{"id":8814,"date":"2011-04-14T08:58:28","date_gmt":"2011-04-14T12:58:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=8814"},"modified":"2012-03-03T22:35:35","modified_gmt":"2012-03-04T03:35:35","slug":"more-proof-that-you-shouldnt-over-pay-for-wine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/04\/14\/more-proof-that-you-shouldnt-over-pay-for-wine\/","title":{"rendered":"More proof that you shouldn’t over-pay for wine"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve discussed this before, but here’s another report<\/a> on cheap versus expensive wine for the average person:<\/p>\n

\n

An expensive wine may well have a full body, a delicate nose and good legs, but the odds are your brain will never know.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In the blind taste test, 578 people commented on a variety of red and white wines ranging from a \u00a33.49 bottle of Claret to a \u00a329.99 bottle of champagne. The researchers categorised inexpensive wines as costing \u00a35 and less, while expensive bottles were \u00a310 and more.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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<\/em> 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<\/em> extremely ordinaire<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Earlier discussion of this topic here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,73,131],"tags":[139],"class_list":["post-8814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-randomness","category-wine","tag-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2ia","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8814"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8814\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13877,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8814\/revisions\/13877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}