The pricier the wine, the more we enjoy it!

The wines and alcoholic beverage industry as a whole is just a huge marketing contraption, capable of churning brand after brand. It has recently been shown that the pricier the bottle and the fancier the label, the more we end up enjoying it. We have been conditioned to believe that the more we pay for a bottle of wine, it will only have to taste better; of course this is our fault from the beginning, because we are not wine experts – the price we pay for the wine is our only proxy.

Dr Rangel came to this conclusion by scanning the brains of 20 volunteers while giving them sips of wine. He used a trick called functional magnetic-resonance imaging, which can detect changes in the blood flow in parts of the brain that correspond to increased mental activity. He looked in particular at the activity of the medial orbitofrontal cortex. This is an area of the brain that previous experiments have shown is responsible for registering pleasant experiences.

Dr Rangel gave his volunteers sips of what he said were five different wines made from cabernet sauvignon grapes, priced at between $5 and $90 a bottle. He told each of them the price of the wine in question as he did so. Except, of course, that he was fibbing. He actually used only three wines. He served up two of them twice at different prices.

What is the truth?The scanner showed that the activity of the medial orbitofrontal cortices of the volunteers increased in line with the stated price of the wine. For example, when one of the wines was said to cost $10 a bottle it was rated less than half as good as when people were told it cost $90 a bottle, its true retail price. Moreover, when the team carried out a follow-up blind tasting without price information they got different results. The volunteers reported differences between the three “real” wines but not between the same wines when served twice.

via The Economist

By the way, wines are not the only things the marketing machine turned more expensive. We significantly overpay for bottled water, coffee, diamonds, weddings (etc). What else is there?