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James Goodman

Should We Buy Expensive Wine? | Wired Science | Wired.com - 0 views

www.wired.com/...should-we-buy-expensive-wine

wine psychology science pricing value perception unconscious

shared by James Goodman on 01 May 11 - No Cached
  • The 600 plus participants could only pick the more expensive wine 53 percent of the time, which is basically random chance
  • the lack of correlation between the price and perceived quality of a wine (at least when tasted blind) has been proven again and again. Wine critics might disagree, but at this point it’s a robust psychological fact
  • The taste of a wine, like the taste of everything, is not merely the sum of that alcoholic liquid in the glass. It cannot be deduced by beginning with our sensations and extrapolating upwards. This is because what we experience is not what we sense. Rather, experience is what happens when our senses are interpreted by our subjective brain, which brings to the moment its entire library of personal memories, wine shop factoids and idiosyncratic desires. As the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars pointed out, there is no reasonable way to divide sensory experience into what is “given to the mind” and what is “added by the mind.” (Sellars referred to this as the “Myth of the Given.”) When we take a sip of wine, for instance, we don’t taste the wine first, and the cheapness second. We taste everything all at once, in a single gulp of thiswineisplonk, or thiswineisexpensive. As a result, if we think a wine is cheap, it will taste cheap.  And if we think we are tasting a grand cru, then we will taste a grand cru. Our senses are vague in their instructions, and we parse their inputs based upon whatever other knowledge we can summon to the surface.
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  • Even though their assumption about wine was false – the more expensive Cabernet didn’t taste better – that assumption still led to increased pleasure, both as measured in terms of self-reported preference and as a function of brain activity. Sure, that pleasure is a figment of our blinkered imagination, but what part of pleasure isn’t an imaginary figment? Instead of bemoaning this subjectivity, we should embrace it. We should realize that we can make our wines much more delicious, if only we take the time to learn about them. Because we don’t need to spend a fortune on old fruit juice – price is not the only way to raise expectations. (It’s also, you know, an expensive way to raise expectations.) If my tippling experience has taught me anything, it’s that we can also make our wines taste better by delving into the history of the varietal or the region or the pretty picture on the label. And that’s why I will always be one of those annoying people who insists on muttering about malolactic fermentation while pouring Chardonnay, or on explaining the genetic kinship between Primitivo and Zinfandel when all you want is a damn glass to go with your red-sauce pasta.
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