Mary forwards me an article from the Feakonomics blog: Cheap Wine – Freakonomics – Opinion – New York Times Blog. In it, Steve Levitt does a blind taste testing at Harvard Society of Fellows: two expensive bottles from the club’s cellar (one of which was split into two bottles), and one cheap bottle of the same varietal from a local store.
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.
[…] 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 this working paper of the American Association of Wine Economists. Their conclusion: fancy people with lots of training can tell cheap wine from expensive wine, but regular people cannot.
The comments are actually just as interesting.
There is a somewhat false dichotomy here, of course, assuming that cheap-vs-expensive is congruent with bad-vs-good, or good-vs-better. Most folk who drink wine for something other than showing off know that is an extremely fuzzy curve — there are cheap (or at least inexpensive) bottles of wine that are quite tasty (though many of them aren’t), and there are some expensive bottles that are wildly overblown (though some of them aren’t).
I’ve tasted what I’ve considered extortionately expensive wine and been very impressed; more than I’d expect the placebo effect of knowing the price. (And I’ve tasted some I haven’t cared for, that were over-aged, or that simply didn’t match my palate.) There are, in fact, differences in wine quality, and to a degree those differences follow the cost curve … with a lot of outliers.
Mix in the truism of “there’s no accounting for tastes,” and the blind tasting above isn’t much more meaningful than pretentious wine snobbery is.
In short — I don’t plan on dismantling the wine cellar any time soon.