"While oenophiles may sincerely believe that they can suss out the difference between a $95 bottle and a $19 one, science indicates otherwise. What experiments show, in fact, is that the amount of pleasure contained in a bottle of wine follows the price tag — not the other way around.
Take, for instance, a recent experiment conducted by researchers at Caltech and Stanford, which looked directly at the relationship between the price of a bottle of wine and how much consumers enjoyed it. In the experiment, 20 volunteers were told they would be sampling five wines, priced at $5, $10, $35, $45, and $90 per bottle. Unsurprisingly, the participants consistently reported that they preferred the $90 bottle to the $5 bottle; they also reported that they preferred the $45 bottle to the $35 bottle.
But, there was a catch. The participants weren’t really tasting five wines; they were tasting three, with two of the wines being tasted twice, labeled at different prices. For example, Wine 2 was presented as the $90 wine and as the $10 wine. So how did that affect people’s enjoyment of the wine? As the “$90 wine,” they loved it; as the “$10 wine,” not so much.
What’s more, these levels of enjoyment were confirmed not just by people’s reports of how much they liked each wine, but inside a brain scanner. Higher ratings of how pleasurable a wine was matched up with greater activation in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, a part of the brain thought to encode for the pleasantness of an experience."
What’s more, these levels of enjoyment were confirmed not just by people’s reports of how much they liked each wine, but inside a brain scanner. Higher ratings of how pleasurable a wine was matched up with greater activation in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, a part of the brain thought to encode for the pleasantness of an experience."
http://www.smartmoney.com/spending/deals/the-best-way-to-enjoy-wine-try-overpaying/?hpadref=1
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