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Food

Terrible Wine Tastes Great If You Just Lie to Your Brain

It turns out that the power of the mind can persuade you that a bottle of wine barely above bum quality tastes like a $200 zinfandel.
Photo via Flickr user donireewalker

What do you think of when you imagine the modern wine connoisseur? A smartly dressed oenophile civilly discussing the merits of a citrusy Chablis over delicate canapé? How about a Texan sorority getting white-girl wasted on a gracefully cascading waterfall of Boone's Farm?

If you chose the latter, you might not be too far off. A study recently published in the American Marketing Association's Journal of Marketing Research has proven the way a wine is marketed can actually alter the brain's chemistry with an incredibly strong placebo effect.

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OK, so studies about wine and perception aren't completely new. Experts have long believed that just like everything else on this mortal coil, appearance is king. Hell, even the new study's authors, Hilke Plassmann and Bernd Weber admit, "Studies have shown that people enjoy identical products such as wine or chocolate more if they have a higher price tag."

Here's the thing, though. Before now, nobody has definitively "examined the neural and psychological processes required for such marketing placebo effects to occur." In other words, we didn't know whether consumers' preconceptions are blinding them to taste or actually altering brain function.

That is, until now.

Participants in the new study were given five wines to consume. The prices of the wines, they were told, ranged from $5 to $90. In fact, they were consuming three different wines at only two price points—but the lab rat gourmands didn't know it.

Sure, the participants tended to rate the taste of the allegedly more expensive wines higher than that of the "cheaper" wines. But guess what? When they were given MRIs, the tests revealed that the participants' brains were tricked too—their brains responded as if they were drinking different wines, when they were actually drinking the same wine.

Unless your roomie happens to be the Mentalist or some sort of lie-detecting, micromagic rock star, maybe you should think about trading in that '97 Opus One for half a box of Trader Joe's Shiraz and a Frisbee filled with some backwash-laden Yellow Tail.

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Oh, yeah: You also might want to pick your friends very wisely: "The authors were able to further determine that people who were strong reward-seekers or who were low in physical self-awareness were also more susceptible to having their experience shaped by prejudices about the product." Well, shit. Reward seekers? Low self-awareness? That's pretty much all of us earthlings, excluding some German Dunkers and a few extremely ascetic tree stumps.

Winemakers have long known that by making consumers believe a bottle is more expensive than it is, they can boost enjoyment of the wines they are selling. In fact, David Schuemann of CF Napa—a brand design agency—wrote a book called 99 Bottles of Wine in which he divulged the tricks of the trade. "We always make a wine look about $10 more expensive than it is. So then it appears like an even better value," Schuemann told NPR.

Scheumann says gold foil and stamping along with minimalist, uncluttered designs designate "expensive" to wine drinkers. But results may vary depending on location. A recent study showed that among Chinese consumers of wine in Hong Kong, "95 percent. . . prefer 'elegant contemporary' labels with red as the dominant color." And a 2012 study out of Stanford University showed that wine drinkers thought that wine in bottles designated "organic" or "biodynamic" were superior to other wines not so-designated, even if the designations were phony.

Hilke Plassmann, the lead author of the recent study about brain imaging, is a professor at INSEAD, the European business school that was founded in France. The French, of course, know very well how labeling—or lack thereof—can influence wine drinkers. During the famed Judgment of Paris, a wine competition that took place in 1976, a panel of French judges carried out two blind tasting competitions and—much to their shock and chagrin—a California wine won in each category. The event heralded a wave of popularity and acceptance of New World wines worldwide.

The bottom line is this: when you take away the labels, preconceived notions fall by the wayside, at least when it comes to wine—and swingers' parties, of course.

And when you tell people they're drinking fancy wine, they'll damn well believe it. Yes, our brains can be tricked into orgasmic bouts of pleasure.

So Robert Parker be damned, it's time to bust out that Westeros-themed zinfandel and a seriously industrial-sized decanter.