Expensive wine is for suckers

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."

Channel: Vox

Views: 5,253,427

Rating: 4.7787609 out of 5

Keywords: expensive wine, cheap wine, wine prices, wine comparisons, wine price comparisons, sideways, good wine, pinot noir, red wines, wine judges, wine competitions, wine ratings, wine tasters, wine tasting, wine taste-testing, wine quality, winemaker, wine spectator, wine competition, wine gold medals, vox, vox.com, vineyard

Id: mVKuCbjFfIY

Length: 3min 31sec (211 seconds)

Published: Wed May 20 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/MidLife_Thrownaway]

Finding this post couldn't be better timed. Story time....

So, my wife and I have been invited by her sister for the last 5 years to a wine tasting event. We have politely declined for four years, but this year guilt pushed my wife to accept.
First, I'll add, we enjoy killing a bottle of wine any Friday evening as most middle-aged couples do. But as far as "wine tasting events" go, yeah, we could list a dozen other events to blow a $120 on admission than some hoity-toity snob fest. Still, we accepted.
We got a babysitter, got dressed up and arranged our way back after drinking. We arrived a bit before doors opened and expectations were met perfectly. The line of fancy, pimped-up people was long.
In line, we got a booklet, some wine catalog of sorts and where to find their respective tables/pourers. Once we got in, we already knew a half dozen wines to try. And of course, they were "the expensive" ones.
Median price? I'd guess ~$20
Average price? Maybe $25-$30
There were few, crazily priced wines there. All for the tasting, all included in the admission.
Lessons learned:
1. This video is true.
2. You get drunk within the hour, after have tried a good 10-15 'samples'.
3. They want you drunk. Because you're going shopping at the end.

Yeah, once you just reach out for a sample and try some random wine without glancing at the price, then you realize, "Hey, that was good - how much was it? Oh, just $14? Hmmm." Then it hits you - it's not the price, it's just your personal taste.

[u/[deleted]]

I'm no expert, but I think that this shouldn't be taken as a reason why expensive wines suck, because taking pleasure in something isn't the same thing as simply receiving pleasant signals from taste buds and the nose, but there is also an element of context. In the end, if you like it, even if it's objectively worse, it doesn't matter because the final sensation is all that matters.