For many products, quality, price and pleasure are strongly linked. Wine is an exception.
Richard Wiseman, a professor of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, invited 578 people to blind taste wines that ranged from £3.49 for a red Bordeaux to £30 for a champagne. “People could tell the differencebetween wines under £5 and those over £10 only 53% of the time for whites and only 47% of the time for reds. Overall, they would have been just as successful flipping a coin to guess,” Wiseman said in 2011.
UK wine writer Jamie Goode dismissed the study as “a publicity stunt dressed up as a piece of scientific research … It was not a comparison between two wines ‒ one cheap and one expensive. Instead, subjects were given just a single wine to taste and then asked to say whether it was cheap or expensive … It would still be difficult, but considerably less so, if the subjects had been offered a comparison of two wines to choose between.”
In another UK study, members of a wine club engaged in four blind tastings of white Burgundy (chardonnay) and red Bordeaux (cabernet sauvignon or merlot-based blends), ranging sixfold in price. In three of the tastings, no link was found between price and enjoyment, and in the fourth it was a negative relationship.
Only about 20% of consumers should even consider paying extra for a reserve bottling, according to a study of more than 800 wine drinkers by Roman Weil, a Chicago accountancy professor and wine researcher. Each consumer faced three glasses of wine, from the same producer and vintage. Two of the glasses contained identical wines of either the regular or the reserve, while the third contained the other one.
Weil recorded whether drinkers could distinguish between the single item and the two of the same. Forty per cent of drinkers were able to distinguish correctly; not much more than the 33% result you’d expect if drinkers had randomly picked one out of the three.
Of the 40% who could distinguish between them, only 52% preferred the more expensive reserve.
Redmetal Vineyards Bridge Pā Triangle Hawke’s Bay Syrah 2024
★★★★½
Delicious young, this powerful red is syrah-based, with splashes of cabernet franc (9%) and merlot (4%). Deeply coloured, it is sturdy and lush, with rich, well-ripened fruit flavours, hints of liquorice and dark chocolate, and a seductively smooth finish. (14.5% alc/vol) $25-$35
