Does expensive wine taste better?

A close look at the psychology of wine, how marketing affects your perceptions, and why you’re paying too much for wine.

In 2002, four Wall Street businessmen sat down for dinner at the Balthazar in New York City. They ordered a Mouton Rothschild 1989 for the table.

The Balthazar menu lists this wine at $2,000. It’s not hard to see why. The Mouton Rothschild 1989 is an exceptional wine, produced from grapes grown on 205 acres near Pauillac, just northwest of Bordeaux. At the time the grapes were grown, the vineyard was owned by Philippine de Rothschild, a member of the infamous Rothschild family at the center of banking in Europe from the eighteenth century onward. According to the tasting notes of Liz Palmer, the noted wine critic, the Mouton Rothschild 1989 is “a lovely Pauillac that has reached its plateau of maturity; notably dark ruby in colour; It has an engaging cedar and tobacco bouquet with hints of mint; not much fruit concentration; the palate follows suit – is medium-bodied and continues the aromatic theme of cedar and tobacco; demonstrates great persistence; well-defined – ‘old school’.” At a tasting in 2018, Jane Anson, the Bordeaux correspondent for Decanter magazine, gave it 97 points out of a possible 100.

That was the wine they ordered.

But it wasn’t the wine they got.

Instead, their server brought them an $18 Pinot Noir.

There had been a mix-up. The staff had poured the two wines into two decanters and sent the wrong decanter to the table.

Five minutes later, the restaurant manager rushed to their table to explain what had happened.

How did they these businessmen react? With incredulity, that a restaurant could make such a costly mistake? That their dinner had been ruined?

Nope.

Though they suspected what they were drinking wasn’t the wine they had ordered, they didn’t realize they were drinking an $18 Pinot Noir.

Meanwhile, a few tables away, the beneficiaries of the mistake—a couple who ordered the $18 Pinot Noir—didn’t realize it, either. In fact, as they unknowingly drank the $2,000 Mouton Rothschild 1989 they “jokingly pretended to be drinking an expensive wine.”¹

How could this have happened?

Not the mistake in the kitchen: the swapped decanters, the wrong wine at the wrong tables.

The real mistake was a mistake in perception: that an $18 Pinot Noir and a $2,000 Mouton Rothschild 1989 could be confused in the first place.

In today’s post, we’re going to take a deep dive into the world of expensive wine. We’ll see if expensive wine really tastes better or if the mix-up at the Balthazar was a one-off mistake. We’ll explore the ways price signals quality. We’ll look at how expectations influence perceptions. And we’ll finish with a definitive guide to buying great wine.

Sometimes you can answer a question with a statement supported by data, science, and story. 

The answer to the question—does expensive wine really taste better?—is not such an answer. Instead, this answer is a series of layers, each one more complicated than the last, and each one introducing a new set of questions—and a new set of revelations about taste, status, and perception.

People can’t tell the difference between expensive wine and cheap wine

When people don’t know the price, they like cheap wine just as much as expensive wine. Between April 2007 and February 2008, Robin Goldstein and his colleagues conducted 6,175 blind tests with 506 participants tasting 523 wines that ranged in price from $1.65 to $150.00 per bottle. About 12% of the participants had taken a sommelier course or had some kind of training. The test was double-blind: neither the person drinking the wine nor the person serving the wine knew the price. After each taste, participants rated it either “Bad,” Okay,” “Good,” or “Great.” Goldstein found that, on the whole, people actually gave higher ratings for cheap wine than expensive wine. However, compared to non-experts, the experts rated expensive wine more favorably. It seems that everyone likes cheap wine more than expensive wine, though experts are better at rating expensive wines compared to non-experts.²

Other blind tastings have produced the same results. In 2011, Johan Almenberg and Anna Dreber of the Stockholm School of Economics had 135 people rate a $40 wine and 131 people rate a $5 wine, both on a scale of 1 to 100. They split the tasters into three groups:

1. Some people learned the price before they tasted it. 
2. Others learned the price after they tasted it, but before they rated it. 
3. And a third group did a blind tasting: they never learned the price and only tasted and rated the wine.

Of this third group, people rated the cheap wine a 60.0 and the expensive wine a 58.5. To them, the $5 wine tasted better than the $40 wine!³

For many people, a $40 wine sounds expensive. But for others, such as sommeliers, wine critics, and others, a $40 wine is still well below the threshold of what a great wine should cost. What if we compare a $40 wine (expensive to some, but cheap to others) to a $400 or $4,000 wine? In 2013, Vanessa Harrar and her colleagues conducted a blind tasting of seven sparkling wines, including six Champagnes. There were fifteen tasters, including four who considered themselves experts and five who considered themselves novices. This tasting, too, revealed no correlation between price and rating. Cheap Champagnes taste better than expensive Champagnes. In fact, of the wines sampled, the lowest rating was a Perrier-Jouët Belle Epoque Blanc de Blanc 2002, priced at £400; while the highest rated wines were a Mumm Vintage 2004 (£40) and a Perrier-Jouet Belle Epoque 2004 (£100). It seems that not only do cheap wines taste the same as expensive wines, but expensive wines taste the same as very expensive wines, too. ⁴

Follow-up studies confirmed this. The next year, Robert H. Ashton published the results of his tasting session in the Journal of Wine Economics. In his study, 48 people, all members of a wine appreciation club at Duke University, tasted six wines each. They rated each wine on a scale of 1 to 10. As before, people thought the cheaper wines tasted better. In fact, in one of the tastings, the most expensive wine (a $119 bottle) was ranked a 3.70 and the cheapest wine (a $22 bottle) was ranked a 4.00.⁵

These and numerous other studies point in the same direction: in blind taste tests, people can’t distinguish cheap wine from expensive wine.

People can’t tell the difference between two wines

There’s a deeper issue, though. The real reason people can’t distinguish expensive wine from cheap wine is because they can’t distinguish any wine from any other wine—at least at rates that are no better than chance. In a series of two tastings, Roman Weil, the former co-chairman of the Oenonomy Society of the US, poured two wines into four glasses: one wine split between two glasses and the other wine split between the other two glasses. Then, he took one of the four glasses away, and served the remaining three glasses in the tasting. Thus, two of the three glasses were poured from the same bottle, and one of the three glasses from its own bottle. (If this is getting confusing, scroll down to the image.) Weil asked people to identify which two were the same and which one was different. 

How did people do?

Not great.

In the first tasting, people identified the wines from the same vintage only 41.5% of the time. That’s not very good when you consider that people would correctly pick the two wines from the same bottle 33.3% of the time if they made decisions at random: there are three glasses, so picking the two of three glasses at random would be correct 1 in 3 times. ⁶

Weil’s second tasting produced similar results. This time, Weil had 395 people compare 855 pairs of regular wines and reserve wines, which are usually produced from superior grapes. People correctly identified only 346 of the 855 pairs, or roughly 40.5% of pairs, compared to the 33.3% that would be expected from random chance. Then, in a final step, Weil asked the 346 people who got it right to tell him which wine was the regular wine, and which wine was the reserve—the purportedly better wine. Of the 346 people, 170 people (49.1%) preferred the regular wine and 176 (50.9%) preferred the reserve—rates that are virtually the same as picking one of the wines at random (50.0%).⁷ 

Weil’s studies show that people can tell two wines apart at rates that are barely better than chance (1 in 3) , and when they can, they pick the better wine at rates equal to chance (1 in 2).

Wine is an acquired taste. It takes time, training, and practice to tell good wine from bad (which could, itself, be evidence that great wine isn’t objectively great, though I digress). Perhaps expert tasters would perform better?

Unfortunately not. Professionals don’t do any better than novices: even people who are trained to taste, describe, and recommend wine for a living—and whose recommendations carry enormous weight within the industry and beyond—can’t tell one wine from another in a blind test. One of the first studies to reveal these inconsistencies took place at the wine competition of the California State Fair between 2005 and 2008. The competition is the oldest in the United States, and its judges include, “winemakers, wine buyers, wine critics and professors of enology and viticulture,” according to Robert T. Hodgson, the retired statistics professor and 35-year owner of the Fieldbrook Winery in California who conducted the study. Wineries are happy to pay more than $1 million collectively in entry fees to have their wine judged at the fair, since a gold medal awarded by judges at the fair can propel an unknown wine to the top of the market.⁸

Typically, judges at the state fair taste between four and six flights of wine per day, and each flight contains 30 wines. However, Hodgson served them a second flight that contained wines they had sampled in other flights. In other words, judges were unknowingly tasting and rating the same wine twice. Would they give consistent ratings?

When judges tasted the same wine twice, their scores between the two wines were consistent only 18% of the time, and 82% of judges gave different ratings for the same wine. One way to interpret this number is that 82% of the judges were not, in fact, qualified to be judges, and the 18% who got it right were the ones whose ratings should be trusted. To test this, Hodgson compared these judges’ scores for four consecutive years, from 2005 to 2008. He found that the 18% of judges who had given consistent scores had done so by chance. The next year, they gave inconsistent ratings. And the reverse happened, too: a predictable number of inconsistent judges the first year became consistent the following year, only to become inconsistent once again the third year.⁸

It doesn’t just happen at the California State Fair. Judgment inconsistency is endemic in wine competitions throughout the United States. According to the California Grapevine, a trade journal for the wine industry, of 13 major wine competitions in the United States each year, a wine has a 10% chance of winning a gold medal. Because of how these competitions are structured, this is no better than chance. Additionally, of the 2,440 wines entered into three or more competitions each year, roughly 84% of the wines that win a gold medal in one competition win no medals anywhere else.⁹ It’s possible that a mediocre wine that barely places in one competition wouldn’t place in another competition. But why would so many wines that receive the highest medal at one competition receive no other medals at other competitions? It’s because when judges must rely on taste alone, they give ratings that are inconsistent across the industry, and inconsistent with their own judgments. The bottom line is if a wine gets a good rating—whether from a novice wine drinker or a professional judge—the rating they give is almost certainly the product of random chance and reflects nothing about the actual taste of the wine.

We started by asking: Do expensive wines taste better? The answer seems to be a resounding no. We have learned that, on average, people don’t prefer expensive wine to cheap wine, and they can’t tell the difference between any two wines. And it’s not just novices. Judges make this mistake, too.

This raises a second question: If nobody can tell two wines apart at rates barely better than chance, why are some wines more expensive than others?

Price signals quality

Price doesn’t just reflect quality. It also signals it.

Wine belongs to a category of products economists call experience goods. Consumers can know the quality of these goods only after they experience them. Experience goods include a transmission for your car, a photography session, and a bottle of wine. What these transactions have in common is is information asymmetry. That is, the producer has more information about the goods than the consumer: consumers can assess the quality of experience goods only after they’ve bought and consumed them—after they’ve experienced them.

To compensate for this information asymmetry, producers rely on signals to set expectations about quality. These signals can include branding, reputation, advertising, public ratings, generous return policies, warranties, and a myriad of other things.

Wine is the quintessential experience good. You can’t assess the quality until you’ve consumed it. 

But wine goes one step further. As we’ve seen, people can barely tell two wines apart and they can distinguish good wine from bad wine at rates no better than chance. This means that not only is the quality unknown before consumption, it’s also unknown after consumption. That makes the external cues—the signals of quality—even more important not only for predicting how a wine will taste before buying it, but also for understand how it tastes during consumption. Such cues thus have a vastly outsized effect on the perceived quality of wine. Winemakers, therefore, rely on external cues to communicate quality—and consumers look for these cues to make sense of their consumption—to a degree greater than just about any other product. According to Robert H. Ashton of Duke University, whose studies have explored the effects of these external cues on wine, “The role played by image, status, and so forth in the overall ‘experience’ of the product far outweighs that played by more immediate and tangible aspects of the product itself.”⁵

In other words, wine-drinkers aren’t just looking to external cues to answer the question: Will this wine taste great?

They’re also looking to external cues to answer the question: Did this wine taste great? 

The most important of these external cues is the price. In a survey of people who buy Italian wine, researchers asked people to identify the most relevant factors they consider when they buy wine. Of the 127 survey respondents, 76% listed the region the wine was produced; 55% listed the year it was made; 37% listed the wine type; and 31% listed the label. Respondents also listed nearly two dozen other factors. But price appeared the most, listed by a whopping 92% of all respondents. (The numbers don’t add up to 100% because people could list more than one factor.)¹⁰ What this and similar surveys reveal is that external cues set the expectation of wine quality, and among these cues, price is the most important. 

Expectations determine experience

But price does more than signal quality. Price doesn’t just correlate with perception of quality. It causes it. The higher the price, the better the wine will taste. That’s because the set of expectations becomes self-fulfilling when people drink it.¹¹

The external-attributes-affect-perception phenomenon happens with other products, too:

• People like Coke more when they drink from a cup with the Coca Cola logo on it, compared to those who drink from an unmarked cup—even though both cups contain the same drink.¹²
• People can be convinced to like a bitter cup of coffee when researchers tell them in advance it’s not bitter, though when a control group drinks the coffee without these expectations, everyone agrees the coffee tastes terrible.¹³
• The most well-known effect of this phenomenon happened when Leonard Lee of MIT added balsamic vinegar to beer and then asked people how they liked it. He found that 59% of people preferred the balsamic vinegar-laced beer to Budweiser and Sam Adams. But when they told people what they were drinking before they drank it, only 30% preferred it to another beer. When people thought they were drinking ordinary beer, they didn’t detect anything unusual. But when they were told balsamic vinegar had been added, most opted to drink something else.¹⁴

The same thing happens with wine. In his book Wine Scandal, Fritz Hallgarten tells the story of a group of wine consultants who did a blind taste test of ten sparkling wines. Not only did the people tasting the wine incorrectly identify which of the sparkling wines were Champagne, but they also typically thought the wine they rated highest was the champagne. They held an expectation that sparkling wine with a high price tag must not only be a Champagne but must be a very good Champagne.⁴ The price sets an expectation of how the wine should taste and affects your perception of how it does taste.

Researchers have even tricked people into thinking a wine tastes better just by showing them a fake—more expensive—price. In a study, people tasted five glasses of wine, each of which had a different price, ranging from $9.50 to $47.95 a bottle (in Australian dollars). What they didn’t know was that instead of tasting five wines, they tasted only three: two of the five glasses were duplicates of other glasses:

1. Glass 1: the price they saw was less than the actual price of the wine
2. Glass 2: the price they saw was a low-priced wine with the actual price on it.
3. Glass 3: the price they saw was a mid-priced wine with the actual price on it.
4. Glass 4: same wine as glass 1, but the price was the actual price of the wine.
5. Glass 5: same wine as glass 2, but the price was greater than the actual price.

You can see how price affects taste by comparing results of glass one with glass four, and by comparing the results of glass two with glass five:

• Even though glass one and glass four came from the same bottle, people rated glass one a 2.8 because it had a lower price tag, and they rated glass four a 4.5 because it had a higher price tag (on a scale of 1 to 6).
• And even though glass two and glass five came from the same bottle, people rated glass two a 3.2 because it had a lower price tag, and they rated glass five a 3.9, even though it had a higher price tag.

People had the chance to buy the wine they had just tasted. Not surprisingly, the price tag affected what they were willing to pay. When people saw the low price of glass one, their willingness to pay went down 86% of the time. And when people saw the high price on glass five, willingness to pay went up 77% of the time. Remember, this is for the same wine from the same bottle: nothing changed except the price the people saw. ¹⁵

What this tells us is that when people taste two glasses of wine poured from the same bottle, they prefer the one with the higher price tag—and they’re willing to pay more for it.

The price-as-signal effect is stronger for higher prices than lower prices. That is, a high price tag on a cheap wine makes it taste better, but a low price tag on a cheap wine doesn’t necessarily make it taste worse. Recall the 2011 study by Johan Almenberg and Anna Dreber of the Stockholm School of Economics mentioned earlier, where 135 people tasted a $40 wine and 131 people taste a $5 wine. Those in a blind test liked cheap wine a little more than the expensive wine. However, when people learned the price of the expensive wine, they rated it higher. But the opposite didn’t happen: that is, when they learned the real price of a cheap wine, they didn’t rate it worse. High prices make expensive wines taste better, and low prices don’t make cheap wines taste bad.³

Why is this? It’s likely because you give greater weight to factors that confirm higher status. After all, everyone wants to be higher status than they really are. It makes sense that any evidence of high status—however fabricated—has an outsized effect on self-perception. And there are few status markers more conspicuous than drinking expensive wine. You’re right, you think, I could be the kind of person who drinks a $2,000 Mouton Rothschild 1989!

Conversely, nobody wants to be lower status than they are. When you find out you’re drinking cheap wine and—if you’re honest—don’t mind the taste, you’re likely to discard this as evidence of low status.¹⁶

How much of experienced quality can be explained by price?

We’ve seen that a high price tag can cause people to like a wine more. Consumers look for external quality signals, such as price.

But how much, exactly, is price a factor? In other words, when people do like a wine more, how much of their taste perception can be explained by the price, and how much can be explained by other factors? (And what are those factors?)

To answer this, Eddie Oczkowski and Hristos Doucouliagos examined as many studies as they could find that studied the relationship between the price and quality of wine. Of the 43 wine studies that fit a set of standardized criteria (many of which I’ve cited already), they found a +0.30 correlation between the price of the wine and the quality ratings in a blind taste test. This means that 30% of the wine’s ratings can be explained by price alone 70% by other factors. They also found the relationship between price and quality isn’t linear. Quality does goes up as the price goes up, just not at quite the same rate. If you double the price, you won’t double the quality.¹⁷

If price explains 30% of a wine’s rating, what explains the other 70%? (It can’t be the actual taste, since people can barely tell two wines apart.) Here’s a different way to ask the same question: What are the external, expectation-setting cues other than price that also accompany the buying and consuming of wine? The most significant factor is the overall brand. In 1989, Akshay R. Rao and Kent B. Monroe published the results of regression analysis they conducted on a range of consumer products. They found a +0.12 correlation between price and quality and a 0.14 correlation between brand and quality.¹⁸ Other research has found that price and brand can work together to create a stronger correlation with quality greater than the sum of the two.¹⁹ This likely happens with wine, too. Factors such as brand, bottle design, shelf placement, and—above all—price work together to set an expectation about how the wine should taste.

Humans are creatures of sight, not taste

Part of the reason extrinsic cues such as price are important is because the brain does a poor job processing olfactory data—that is, taste and smell data. A high price improves the taste of a bad wine partly because you struggle to interpret sensory data from taste. In an almost unbelievable example of this, researchers dyed white wine to make it look like red wine (without changing the taste). Then they served it to 54 members of the Faculty of Oenology of the University of Bordeaux. When they compared the tasting notes, they found that when they dyed the white wine red—remember, the taste remained unchanged—the tasters used the descriptors normally used for red wine, even though they were really tasting white wine. As a group, the wine experts could not distinguish red wine from white wine based on taste and smell alone. Instead, the color of the wine determined the taste.²⁰

The color of wine affects perception to a greater degree than the taste of the wine. That’s because your sense of sight works better than your sense of taste and smell. This is partly for physiological reasons: it takes about 400 milliseconds for your brain to recognize a taste or smell, but only 40 milliseconds to make a visual recognition.²¹ Visual data beats olfactory data. The geography of the brain helps explain why. The brain processes smell and taste, like all senses, in the cortical regions. However, smell and taste are the only senses that are not first processed by the thalamus.²¹ When you take a sip of wine, data from taste and smell skip the important intermediate step of interpretation—a step the other senses get. This means that when data from taste and smell hits your brain, you’re less sure what to do with it. As a result, your brain looks for secondary sources to augment the ambiguous incoming information. First on the list is the more-easily-processed visual data. This is why the brain is not as good at processing data from taste and smell compared to visual data; the sense of sight gets preferential treatment in the brain. When you drink wine, what you see is more important than what you taste.

People are so bad at tasting wine that they can be tricked into giving a wine a high rating even after the wine has been intentionally spoiled. In a blind test with 263 participants, researchers added tartaric acid to the wine. The most expensive wine in the study, at $53 per bottle, received the highest rating, even after researchers made it taste worse. The price explained 71.81% of the rating, compared to 13.10% for the tartaric acid. Extrinsic cues influence perception to a far greater degree than the objective taste of a wine. ²²

Extrinsic cues determine not just how you taste a drink. They also change how you behave. A 2005 study by Baba Shiv, Ziv Carmon, and Dan Ariely found that gym-goers who drank a more expensive energy drink reported experience more intense workouts and feeling less fatigued afterward, compared to gym-goers who drank the same drink with a lower price tag. Even though both prices were fake, people who saw the high price tag had a very different workout. The researchers also found that people performed better on puzzles when they thought they were consuming a drink that claimed to enhance mental concentration—but only when a (fake) high price tag was attached. They found that people who consumed a drink that claimed to “enhance mental acuity” performed better on a word puzzle when the drink was priced at R$5.50 (22.3 words on average) compared to people who drank the same drink priced at R$1.00 (16.9 words on average).²³

All this research points in the same direction: of all the factors that determine our experience of taste, one of the least important is the taste itself.

Wine on the brain

What should be clear now is that the relationship between a wine’s price and taste is really a story of the brain’s attempt to handle confusing, competing, and contradictory inputs. On the one hand, the taste and smell inputs hit the brain with one set of data. But on the other hand, visual data confirms or augments it. And layered on top of both is expectation-setting data, like brand, variety, vintage, and most important, price. Let’s take a closer look at how the brain puts it all together to produce the experienced perception of a wine’s taste.

In a series of experiments, Hilke Plassmann of INSEAD (the Institut Européen d’Administration des Affaires), along with her colleagues, served people wine while they watched the brain’s reaction in an MRI machine. In one study, they had people taste what they thought were five Cabernet Sauvignons, though Plassmann and her colleagues only served three: two of the glasses were duplicates with different prices. As expected, the higher price tag caused people to give higher ratings, and the lower price tag caused people to give lower ratings, even though they drank identical wines. Same wine, different taste.

Or so they said.

Their brains told a different story. Though people reported tasting two wines, their brains reported drinking one wine. To put it slightly differently: at the conscious level, people thought they drank two wines, but at the subconscious level, their brain knew they were drinking one wine. It’s as if the initial input into the brain is hey, look, two identical things! The raw input is received correctly, even if people consciously taste two different wines.²⁴

But why, then, would the subconscious part of the brain lie to the conscious part of the brain? Why would they say they tasted a difference when their brain seemed to know, at least at a subconscious level, that the wines really were from the same bottle? Why is the experienced output different from the raw input? 

Because the MRI has captured the raw input before it had been integrated with other sensory inputs, such as visual stimuli or prior expectations of how the wine should taste. In other words, the MRI could capture the conflicting, opposing inputs the moment the brain first tried to process each of them and merge them together: one a set of taste data and the other the expectation-setting data–i.e. price. Then, in the process of merging these conflicting inputs, the expectation-setting data overrode the taste data. The result was the perception of tasting two wines instead of one.

But why would the brain disregard the more accurate raw, sensory taste data in favor of the incorrect, expectation-setting data? Because for the majority of lived experience, expectation-setting data is a reliable way to interpret the world. It’s correct enough of the time for the brain not to discount it all of the time.

Your brain is an expensive, energy-consuming organ. For the sake of efficiency, your brain devises shortcuts. When your brain needs to make a choice based on conflicting data, it favors the easiest choice over the most accurate choice. (For example, you don’t need to be 100% sure there’s a lion in the bushes to react. On average, a quick decision that might be correct makes you more likely to survive than a slow, careful, decision that’s guaranteed to be accurate.)

Let’s take a closer look at the factors that influence the extent to which the brain discards the (correct) raw sensory taste data in favor of the (incorrect) expectation-setting data, such as visual stimuli and extrinsic cues like brand and price. Across three experiments, Plassmann and her colleagues were able to identify regions of the brain that deal with the perception of taste in response to external pricing cues. We’ll look at each: the first on the striatum; the second on the posterior insula; and the third on the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex.²⁵

Experiment 1: The striatum

The first of the three experiments examined the striatum, a region of the brain associated with reward-seeking activity. That is, when the brain receives a positive stimulus, the striatum tells you to get more of it. In a blind taste test involving 89 people, Plassmann and her colleagues noticed that the striatum responded not only to the taste of the wine but also to the price. In other words, the striatum cued the brain’s reward system—hey, that’s good!—based not just on taste, but also on price. 

To check their results, the experimenters conducted a survey that asked people to indicate their agreement with statements such as “When I get something I want, I feel excited and energized.” In other words: the survey measured how likely people might be to respond to reward-seeking stimuli. It turned out that people who scored high on the survey displayed greater activity in the striatum. The same people—those whose striata registered the most activity—were also more likely to judge a wine based on its price instead of its taste. 

Price sets an expectation about how the wine ought to taste, and people more responsive to rewards were convinced by their prior expectations.

Experiment 2: The posterior insula

The second of the three experiments examined the posterior insula, which, in the words of the experimenters, is “linked to somatosensory processing and introspection.” In other words, the posterior insula makes you aware of how you’re physically feeling. Among other things, it monitors pain sensitivity, body temperature, and perception of taste and smell. 

When you taste wine, activity in your posterior insula means you’re correctly processing the incoming taste data. And the more activity there is in the posterior insula, the less likely you are to be affected by the price of the wine. 

Plassmann and her colleagues confirmed this by having participants answer the Body Consciousness Questionnaire, a well-known survey designed to measure “how attentive (conscious) a person is to his or her internal body signals.” (As an example, people were asked to rate their agreement with statements such as “I’m aware of changes in my body temperature”) People who scored high also had more activity in their posterior insula, which made them more aware, on average, of taste and smell. These people were less likely to judge a wine based on its price and more likely to judge a wine based on taste and smell.

Experiment 3: The dorsal medial prefrontal cortex

The third of the three experiments monitored the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex. It’s where higher-level processing happens, including working memory, thinking, and identifying emotions. In short, the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex is the seat of cognition. In a 1955 article in The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Arthur R. Cohen and his co-authors define cognition as “a need to structure relevant situations in meaningful, integrated ways” and “a need to understand and make reasonable the experiential world.”²⁶

When Plassmann and her colleagues conducted blind taste tests, those who exhibited greater activity in their dorsal medial prefrontal cortex also were more likely to rate a wine based on its price than its taste. 

But why would that be? 

Because higher activity in the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex is associated with greater cognition. To confirm this, they had participants take a test designed to measure their need for cognition—their need to experience structure and order in the world. Those who scored high were also more likely to rate wine based on price. Here’s what this tells us: When you drink a glass of wine the expectation from price needs to match the perception from taste. And when it doesn’t, the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex works hard to align the conflicting data. For those who score high on a test measuring a need for cognition, and for those who exhibit greater activity in the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, the expectations from the price of the wine are more likely to affect taste than the actual taste of the wine itself.

Let’s briefly summarize what these three experiments tell us:

• People are more likely to be affected by the price of wine (instead of its taste) when they register more activity in the striatum, which is associated with reward processing, and more activity in the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, which is associated with cognition.
• People are less likely to be affected by the price of wine (instead of its taste) when they register less activity in the posterior insula, which is associated self-sensations and reactions, including how we respond to taste.

A blind taste test confirmed these findings. In a 2017 study, 30 people sampled 1.25 milliliters of €12.00 wine. Everyone got the same wine, though the price they saw was either €3.00, €6.00, or €18.00. Next, they rated the wine on a nine-point scale. Unsurprisingly, they rated the €3.00 wine a 4.19 and rated the €18 a 5.21. As people tasted the wine, researchers watched the activity in the brain. When prices were higher, two areas registered extra activity. The first was part of the prefrontal cortex, as it tried to resolve inconsistencies between the expectations set by the price tag and the incoming sensory data. As expected, the reward motivation system, governed by the striatum, overrides the raw sensory data.²⁷

Let’s review. People can’t tell cheap wine and expensive wine apart because they can’t tell any two wines apart. The reason for this is because the brain is bad at processing olfactory data. To compensate, the brain looks for extrinsic cues to determine taste, the most important of which is price.

Knowing this, how is it possible to enjoy a glass of wine?

How to enjoy a glass of wine in 3 easy steps

1. Forget taste

Face it. The glass of wine you’re about to drink is probably average.

Even critics, judges, and professionals often can’t distinguish good wines from bad, and everyone else can barely tell two wines apart at rates greater than chance. That’s because the difference between a great wine and a terrible wine is small.

Most wines are either average or so close to it you likely won’t know either way.

2. Optimize for experience

We’ve seen that the perceived taste of wine is driven not by intrinsic factors, like the actual taste and smell, but by extrinsic cues, and particular various expectation-setting factors.

For your wine to taste great, you need to optimize for experience. Where are you drinking it? Who are you with? Is it accompanied by a meal, and if so, what are you eating? If you’re at a party, what is the setting? What’s the conversation about? Is the wine from a box, or served at an expensive restaurant in Paris?

And so on.

The answers to these questions set your expectations of how the wine should taste, which affects how the wine does taste.

3. Get the most expensive wine you can

The most important among these factors is price. If you want the wine to taste great, get the most expensive wine you can.

But, you may say, will knowing that my taste buds are tricked by the price make it taste worse?

In other words, will knowing how the magic of perception works diminish the effect?

Maybe—but likely not. There’s plenty of research that shows placebos work even when people know they’re getting a placebo.²⁸ Even after you’ve read this article, and even after you’ve bought that expensive bottle of wine, and even though you know you’re getting tricked, the high price is still going to make the wine taste well above average.

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