Are Your Taste Buds Affected By Price?

I remember watching a blind wine taste on a major US network's morning show where a bottle of Two-Buck Chuck (Charles Shaw) was pitted against two other more expensive bottles of wine. "Chuck" as it is affectionately known, is sold for $1.99 per bottle at Trader Joe's outlets across the US. In the two rounds of tasting, Two-Buck Chuck came first or second, beating out bottles costing more than 20 times its cost. Wine connoisseurs were appalled. Last year its Chardonnay beat hundreds of other wines and won the top prize at the prestigious 2007 California State Fair Commercial Wine Competition. Two-Buck Chuck is not available in Canada, but every time I go to the US, I buy a bottle to drink. It's not a great wine, usually quite young and light in taste, but very drinkable, and hard to go wrong at that price.

What made me think of this was a recent article about an unusual wine tasting experiment conducted at Cal Tech and Stanford University. The scientists provided the wine tasters with identical wines at seemingly wide-ranging price points - from $5 to $90. Although the tasters were told that all the wines were different, the scientists were in fact presenting the same wines at different prices. The subjects consistently deemed the 'more expensive' wines tasted better, even though they were identical to 'cheaper' wines.

What was different with this experiment, was that a scanner was used to allow scientists to observe how the subjects' brains responded to each wine. When told they were being given a more expensive wine, a higher level of activity in a part of the brain known to be involved in our experience of pleasure was observed. What it revealed was the power of expectations. Since we may expect expensive wines to taste better than cheap wine, our brains convince us to literally make it so.

Wine snobs may not have any greater level of refinement when it comes to wine-tasting. They might just be basing their opinions on the price. That's why I always find it hilarious when Two-Buck Chuck beats out its more expensive competition!

So trust your senses and buy what your taste buds like, not what your eyes are telling you. By the way, my favourite daily drinking reds are Mezzomondo Negroamaro Salento at $8.40 per bottle or Zuccardi Fuzion Shiraz/Malbec at $7.45 (both of which are cheap by Canadian price standards).