In France, a decade ago a wine researcher named Fréderic Brochet served 57 French wine experts two identical midrange Bordeaux wines, one in an expensive Grand Cru bottle, the other accommodated in the bottle of a cheap table wine. The gurus showed a significant preference for the Grand Cru bottle, employing adjectives like “excellent” more often for the Grand Cru, and “unbalanced,” and “flat” more often for the table wine.
Whether a wine wins a medal in a competition appears to be pure chance:
Mr. Hodgson restricted his attention to wines entering a certain number of competitions, say five. Then he made a bar graph of the number of wines winning 0, 1, 2, etc. gold medals in those competitions. The graph was nearly identical to the one you’d get if you simply made five flips of a coin weighted to land on heads with a probability of 9%. The distribution of medals, he wrote, “mirrors what might be expected should a gold medal be awarded by chance alone.”
Thanks to Dave Lull.
Hi Seth,
I thought this was a good prescription from that article:
“If you ignore the web of medals and ratings, how do you decide where to spend your money?
One answer would be to do more experimenting, and to be more price-sensitive, refusing to pay for medals and ratings points.”
We each are “experts” in our own taste preferences: self-experiment away.
And maybe use the heuristic that the average price per bottle never exceed $10 in these experiments.
I suspect the health benefits from wine accrue via hormesis.
Intake becomes toxic at some point, I imagine, and I suspect that level is lower than we think.
Cheers,
Brent
I wonder if an online site, a cross between Wikipedia and Zagat, where anyone can add a rating, would help.
Or similar to Amazon’s book ratings. Such ratings could be very valuable, but they’re also very hackable currently, as fake ratings can be added by people with vested interests, and often they are quite highly incentivzed to do so. What is needed is for “real name” systems to become more common and acceptable, so people have to provide some evidence of who they are — say a credit card — in order to create an account. I think we’ll see such verification techniques become more common as digital natives age and constitute a greater proportion of the population, using the net more and more naturally.
This makes me wonder if I’m enjoying things in nice packages more than I need to. There might be a gold-mine in products in ugly packages.
If the framing effects really do make a wine better–I think Tyler Cowen argued for the possibility framing effects might add to real enjoyment–then perhaps you can use this effect to make your life better. You buy some cheap liquor and expensive liquor, pour them into identical, nice-looking bottles, and mix them up so you don’t know by look which bottle is expensive and which is cheap.