Wine and Myth: A brain scan delivers the truth

Quality has it´s price. Every child learns and knows this sentence. Therefore everybody assume the pricier a product is the better it is. Some say you get what you pay for. But a scientific study shows that the price of a product has an impact on the perception. It can be seen by a brain scanner. If people know they taste an expensive wine a certain sector in their brain is active. The sector is called reward center. This is the reason why people think the more expensive wine tastes better when comparing one wine to the other. But in the experimental setup I am talking about the wines were the same. The experimental subjects only thought wine A is more expensive than wine B. And the difference was significant when analyzing the pictures of the brain activity.

This is a very interesting insight for all of us, isn´t it? The luxury brands have an invaluable advantage.

I don’t think this is particularly surprising. Most are not experts in all, and so we rely on external factors for confirmation of quality. That’s why Robert Parker and Wine Spectator both became tremendously successful. It’s why Consumer Reports exists and why many rich folks have professional art consultants to help them choose what to buy.

Even basic business people with a penchant for wine understand both supply and demand and costs of goods sold factors. For instance, one should expect that a $60 napa cab will be better than a $10 napa cab. That expectation does not have to do with folks being snobby. But high quality grapes from a high quality vineyard managed by a high quality team picked, processed, crushed, and fussed over by a high quality wine making team, and then aged for 18 months in mostly new high quality french oak barrels before being stored for an additional six months in bottle in a high quality warehouse before being packaged and sold in high quality bottles means the wine cannot be sold for a profit at $10. But maybe it can be sold for $59.99.

If someone put two unmarked bottles of wine in front of me and said this is $10 and this is $60, which one do you want to try most? I’d select the $60 bottle every time for those reasons and don’t doubt that my brain would be actively processing those thoughts.

Now once we’ve tried the $60 and the $10 bottle (and they’re the same), I think most of us would be looking for a qualitative difference in favor of the more expensive wine, and that’s likely just confirmation bias. At the same time, myself and almost certainly most if not all others on this board (a super geek board) have picked cheaper wines as qualitative superiors to lavishly expensive bottles in blind and non-blind tastings. So we can go the other way, too.

Do you have a link or citation?

Yes, but unfortunately only in German language …

https://www.sz-online.de/nachrichten/wissen/warum-teurer-wein-vielen-besser-schmeckt-3751171.html

The brain’s susceptibility to suggestion has been discussed many times in the past both directly and indirectly. Tasting rooms know this and that is why they always set up the wine before you taste it. It takes a lot of confidence, usually derived from experience, to ignore the external influences and taste only what is in the glass. I can say that it took me many years to get to the point where price and history now have a limited impact on my appreciation of a given wine. Surely some remains but its not at all like it was when I started my interest in wine over 25 years ago and drank what I thought I was supposed to like versus what I did like.

This is very old news. People who set prices on new commodities have known it for years.

The news is the scientific proof by a brain scanner.

While there have been a bunch of stories in the past week on this, it seems the basic research was published two years ago:

http://time.com/money/3846874/expensive-price-tag-cheap-wine-brain-placebo-effect/

This crap again? I know people who can consistently identify quality, within a reasonable range anyway, in blind tastings. Sure, price is one factor affecting our level of enjoyment. It’s false logic to say that price/label bias is therefore the only factor, as stated in the first post here.

“Wine and Myth: A brain scan delivers the truth.”

The truth is what?

That, therefore, there are no ‘real’ differences between wines, other than price point?

Tell us about your drinking habits!

The brain scan only shows where what we already knew was happening was happening. This is one of the common popular misconceptions of current neuroscience. It is doing impressive things in mapping out and indicating where responses that we know about occur. But it doesn’t generally provide new definitional information about those things. Thus, for instance, Doug Schulman’s resistance to this very old information isn’t really undermined by the fact that the reward center lights up when we think we are being exposed to a valuable experience because the fact of that lighting up doesn’t show where the information that we are given such experiences usually comes from. Knowledge of price, as he claims, is only one factor, though in an experiment controlling for other factors, that one’s determinants will surely stand out.

Meanwhile, marketing research on the effect of price on sales is really very old news.

You don’t need to spend money on studies and brain scanners to get these results, all you have to do is volunteer to pour wine at a big event and count how many times you have the following interaction.
You: What can I pour for you?
Event Goer: Give me whatever is most expensive.
You: Red or White?
EG: The most expensive?!

That being said, I am not sure why people are getting angry about this. Bias is real. We all have it. Therefore it is better to know it’s there so you can get past it to the truth.

I’ve seen people do that at art galleries and Hi Fi shops, as well. [cheers.gif]

What do you think the brain scans would show for the participants in a WB debate over decanting techniques? [scratch.gif]

Profound pleasure is my guess.

This is in line with the studies of Thorstein Veblen, I think:

Doug,

I have decent experience with blind tastings and my conclusion is different than your statement. Look here what can happen when even some of the most experienced and talented palates taste blind.

I tasted with these people several times. There is no doubt that you won´t find better tasters than Michel Bettane, Olivier Poussier and so forth. No way.

Consistently doesn’t necessarily mean always or at least I didn’t mean it that way. Maybe it was a poor choice of words, but I definitely know people who can do it with far better than random odds of being correct. My point about false logic still stands as well.

Out of curiosity, how many wines were tasted at that event?

You see the complete list at the end of the video.

The point is that price and quality are often not in line. The most expensive wines are not better than wines to a fraction of the price. At least not in most of the cases This is the message. Proven in numerous blind tastings. I was participant of several tastings. And as I said – it was not the problem of the tasters because they were the best you will find.

And there has been at least one post on this not too long ago. The useful take-away from the article John linked is:

“One big grain of salt? Neuroscientists don’t all agree that using brain structure to infer behavior or personality makes for sound science—and Plassmann and Weber acknowledge in their study that some researchers are skeptical of that methodology in general.”

As an MRI scientist and a wine enthusiast I find this line of work fascinating. But I’m also very aware that just “lighting up” some part of your brain doesn’t necessarily mean you’re thinking some particular thing. The OP study might indeed have some significance for people without a lot of experience or expertise, but it is probably less meaningful for people like us - who think we know a lot more :wink:

Having said that, we have all experienced an initially blind wine tasting a lot better once the label is revealed…

Hmm, this calls for full on blind tasting - even to price, and see what people can discern.

Asking one more time, how has this information affected your wine choices?