I spent three years at Harvard in the Society of Fellows. I had no obligations there except to spend my Monday nights eating fancy meals in the company of some of the world’s most brilliant thinkers: Nobel Prize-winning scientist Amartya Sen, philosopher Robert Nozick, etc. Dinner was always accompanied by expensive wine from the society’s wine cellar.
Photo: Rhett RedelingsI have an extremely underdeveloped palate. I’ve never liked wine much. Given the choice between gourmet cooking and fast food, I’ll usually take the fast food. While the Society of Fellows was an incredible experience, it wasn’t a particularly well paying one. As poor as I was, it didn’t make sense to me to be drinking $60 bottles of wine that I didn’t even enjoy.
So I suggested that perhaps there should be two tracks: one that drank wine and one that didn’t. Those of us who agreed not to drink wine could perhaps be paid in cash some portion of the savings from our abstinence. My suggestion was not viewed kindly.
So I tried to make my point in a different way. On Tuesday afternoons we had wine tastings. I asked if I could be allowed the opportunity to conduct one of these wine tastings “blind” to see what we could learn from sampling wines without first knowing what we were drinking. Everyone thought this was a great idea. So with the help of the wine steward I selected two expensive bottles from the wine cellar and then I went down the street to the liquor store and bought the cheapest bottle of wine they had made from the same type of grape.
I thus had two different expensive wines and one cheap one. I tried to make things more interesting by splitting one of the expensive bottles into two different decanters. Thus, in total the wine tasters had four wines to taste, although in reality there were only three different wines, with one sampled twice by each taster. I gave them a rating sheet and each person rated each of the four wines.
The results could not have been better for me. There was no significant difference in the rating across the four wines; the cheap wine did just as well as the expensive ones. Even more remarkable, for a given drinker, there was more variation in the rankings they gave to the two samples drawn from the same bottle than there was between any other two samples. Not only did they like the cheap wine as much as the expensive one, they were not even internally consistent in their assessments.
There was a lot of anger when I revealed the results, especially the fact that I had included the same wine twice. One eminent scholar stormed out of the room stating that he had a cold — otherwise he would have detected my sleight of hand with certainty. Armed with this evidence, I again made my pitch for extra compensation to those who passed on the expensive wine at dinners.
My plan once again received an icy reception.
Fifteen years later, I am happy to report that the results of my little experiment have been confirmed by rigorous academic research involving more than 5,000 subjects, as published in a paper entitled “Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better?” from the American Association of Wine Economists published in the Journal of Wine Economics, Vol. 3, No. 1. Their conclusion: fancy people with lots of training can tell cheap wine from expensive wine, but regular people cannot. (A non-gated working paper version is available here.)
What lesson should we take from this? No matter what, do not let yourself become a wine expert who can tell the difference between cheap and expensive wines. When it comes to your pocketbook and wine, ignorance is bliss.
(Hat tip: Camilla Reimer)
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I would recommend that you download and watch a BBC television series called “Oz and James Big Wine Adventure”. It features Oz Clark, the reigning World Wine Tasting Champion and notable wine critic, and James May, an automotive journalist, co-star of the BBC series Top Gear and generally down to Earth bloke.
Oz of course represented the typical “wine ponce” who could appreciate an expensive bottle, while James felt all of that was BS and was looking for the best value. Over the course of two series Oz taught James how to properly enjoy/appreciate a good bottle of wine, and just like you said, James became frustrated with being forced to pay more for superior bottles of wine.
The series also shows that good bargains can be found if one does their homework with 2 Buck Chuck being perhaps the most extreme example. In each series they would find a selection of very good wines (or even Champaign region Champaign) that could be bought for under $10 . It did become apparent that if good was no longer good enough, the cost of a better wine experience is asymptotic as one approaches the fictional “perfect bottle”.
Wine appreciation, like so many other upper class activities, was born to suit the needs of the idle rich. To fully appreciate (or collect/invest in) things wine or art or scotch or horses, one must devote a significant amount of time into becoming a subject matter expert. Most people, including many of todays upper class, have jobs or interests that preclude them from having the devotion necessary to become experts and so they chose to just fake it if you will. While this risks embarrassment when their economist friends pop by, it is unlikely that someone who devoted their life to wine collecting would be able to run a hedge fund or high technology startup.
I once had a several-day trip to Napa Valley in CA (with one day in Sonoma Valley). I tasted wines at a lot of vineyards. My experience — as dictated by my own personal taste — was:
1. Most wineries had a level of quality that went across the board; i.e. the best wine at Winery B might still not be as good as the worst wine at Winery A.
2. Despite this, there were a few wines at some vineyards that stood out in some way … i.e. they were either much better, or much worse, than everything else the vineyard produced. But this was not common.
3. Price was not really a factor; i.e. there were some expensive wines I liked, and some cheap ones, and some in-between.
4. I tended to favor white wines which were about in the middle of the dry-to-sweet spectrum. Others that I was with favored other “brackets” of wines.
4a. A lot of people who say they like their wines “dry,” don’t … they actually prefer their wines sweet, or in the middle-of-the-road as I do. IOW they don’t really know what “dry” means, they just see people on TV talk about wines being “dry” so they just repeat that.
5. Rules such as “Never drink white wine with steak” are largely overblown … you should instead drink wines you like with food you like. There may be exceptions, but I’ve never come across them personally.
6. The wineries that had the most interesting tours and the most attentive employees, tended to be among the better ones (as stated in my observation #1), although this might have been a psychological effect (i.e. since I was treated well and enjoyed the tour I liked the wines).
7. Because I didn’t delve too deeply in red wines, I largely missed the distinctions of vintage which are most notable among them. But the people I traveled with, who did enjoy red wines, found that a lot of the “rules” about vintage (e.g. which years are better than others) largely did not matter all that much.
8. CA’s “Wine Country” is a marvelous region that everyone should get to at some time in his/her life.
Since then I’ve tried other wines but have generally found that factors such as price, country of origin, etc. do not determine whether or not I like a wine. The most significant factor, I’ve found, is the label/vineyard.
Bottom line is I’ve saved a lot of money, by rooting out good wines that aren’t expensive, and enjoying those.
The same is true for vodkas. What people are willing to pay for a handle of Grey Goose results more from marketing brilliance than from any actual improvement in the taste. Dirt cheap Popov, run through a Brita filter a few times, will taste very nearly the same as any top shelf vodka. After all, vodka by definition is tasteless, it’s just watered down ethanol.
I couldn’t agree more. I always tell my girlfriend that it’s true, I do have an unrefined pallet (as she always love to point out), but it’s a huge asset. There is something to be said about enjoying every single glass of wine, no matter how cheap or expensive.
regular people.
Irregular people–drink mulberry wine. laxative qualties.
can’t help but wonder that there are so many mulberry trees here and those magic (colon blow0 waters down the road in French Lick. It’s like they put a university here for constipated thinkers.
One of my favorite running gags in the movie “Sideways” is that Paul Giamatti’s character carefully and critically analyzes every wine they come across. But no matter what they’re drinking, Thomas Haden Church’s character responds, “I dunno … tastes all right to me.”
Personally, I’m a “tastes all right to me” kind of guy.
Doesn’t Becker and Stigler talk about this in their “De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum”? In that paper, they talk about fine music, not fine wine, but the same principle applies. There’s a correlation between enjoyment and price for experts because experts have a capital stock of discernment accumulated through years of drinking wine. The same goes for movies, art in general, etc. We invest in these skills because they raise the marginal benefit of future consumption. Unless I’m missing something, that is all that this paper is saying. Experts have discerning palettes, and that enables them to notice and appreciate the subtle differences in quality for wine. Sounds right to me but LEvitt’s normative conclusion doesn’t.
When I was in college, I worked as a host at an LA restaurant with an award-winning wine list, but no sommelier. Sometimes diners would ask for advice on wine and I would tell them the chef’s recommendation (always vastly expensive) but add that since it wasn’t the chef that would be drinking the bottle, they should really order whatever sounded good.
I got more complaints from people that took the chef’s recommendation than those that went with their own choice – even if they were commiting some egregious wine heresy. Drink what you like.