Is Expensive Wine Really Worth It?
By Grace Ozieme
Notice how your first instinct is never to just reach for the palate-and budget-friendly plonk wine and call it a day? Well, it’s not rocket science. Quality has its price! It’s simply human nature to equate higher price to higher quality. When a bottle costs more, it tends to be a proxy for better quality to the human mind.
What determines the price of wine?
There is a common conception that higher quality wine should cost more. But how do you evaluate quality? That’s where things get tricky. For starters, winemaking is complicated. So many factors go into producing a bottle of wine. How much labor is needed? How much harvesting? Where are the vines? How long has it fermented? What kind of soil is it grown in? What kind of climate? How long has it stayed in barrel? You also have to factor in administrative, sales and marketing costs. If the wine isn’t sold directly to a consumer, then distributors, wholesalers and retailers all look to make a profit on every bottle sold, so there are markups along the way. All of these factors will affect the taste — and the price – of the wine.
On an equal level, the basic rules of economics also apply. There’s supply and demand, of course: Wine that’s scarce will be more expensive, while the more plentiful stuff is cheaper.
It goes within saying too that some expensive wines are expensive because they can be. This is a phenomenon known as “perceived value,” in which how much a consumer is willing to pay affects the price of a good or service.
Whether expensive wines actually taste better is a different question.
According to researchers, “the brain expects expensive wine to be better quality, so people judge the flavor as better — even if it actually tastes the same as a cheaper bottle.”
Wine writer Mike Peterson notes that in a 2008 study, enjoyment of wine was proven to be greatly impacted by how much people are told the wine costs. What’s more, the effect can be physically proven — when drinking wines believed to be more expensive, participants had increased activity in the region of the brain associated with pleasure.
Experienced drinkers and wine experts may be able to differentiate between expensive and inexpensive wine, but perception trumps a taste test for the average drinker. Findings from the Journal of Wine Economics in 2008 implies that, on average, most non-expert wine drinkers who are unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine. In fact, they enjoy more expensive wines slightly less.
Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at Hertfordshire university, after conducting a survey of 578 people said "People were unable to tell expensive wines from inexpensive wines, and so in these times of financial hardship the message is clear - the inexpensive wines we tested taste the same as their expensive counterparts." The overall result of the survey suggests a 50:50 chance of identifying a wine as expensive or cheap based on taste alone – the same odds as flipping a coin. “The real surprise is that the more expensive wines were double or three times the price of the cheaper ones. Normally when a product is that much more expensive, you would expect to be able to tell the difference," Wiseman said.
In 2001, Frédéric Brochet, a researcher from Bordeaux, conducted his own formal study of wine. The results are compelling. Brochet asked 54 wine ‘experts’ to evaluate two glasses of red wine, simple enough. In a science post for realclearscience.com, Ross Pomeroy, describes the outcomes of Brochet’s study. Despite the fact that they were actually being served the exact same white wine, the experts gave the differently labeled bottles nearly opposite ratings. Brochet notes that, “It is a well-known psychological phenomenon – you taste what you are expecting to taste. They were expecting to taste red wine, and so they did. What we perceive is a mixture of thought, vision and taste.”
Confirming the above stated theory, is another observational research in 2021, that implies that knowledge of the price of wine influences the consumer’s subjective experience. It showed that the deceptive up-pricing of low-price wine significantly influenced ratings for pleasantness, whereas deceptive down-pricing of high-price wine had no effect on pleasantness ratings.
Does this mean that wine is just one big hoax? Moving forward, we should all just go for the $10 bottle and be happy, right?
Not so fast.
These researches are very debatable. Most of these surveys and tests were performed on novice or inexperienced wine drinkers. An example is Richard Wiseman’s survey. It was conducted on 578 ‘festival-goers’ present at the Edinburgh International Science Festival, not wine experts. According to wine journalist Jamie Goode, the inability of these inexperienced wine drinkers to discern quality in wine should not lead commentators to dismiss the entire enterprise or suggest that fine wine is all in the head. Further reconfirming his point, Goode strained on the value of expertise. "There are many areas of human endeavour where I am unable to discern absolute quality because I lack expertise. Take visual art: I am not well enough versed in this area to tell you what is good and bad, but my lack of ability to discern quality doesn’t lead me to dismiss the entire enterprise. It’s a strange thing, but we often have a tendency to dismiss expertise, when that expertise is outside of our own field, or our own reach."
IT ALL COMES DOWN TO PERSPECTIVE AND TASTE
Here’s the thing. You may not enjoy more expensive wine until you teach yourself how to understand what’s good about it. And it’s wine experts who teach us how to move past these plonk wines, and how to enjoy the more expensive stuff.
Then again, I would always advise taking a few steps to get as much enjoyment as you can from your wine, no matter the price tag. Always pour your wine into a clear and classy decanter before serving to enhance the wine's aroma and flavor. Ensure your wine is at the ideal temperature then serve in the right wine glass. Hold your glasses by the stem and swirl wine lightly in the glass, enjoying the wine's aroma and different scents. As the wine unfolds, you will be able to detect different nuances of the aromas. The more complex the wine, the more there is to discover. Take small-to-medium sized sips of wine, and hold the wine in the center of your tongue before swallowing for utmost enjoyment. This will allow you to taste the complex flavors of the wine. If you allow your imagination to take control, it probably doesn’t matter if you spent $10 or $75 on the bottle, if you know how to present the wine correctly.
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