I’ve discussed this before, but here’s another report on cheap versus expensive wine for the average person:
An expensive wine may well have a full body, a delicate nose and good legs, but the odds are your brain will never know.
A survey of hundreds of drinkers found that on average people could tell good wine from plonk no more often than if they had simply guessed.
In the blind taste test, 578 people commented on a variety of red and white wines ranging from a £3.49 bottle of Claret to a £29.99 bottle of champagne. The researchers categorised inexpensive wines as costing £5 and less, while expensive bottles were £10 and more.
The study found that people correctly distinguished between cheap and expensive white wines only 53% of the time, and only 47% of the time for red wines. The overall result suggests a 50:50 chance of identifying a wine as expensive or cheap based on taste alone — the same odds as flipping a coin.
While a more wine-oriented group of testers would probably do better, they’d do better in the sense of determining which of two similar wines was the more expensive — but not necessarily a lot better. We’re in a golden age for wine, as more and more producers of inexpensive wines adopt better techniques and equipment for even their vin extremely ordinaire.
Wine isn’t a simple product: people buy wine for lots of different reasons, and one of those reasons is to signal higher social status by buying more expensive wine. As you get above a certain price level, the quality increases more slowly but the “prestige” makes up the difference (for those interested in the social signalling, anyway).
I’ve discovered that my palate isn’t highly developed enough to detect and appreciate the additional quality that a $100 bottle of wine is supposed to display over a $40-$50 bottle. It may be that I lack the ability to discriminate sufficiently between the two . . . or it may be that the primary difference is in the “prestige” and not in the palate.
Earlier discussion of this topic here.
