Study: $90 wine tastes better than the same wine at $10

Study: $90 wine tastes better than the same wine at $10

In a study that could make marketing managers and salespeople rub their hands with glee, scientists have used brain-scanning technology to shed new light on the old adage, "You get what you pay for."

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology and Stanford's business school have directly seen that the sensation of pleasantness that people experience when tasting wine is linked directly to its price. And that's true even when, unbeknownst to the test subjects, it's exactly the same Cabernet Sauvignon with a dramatically different price tag.

Specifically, the researchers found that with the higher priced wines, more blood and oxygen is sent to a part of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex, whose activity reflects pleasure. Brain scanning using a method called functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) showed evidence for the researchers' hypothesis that "changes in the price of a product can influence neural computations associated with experienced pleasantness," they said.

The study, by Hilke Plassmann, John O'Doherty, Baba Shiv, and Antonio Rangel, was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9849949-39.html?tag=newsmap

Won a great big prize.

Tasty stuff. I rarely drink anymore, but enjoy an occasional glass of red wine, or beer from time to time. If it tastes good to you, that should be all that matters.

...and it doesn't end with sensory information. Associational perception is important too.

...or so I'm told! :blush:

Perhaps with a little research you could pull this one off on someone with a completely worthless palate, but I can assure you that anyone can tell the difference between a bottle of plonk and a decent vintage.

nm

if they tried the same experiment with people who actually knew a little about wine, then instead of pleasure at increased expense, it would be outrage at a wine being criminally overpriced... it'd be profound disappointment.

Consider:

a) common boob eating sweatbreads... feelings of disgust and loathing
b) educated diner eating sweatbreads... feelings of pleasure

Even this 'common boob' knows that.

"People just love my Schwetty Breads"

The more you try to convince us that you're some refined, wealthy elitist,
the more I become convinced that you're actually sitting in a basement wearing
unwashed sweatpants, pecking away at a cheeto-stained keyboard.

Dunno why I can't shake that feeling- maybe you're just trying too hard. :shrug:

If a $90 bottle of wine doesn't have layers of extraordinary flavor across all areas of the mouth and a nose to savor, it is either a bad bottle or someone is trying to pull something over.

While this study will be used ad infinitum to say "anyone who drinks $90 bottle of wine is an elitist who is making it up" what it really says is that given no information other than "this glass comes for a $10 bottle and this glass comes from a $90 bottle, which one is better", people will decide on the "$90" version just because of the price.

Putting myself in that experiment, I'm not quite sure what I would say about which tasted "better" but I'm quite sure I would say the "$90" wasn't worth that price. It would have to be one extraordinary $10 bottle of wine to fool anyone who is even a moderately experienced wine drinker to that degree.

This experiment could as easily have been performed using water (and it was...by Penn and Teller in their Bullshit! TV show) than with wine. It would certainly have been used by the media more responsibly if it had been.

wasn't that on mythbusters or something? using coffee filters to improve the taste of vodka or something.

The study determined that kids thought that food (including carrots, milk, and apple juice!) wrapped in McDonalds wrappers tasted better than identical food not plastered with McDonalds logos. It's probably a similar phenomenon.

The outcome of neither of these studies is terribly surprising.

Source: http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2007/08/07/mcdonalds-advertising.html

Thanks for offering!

lower the price to try to get rid of the other, the perception of "taste" would suffer.

Coke and Pepsi. I prefer Coke. To me Coke is smoother and more refreshing.

(more sensitive taste buds) but what I meant is that there would be a perception if Coke suddenly lowered their prices that the quality had also slipped.

Many years ago, Coke considered that if they lowered their prices for a full year below those of Pepsi, they would win Pepsi's market share, drive them out of business and then go back to regular pricing. What they discovered is that the strategy would backfire because the public will always associate "price" with "quality" and if Coke lowers their price, the perception is that the quality is also lowered and sales would suffer. Thus Coke and Pepsi both have to keep their prices in the same ballpark in order to survive.

I studied this in college (which was admittedly many years ago). I'm just surprised that there was a recent study funded on this wine thing when this is a marketing concept which is centuries old...

Filtered tap water. And it only costs pennies a glass with no artifical sweetner or corn syrup....

fantastique.

I'm kidding. Enjoy! :)

and it didn't taste any better than it did when it only cost me $3...wonder what's going on with that...!

and to come that that conclusion, you had to do a freaking STUDY?

:shrug:
rocknation

(haven't had blue nun for YEARS and really liked it--maybe i'll get some)

"reflect pleasure"-it obviously anticipates pleasure.In any other case the test results should be identical. This probably is tangent to placebo effect and could easily be compared.

a stack of nearly 50 different bourbons. I asked him if they made all of these and he said yes, they are all the same bourbon.

This distillery is no longer under the same ownership and has a whole new line up of premium bourbons.

In one of the "Bullshit" segnments, they set up a restaurant with a pretentious "water steward" who pushed several brands of high-priced bottled water to customers. The patrons actually buy into it and start swooning over the different flavors. But it's all in their imaginations because the brands don't exist and the same garden hose out back filled every bottle.

My favorite was the Agua del Culo brand which basically means Ass Water.

In another episode about, "The Best," they had the same actor be a waiter in a posh restaurant. He served a multi-course meal that came out costing (in real life) around $4.00 for much more to unsuspecting clients, who went on and on about how great everything was. The best part was where he just gave people a fancy glass full of cheap-ass whipped cream, describing it as some sort of mousse (sp?) that had been hand-whipped hundreds of time to achieve its fluffiness.

TlalocW