I blogged last week about blind wine tastings — my own casual experiments as well as some more serious academic ones. The bottom line is that in blind wine tastings, there is a zero or even slightly negative correlation between the ratings of regular people and the price of the wine they are drinking; for experts the relationship between rating and price is positive.
I’ve learned a few more things from blog readers about cheap wine over the last few days.
From thewinetrials.comRobin Goldstein has an excellent book, The Wine Trials, which describes the blind wine tastings and which cheap wines people liked. The beauty of this book is that you can bring an $8 bottle of wine to a party and explain that it tastes better than the $28 bottle you would have bought. If the host of the party is an economist, you can tape a $10 bill to the bottle for an even split of the joint surplus.
Not until I read Goldstein’s book did I realize just how weak the correlation was in blind tastings between expert evaluations and price in experimental settings. Yet, somehow Wine Spectator, which claims to do tastings blind (at least with respect to who the producer is), has an extremely strong positive correlation between prices and ratings. Hmmm … seems a bit suspicious.
It turns out that the story with respect to cheap wine is even more true for champagne. I’ve never tasted a $12 bottle of champagne that I didn’t enjoy immensely. It turns out I am not alone. In blind tests, Domaine Ste. Michelle Cuvee Brut, a $12 sparkling wine from Washington, is preferred nearly two to one to $150 Dom Perignon if you strip away the labels.
Dan Ariely (author of Predictably Irrational) and his co-authors have an interesting experiment with beer and balsamic vinegar. If you tell people ahead of time there will be vinegar in their beer, they won’t like the taste. If you don’t tell them and do a blind tasting, they do like the taste. If you let them form their opinions and then tell them there was vinegar in the beer, most continue to say it tasted good.
I am generally skeptical of neuro-economics, but here is one such study which finds that the firing of neurons in the brain is affected by how much the subject thinks the wine he/she is being served cost. The bottom line seems to be that if you think a wine is more expensive, you really do enjoy it more.
Finally, a wonderful tale published in The New Yorker a year ago, written by Patrick Radden Keefe, profiled an ambitious conman who fooled the world’s leading wine experts for more than a decade before his nefarious plot unraveled. I can’t remember the last time I read an article this long from beginning to end in one sitting.
(Hat tip: Eric Jorgenson)
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I think you mentioned before that the issue that most lay individuals lack the trained pallet of a wine expert to tell the difference or fully appreciate an expensive bottle of wine. If ratings of wine experts can correlate to price then the price clearly does indicate quality and those that think they can get a good wine for $10 are in fact not actually drinking wine, but merely an alcoholic beverage made from fermented grapes.
While a $10 bottle can provide a perfectly enjoyable experience, it would succeed in being measured against the individual’s own metrics (“wow, this tastes better than seawater”), not an objective standard comparing a wine to what a wine can and should be.
A good analogy would be movies. Some movies can be very entertaining, but at the same time complete crap. While they succeed at producing enjoyment, they fail in the art of good cinema. The ignorant probably won’t notice or care, but those who have studied up on the subject and who have been exposed to many classic films most certainly will.
Dear jeff;
Been to france lately. I was sitting in a taxi last year in Paris and had this conversation with the driver. He was talking about disco dancing and how he and his wife were going to a disco that night and perhaps my family would like to join them. I thought to myself wow- so much for their supposed elitism- perhaps I should reconsider my own. Just a matter of time before we catch up.
I then went on to have a similar conversation with a member of the French upper class. He was perhaps too polite to take it further (say invite my family to his home for a taste of french cuisine, But I was surprized to have had such a conversation altogether. So not so different after all.
The key insight I took away is this… most beer sucks so bad, that you wouldn’t even know if someone poured vinegar into it!
Obviously there are some greatly overpriced wines out there, and some relative bargains to be had. However, there’s also a clear fallacy in equating most popular with “best.” By that standard, is cheddar cheese the best in the world (or perhaps, Cheetos)? Same with restaurants – more people choose to dine at Applebee’s than La Bernardin or Charlie Trotter’s, and even more at McDonald’s. Apparently, between Yellow Tail, Two Buck Chuck and the abundance of chain restaurants, an economist’s taste utopia is already available in any given suburb you might select.
My girlfriend & I have hosted a number of blind wine tastings at our house & not once has the most expensive wine in the tasting been the winner.
Mike, #9-
Case in point: XXX with Vin Disel. The crappiest best movie I have ever seen.
Wow, this is a blog on economics and Levitt does not consider any other aspect than taste on the cost of a wine. Very enlightening…
Mr. Levitt, I don’t know why you pick on wine so much. Let us not confuse preference with quality. Many people would prefer to read Harry Potter over Crime and Punishment, but that does not make the former the superior product. Or, you could very well prefer a Big Mac to a fine steak finished with a madeira glaze, but that does not mean they should be priced equally.
Also, the negative correlation between blind-taste-test preference and price by average people is fairly common. Here’s an analogy:
You’re a golfer, right? Have you noted that the best clubs and balls in the world – those designed for the pros and scratch golfers – are not usable for 30+ handicappers like me? The balls are too soft – I would destroy them and slice them off into oblivion. The clubs are too unforgiving and I’d never hit the sweet spot. But put these things in the hands of the experts, and they greatly outperform my third-hand irons and bargain bin balls.
A fine wine is designed to be consumed by people who like fine wines – it is not designed to be consumed by people who can’t tell the difference. Just as balata golf balls are not designed for my game.
These posts do bring up an interesting point, though. That is the desire for consumers to want a product that is too good for them. Why shouldn’t I want the $2000 irons even though they’ll make me worse? Those are the clubs the pros use! And why shouldn’t I want to drink “better” wine, even if I don’t like it. It’s better wine, right?
This is the absolute heart of pretentiousness. Is that why you pick on wine? But don’t confuse a prevalence of pretentiousness among the users with a lack of differentiation in the quality of the product.