These are 3 red wines that are made from the same grape, but at different prices.
The most expensive: a 2011Honig cabernet sauvignon
from Napa Valley. Wine Spectator magazine rated it Outstanding. And it cost 5 times more than
the one on the right. So does it taste 5 times better?
19 Vox staffers tasted and rated each of the wines. And almost half of them correctly identified
the most expensive one. But that’s not because they liked it more.
"Very nuanced. Complex. Didn't enjoy it."
The average ratings of the cheapest and most expensive wine were actually the same.
"I'm glad I have cheap taste. That's going to make my life really easy."
And this is consistent with a 2008 study that compiled 6,000 blind tastings in the
US. It found that unless they had undergone wine training, people didn’t actually prefer the
taste of more expensive wines. In fact they enjoyed them slightly less.
"Yeah, that's really not very pleasant."
There seems to be something about wine that can make us feel a bit lost.
“That has sort of an oaky afterbirth."
That’s probably why a single movie can move the whole wine market.
“That's tasty.” “That’s 100% pinot noir. Single vineyard. They don’t even make
it anymore.” After Sideways was released, sales of Pinot
Noir jumped up compared to other red wines. And sales of merlot?
“I’m not drinking any f*cking merlot.” They slowed down.
But who decides what good wine is? Professional judges give medals in wine competitions,
but they’re really inconsistent One statistician showed that most wines that
received the highest score in one competition also got the lowest score in another.
This is the distribution of gold medals that you would expect if they were awarded by random
chance. It looks a lot like the actual distribution of gold medals entered in US wine competitions.
That suggests judges often disagree with each other. But it gets worse: they often disagree
with themselves. When surreptitiously given the same wine 3 times, only 1 in 10 of the
judges at the California State Fair wine competition consistently awarded it the same medal.
Wine ratings published in magazines can be all over the map too. Here’s how two of
the top critics described the same wine in 2004.
“A brilliant effort” “completely unappetizing” “a wine of sublime richness” “overripe
aromas” “remarkable freshness and definition” “more reminiscent of a late-harvest zinfandel
than a red bordeaux.” One problem is that not all wine publications
require tasters to be blind to the price and the brand.
And that matters because people can’t seem to avoid associating price with quality.
One experiment in Australia showed that people rated the same wine higher when they thought
it was $53 rather than $16 or $6. But get this - the experimenters had actually made that wine
objectively worse by adding tartaric acid. It didn’t matter -- the price tag overwhelmed
their own taste buds. In another study, scientists scanned the brains
of people tasting wines they thought were either $10 or $90. In reality, it was the
same wine, but when they thought it was expensive, their brains showed more activity in a region
associated with pleasant tastes and smells.
so expensive wines may actually taste better after all, as long as you know that they’re expensive.
"You can feel free to finish it if you want." "I'll take the expensive one."