Expensive wine tastes better....doesn't it?

Jan 15 2008

According to a study by Californian researchers the more wine costs, the more people enjoy it despite how it tastes.

They say because there is an expectation that high quality wines are more expensive, people convince themselves they are more pleasurable to drink.

The researchers from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the California Institute of Technology say such pleasurable expectations trigger activity in the part of the brain that registers pleasure and this happens even though the part of the brain that interprets taste is not affected.

Previous research has examined how advertising and marketing affects behaviour, but this is the first study to demonstrate the direct effect on the brain.

For the study the researchers asked 21 adult volunteers to sample identical bottles of wine presented at different prices and by using brain scans they monitored the neural activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex - the area of the brain associated with decision-making and pleasure in terms of flavour.

They found that the more "expensive" wines were given higher ratings when it came to the amount of pleasure experienced and the part of the brain responsible for pleasure showed significant activity.

The authors say it has been known for some time that people's perceptions are affected by marketing, but it can now be seen that the brain itself is affected by price which may make marketing companies think twice about reducing prices.

The researchers say if an experience is pleasurable, the brain will use it to help guide future choices which has important implications for marketing strategies.

Experts say the study demonstrates how expectation can drive the sensory experience, to generate pleasure and also how people can be fooled and possibly seduced into spending more than they need to on a product such as wine.

However wine experts say it is not difficult to get the price of wine right, less expensive wine is less interesting and most people would have been able to tell the difference.

They say not everyone is going to enjoy a bottle of wine just because it is expensive.

Lead researcher Antonio Rangel says the experiment showed how "expectation can affect the actual encoding of the pleasantness of the experience."

The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.