This is the big wine myth everyone always falls for
New scientific research into wine: the more expensive a wine is, the better it tastes. Or at least, that’s what we think. Wait a minute, does cheap headache wine suddenly taste much better in an expensive decanter?
Swiss researchers asked 140 people what they thought of the wine being served at a party. The people who knew nothing about the wine thought it was meh. Not great, not bad, just the kind of wine you can’t really object to. Ideal for a reception, so to speak. The wine drinkers who thought they were drinking a very expensive wine rated their glass of wine much more highly. The wine had suddenly started to taste much better, and all because of a little bit of – misleading – information!
Sommeliers can fool you
Apparently, it has something to do with the reward centre in our brains: it is stimulated more strongly when we think we are dealing with a delicacy, concludes behavioural researcher Bernd Weber of the University of Bonn based on the results of this study. Appreciation for cheap ass wine therefore rises sharply when you think you have something special in your glass. That’s quite a conclusion. Can sommeliers pour us anything they like, as long as they come up with a good story to go with it?
Kniknek in a decanter
A prank at a dinner with wine-loving friends makes me suspect that they can. Everyone brought a bottle of wine, each bottle more exclusive than the last. I still had a bottle of JP. Chenet left over from a press trip, and decided to pour it. Into a decanter, of course, otherwise the experts would immediately have recognised that distinctive little kink in the Chenet bottle. Served from crystal in beautiful wine glasses, with the expectation that something beautiful and special was being poured into their glasses, their verdict became considerably more favourable. A lovely Fleurie, according to one of the tasters. And when we started guessing what my bottle would cost, it turned out that I could easily have asked 40 euros for my complimentary wine, with a retail value of 3.49.
You can taste quality
Naturally, the scientists also investigated the opposite effect: they poured expensive wine. Everyone enjoyed it, both the people who thought they were drinking cheap wine and those who actually knew nothing about the wine. Quality cannot be hidden, you might say.
Read also:
- Keep running a little longer, and then there’s wine: these are Europe’s most fun wine marathons
- Fill the glasses again: wine tasting makes you smarter
- Here to stay: ageing wine underwater is apparently amazing
Source: Eat This, Not That
