A lot. I spend way less money than 15 years ago. You love great Paullliac? Buy GPL. You love Graces/Pessac? Buy Domaine de Chevalier. It must´t be Latour or Haut Brion. And so forth.
I never said price and quality were always in line. I guess you’re reasoning against a point that I didn’t make. My point is that there are many factors of wine enjoyment beyond the price of the bottle, and that there are qualitative indicators that are quite discernable blind. Your sentence “[t]his is the reason why people think the more expensive wine tastes better when comparing one wine to the other” is not true because it implies that there are no other reasons. I’d bet almost everyone here can tell the difference in quality between a $10 Cotes du Rhone and Rayas in a blind tasting. There are many factors at play. Certainly price is one, and it’s almost impossible to eliminate it without tasting blind, but to then assume that’s the reason great wines are thought to be great is ridiculous.
Doug,
you said almost everyone is able to see the difference between a Cotes Du Rhone and a Chateau Rayas. If the Cotes Du Rhone is from a top producer and a very good vintage I am not as sure. In your logic the same should have been true vor Chateau Reignac and Chateau Latour. It´s a very similar comparison – David vs. Goliath. In the video I posted you can see what happened.
Part of it depends on why you’re tasting. I used to participate in several groups like the one in the video. We did it for many years. The point of those was to learn, not to select the most or least expensive. It was of course no fun if all the wines were at the same price point, so while we tried to reduce the variables as much as possible, focusing on a region, a variety or blend, a vintage, etc., price was rarely restricted. All of us wanted to see how we rated the various wines and of course, if the cheapest was your fave, you went out and bought that one.
In other circumstances, I’d go to taste wines to see if I could guess what I’d put it on the shelf for. If you taste a wine and think it’s at most a $25 wine on the shelf, and someone tells you the cellar price is something that’s going to result in a shelf price of $50, you don’t pick up the wine. My wife is consistently able to price a wine somehow - I have no idea how she does it but she’s the most accurate person I’ve met. On boards like this, where most people aren’t in the business and they’re tasting wine as they’re consuming it for pleasure, you’re likely to get different brain scan results and different tasting results.
So to the extent that kind of scan matters, and according to Alan there are other factors that should be considered, it’s not going to apply to all manner of tasting. If you’ve tasted a wine multiple times, at the winery and then back at the office, and you’ve ordered a few palates of it, certain that you have a great $90 wine in your warehouse, and then you taste it and think it’s at best something you can sell for $30, it’s a guarantee that pleasure center in your brain will not be the one highlighted. I don’t know where the pisstivity center is, but that’s the one I’d be looking at.
What created the recent fuss is this recent scientific paper in Nature’s open access journal Scientific Reports
http://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-08080-0
The older paper (linked to in John’s link) was published in the Journal of Marketing Research:
https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/plassman_jmr_13_0613.pdf
Without having read the articles in detail, I am struggling to spot what is new in the recent paper, but there does seem to be more discussion of brain mechanisms. The conclusions for wine drinkers though seem to be the same.