WASHINGTON — The results of recent wine tastings conducted inside an MRI brain-scanning device have left high-end wineries with a bitter aftertaste but given consumers a new way to save money.
First, the savings tip: Remove the price sticker on the wine you bought. Put on a new one that quadruples the price. Or octuples it. And leave it on when you serve the wine.
A meticulous new study found that the more people think a wine cost, the more they like it. And the less they think it cost, the less they like it.
The link between cost and enjoyment might be hard-wired in the brain.
“It’s not the taste of the wine that changes” when its price goes up, said lead author Hilke Plassmann, a neuroeconomist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “Rather, it’s how pleasant people interpret the taste to be.”
Plassmann and her co-researchers say it works like this: While several parts of the brain assess a wine’s taste, a separate part — the medial orbitofrontal cortex — interprets the pleasantness of the sensation. When the perceived price of the wine goes up, there is no change in the taste-registering parts. But there’s more excitement in the brain part that decides how much you like it.
Her group’s findings were published in the Jan. 22 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study was performed on 20 Cal Tech students, who sipped a random series of small cabernet samples and were told their prices: $5, $10, $35, $45 and $90.
In the $10-$90 comparison, which used a $90 wine, they liked the wine half as much when they thought it cost $10. The students were all novice wine drinkers. However, members of the Stanford University Business School’s Wine Circle, who get together regularly to taste wines, had the same tendencies in a similar experiment.
