscastle.com/
And, to give you an idea of what a trendy Vietnamese restaurant charges:
http://slanteddoor.com/wine_list.html
I wanted to show you a tiki bar that’s popular, too, but their drink menu doesn’t have prices:
http://www.forbiddenislandalameda.com/fi/menu
Tiki bars have made a big comeback around here. Most of these are $8 - $11, if memory serves — but memory was slightly imparied, last time I visited.
Note for instance, the “Suffering Bastard: A refreshing concoction from The Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo, featuring lime and ginger ale fortified with bourbon and gin.”
It’s cute — but the drinks do use fresh juice and are quite good.
Usually when we go to Speisekammer, I have their good German beers, which are around $7 a pint. Mrs. Ombud (not a beerdrinker) likes the Belgian lambics which routinely run around $9 or $10.
It’s an old joke for us. We visited the bar with friends once, I ordered a pilsner, she ordered the lambic, I was yakking to my friend and offered the waitress a $20. When she gave me a $5 and waited for the tip, I did a total double take.
Fished for a pair of $1’s, as I was damned if I was going to tip five bucks for 2 beers.
“What the hell did you order?!?” I asked after the waitress left.
Now she enjoys ordering it just for the old joke …
Had an odd thing happen, speaking of the label determining the taste. Was helping my girlfriend install a new shower head on a very cold day. We’d just come in and she suggested brandy. A couple of snifters happily down, we took the glasses back to her kitchen counter only to notice that she had poured scotch rather than brandy into the glasses.
This was truly a case of “I can’t believe it”. As we looked at the bottle we tasted the dregs and still thought brandy but when we pulled out the brandy and put a tiny bit in to be sure, we realized there was quite a difference between them. (Scotch was much smoother, brandy biting a little at the throat). One of those cases, where if it wouldn’t have happened, I would never have thought possible.
aos, that’s very funny. I suspect stuff like this happens all the time.
One of the wonderful things about the age we live in is how much we are learning about our own brains, and the subjective interplay stretching from reality through our senses to our noggins.
Good story!