Monday, January 14 2008
Mo Money, Mo Bettah
Expensive = good? Why do you think people buy Mercedes?
I spend a lot of time yapping about wine criticism: whether it's whining about the treatment kit wine gets from the press, or how certain wine critics have the palate of children, I'm concerned that critics with loud voices aren't truly engaged enough to think critically about what's in their glass. In particular, I've often found that people who are dismissive and overtly critical of the very concept of kit wine (which is made exactly the same way [both in our winery and in the homes of you the consumer] with exactly the same ingredients [grapes] and exactly the same process [fermentation] as commercial wine) are fuddled by the idea that the raw materials cost between three and five bucks a bottle, and can't take it seriously.
Well, it turns out that not only is this true, it's hard-wired into the human brain. According to research at the California Institute of Technology, tasters consistently give higher ratings to more expensive wines, regardless of actual merit. The study is an interesting one, as it was conducted by a professor of economics. As a field economics sounds a little dry but it's surprisingly rife with contradiction, subtlety and outright weirdness, as anyone who has read Freakonomics can tell you.
The study was very well constructed, with good randomization and sampling techniques. The core of what they were looking for came when they sneakily gave the tastes a glass of $90/bottle Cabernet while telling them it was $10 per bottle, and a glass of $5/bottle Cabernet they said was $45/bottle. Not only did they ask the tasters to rate the wines, they also scanned their brains to monitor their cortex function as they tasted--pretty hifalutin' science!
The study found that inflating the price of a bottle of wine enhanced a person's experience of drinking it, as shown by the neural activity.
The volunteers consistently gave higher ratings to the more "expensive" wines.
Brain scans also showed greater neural activity in the pleasure center when they were sampling those "pricey" wines, indicating that the increased pleasure they reported was a real effect in the brain.
So it's not just the fruits of an unhappy childhood making the critics give lower ratings to less expensive wines–their brains are actually lying to them!
Suddenly I don't feel so bad. No, wait! Suddenly I feel great! I like the wine I drink, I drink the wine I like, and I gave up on most wine critics a decade ago, especially those who don't blind taste. Now some big-brained sceince-making guy scanned the inside of a living brain to validate what I always thought was true: good wine is what tastes good to you.
And I'll drink to that.
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