10 things winemakers won’t tell you

(MW) - 1. You’ll be just as happy with the cheap stuff

We’re number one! In 2013, Americans consumed 321 million cases of wine—up 15% from 2005, according to research firm Impact Databank. That solidified our status as the world’s top wine-drinking nation in terms of volume, though we rank only 12th in consumption per person among major wine-drinking countries, far behind top-ranked France. Wine sales in the U.S., meanwhile, grew from $34.5 billion in 2005 to $43.9 billion last year.

Our growing thirst for vino is fueling a boom in U.S. winemaking: The number of wineries in the U.S. jumped more than 80% in the past decade, to around 8,000, according to WineAmerica, the trade group for American wineries. Many of these wine startups are small, boutique wineries, aiming at the premium end of the market with bottles priced at $20 or more.

But research suggests that most of us needn’t buy premium to indulge our love of wine. In blind taste tests, consumers—when they weren’t aware ahead of time of the price of a wine—slightly preferred cheaper wines, according to one of the most comprehensive studies on the topic, published in the Journal of Wine Economics in 2008. “The correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less,” wrote the authors, who analyzed the results of more than 6,000 tastings.

What’s more, we can’t tell whether a wine is expensive unless we actually see the price tag, research by psychologist Richard Wiseman suggests. In 2011, Wiseman gave 578 people blind tastes tests of wines at a variety of price points, and found that people identified the more expensive white only 53% of the time and the more expensive red only 47% of the time—essentially the same results you’d get from flipping a coin.

To be sure, more experienced drinkers do often prefer more expensive wines because they are trained to taste the complexity, balance, typicity (how typical it is of the grape and the region the grape was grown in) and intensity of the wine, says Jörn Kleinhans, the owner of the Wine Elite Sommelier Company. But, he adds, “For most consumers, it is hard to justify spending a large amount of money on wine.”