My plan to never try a bottle of wine over $20 so that I don't develop a taste for the expensive stuff has now received support from experimental psychology. A study called, "Do more expensive wines taste better?" concluded:
Individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more
enjoyment from more expensive wine. In a sample of more than 6,000 blind
tastings, we find that the correlation between price and overall rating is small
and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive
wines slightly less. For individuals with wine training, however, we find
indications of a positive relationship between price and enjoyment. Our results
are robust to the inclusion of individual fixed effects, and are not driven by
outliers: when omitting the top and bottom deciles of the price distribution, our
qualitative results are strengthened, and the statistical significance is improved
further. Our results indicate that both the prices of wines and wine
recommendations by experts may be poor guides for non-expert wine
consumers.
This reminded me of the famous and almost too-good-to-be-true study that called into question whether wine experts could even tell the difference between white and red wine:
A few years ago, Frederic Brochet, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Bordeaux, conducted a rather mischievous experiment. He invited 54 experienced wine tasters to give their impressions of a red wine and a white wine. Not surprisingly, the experts described the wines with the standard set of adjectives: the red wine was "jammy" and full of "crushed red fruit." The white wine, meanwhile, tasted of lemon, peaches, and honey. The next day, Brochet invited the wine experts back for another tasting. This time, however, he dyed the white wine with red food coloring, so that it looked as if they were tasting two red wines. The trick worked. The experts described the dyed white wine with the language typically used to describe red wines. The peaches and honey tasted like black currants.
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