Neuromarketing: How The Price Of A Wine Can Influence Its Taste

(WorldCrunch) - Chances are that at least once in your life you've found yourself at a restaurant, sitting next to someone who claims to know everything about wine.

They usually hold their glass up toward the light to see the color of the wine, talk about tannins, grape variety, soil quality... Of course, the most expensive wine always seems to be the best one.

But recently, several studies have shown that the price itself of a wine can actually influence its taste.

In 2001, Frederic Brochet carried out two experiments at the University of Bordeaux. In one of them, he got 54 oenology students together and had them taste a glass of red wine, and a glass of white wine. They described each wine with as many details as they could. What Brochet did not tell them was that both glasses were actually the same wine. He had simply dyed the white wine red – which did not affect its taste. In the second experiment, he asked experts to assess the quality of two bottles of red wine. One was very expensive, the other one was cheap. Once again, he had tricked them, filling both bottles with the cheap wine. So, what were the results?

During the first experiment, with the dyed wine, the tasters described all sorts of berries, grapes and tannins in the red wine, just as if it was really red. None of the 54 students could tell the wine was actually white. In the second experiment, with the switched labels, the students gave lengthy descriptions of the cheap wine in the expensive bottle. They used adjectives such as “complex and full-bodied,” whereas they described the same wine, in the cheap bottle, as “weak and flat.”