Expensive Wine 🍷
Is for Suckers 😎
The Video Below Shows Why...
by Joss Fong on May 20, 2015
We blind-tasted three cabernet sauvignon wines, one of which (the most expensive) was described by Wine Spectator as "extremely well done ... with style and panache." Our response was somewhat different.
I bought three red wines at different prices
to see if my coworkers could tell the difference.
🍷
Would they be able to tell which wine was the most expensive?
Check out the video to
see our results
In any given grocery store, you might find a couple dozen types of
beer. But glance over to the wine section, and you'll see maybe a
hundred different bottles with prices ranging from a couple bucks to a
small fortune.
How does this make sense?
Americans drink seven times more beer than
wine. And most of us can't tell so-called "good wines" from bad ones.
The ambiguity of wine is presumably what gives rise to the sizable
industry around wine competitions, sommeliers, ratings, and commentary that often sounds more like poetry than a beverage review. ("Yellowing and leesy in character, with a deep, brooding style.")
In a 2007 essay, Princeton economist Richard Quandt discussed "the two principal sources of bullshit" in life: First, there are some subjects that tend to induce an unusually large
amount of bullshit ... Equally importantly, there are some people who
engage in bullshit with greater frequency than the average; they have a
special propensity to bullshit, perhaps habitually or compulsively or
just for the fun of it ... In some instances, there is an unhappy
marriage between a subject that especially lends itself to bullshit and
bullshit artists who are impelled to comment on it. I fear that wine is
one of those instances where this unholy union is in effect."
Therein lies the problem with wine: you have the science of turning a
great fruit into a great drink. Then you have what are seemingly
objective quality variables like balance and complexity. But layered
onto that is a mountain of subjective opinions, people trying to prove
their sophistication, and a whole lot of marketing. The nature of wine
makes it really hard to tell the difference between expertise, nonsense,
and personal preference.
Take wine comments, for example. There's no doubt that people can
learn through training how to identify different grapes and regions, and
develop the vocabulary to distinguish and describe subtle flavors and
aromas. But at the same time, people are always vulnerable to the
influence of their expectations. And time and again, researchers have
been able to trick even expert wine tasters.
By dyeing a white wine red, researchers at the University of Bordeaux showed
how easily visual cues can dominate wine students' sense of smell. When
they thought the white wine was a red one, they described it using
words commonly applied to red wines (incidentally, those words are
typically dark objects like red berries or wood).
We can't help but associate price with
quality, and most of the time it's probably a good assumption that
you're paying more for a reason.
But does that association hold up for
wine?
Buy three red wines at different prices to see if coworkers could tell the difference.
Would they be able to tell which wine was the most expensive?
Would
they enjoy that wine more than the others?
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