TJ, a loyal reader, posted a link on our Facebook page to a fascinating podcast on Freakonomics Radio entitled, “Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better?”
The show takes a fresh look at some old data that suggests that the answer to this question, for the average wine drinker, is no. Weaving together interesting anecdotes from a Harvard economist, a wine importer and Robin Goldstein – a food and wine critic infamous in the wine industry for his controversial research – the show sheds new light on the relationship between wine, critics, and consumers.
“When you take a sip of Cabernet, what are you tasting? The grape? The tannins? The oak barrel? Or the price?” the show’s website asks. “Believe it or not, the most dominant flavor may be the dollars.”
The show goes on to describe various episodes that illustrate that if you think a wine is expensive, you’ll enjoy it more, and that when the price is taken out of the equation in blind tastings, the average consumer has a preference for the cheap stuff.
That’s the thrust of the segment with Goldstein, whose 2008 paper detailing more than 6,000 blind tastings reached the conclusion that casual wine drinkers actually prefer less expensive wine, and that only trained professionals give higher scores in blind tastings to pricier wines. That begs the question: Why train yourself to appreciate expensive wine, when you can continue to get as much or more enjoyment from good, inexpensive wine?
Goldstein, a scourge on the wine establishment, has some credentials to back up his research, which has been published by the American Association of Wine Economist. In addition to being a food and wine critic, he has contributed to the New York Times’ Freakonomics blog and is the author of at least nine books, including his series written with Alexis Herschkowitsch, The Wine Trials, on inexpensive wine.
His scholarly work focuses on perceptual bias, price signals and “placebo effects in the cognitive processing of sensory experience” (i.e., why when we know a wine is expensive, it tastes better to us). He also has an A.B. in neuroscience and philosophy from Harvard University and a J.D. from the Yale Law School, and a certificate in cooking from the French Culinary Institute in New York. But he may be most famous for the story of how his fictional restaurant in Milan won an Award of Excellence from Wine Spectator magazine in 2008 – by submitting the $250 fee and a wine list that amounted to a catalog of the very worst Italian wines, as measured by Wine Spectator’s own ratings, exposing the awards program as a pure advertising scheme.
The methodology behind Goldstein’s The Wine Trials books is controversial, to say the least, in its absolute dedication to blind tastings. His critics, mostly trained wine professionals and wine writers, say he glosses over a key finding of his own blind tastings, that wine professional can tell the difference between cheaper and higher-priced wines, and demonstrate a preference for the latter. Others note that there is more to enjoying wine than just blind tasting, and that only small sips taken without food isn’t the best way to judge wines.
We fall squarely … in the middle of the debate. We buy most of the basic premises of The Wine Trials: that the placebo effect makes expensive and highly-rated wines taste better; that outrageously priced wines are rarely worth the money; that the precision promised by the widely used 100-point scale is absurd; and that low-priced wines can be just as enjoyable as their pricier counterparts. But there are apparent flaws in his methodology – for example, he offers precious little information about the more expensive wines sampled in his blind tastings – and we certainly don’t think that blind tastings by hundreds of wine newbies is the one and only way to judge wine.
Yet scrolling through the 176 sub-$15 recommendations in the 2011 edition of Wine Trials, which the authors say scored the best among the 560 total wines tasted blind, it’s reassuring to find many of our perennial favorites. Mark West Pinot Noir in the “light red New World” category, Columbia Crest Grand Estates Cabernet and Big House Red in the “heavy red New World” class, and the Perrin family’s “chicken wine” La Vieille Ferme Blanc was listed among “heavy white Old World” wines. One of our newest favorites, Portugal’s Quinta de Cabriz, was among the “heavy red Old World” recommendations.
In an obvious reflection of the tastes of the average American consumer, the category with the largest number of recommendations was the "heavy red New World" group, with 44. But regular readers won’t be surprised that the category with the greatest overlap in recommendations between this column and the blind tasters was the "light red Old World" wines. No fewer than six of our favorite Spanish Riojas, and our longstanding top-pick Tuscan blend were among the 24 recommendations in that category.
Check out the slideshow for a representative sample of local sales on the Wine Trials recommendations. But maybe you shouldn’t buy them on sale. If you pay more, maybe they'll taste better ...?
Cheers!
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