Four (or Five!) Reasons Why

…Wine, It’s All In Your Head

1. At the end of the day, you like what you like. While there are innumerable magazines, countless experts and friends who fancy themselves oenophiles, once you pull out the cork only you can be the real judge of whether a wine is any good. While ratings and price are usually closely connected and often are important to trained wine drinkers/collectors, personal taste should be the ultimate factor in choosing what to drink.

2. Wine drinking, or more importantly “tasting”, is like any skill. Training changes your relative perception of what is good. In other words, you like what you know…or don’t know. In his book, “The Wine Trials,” Robin Goldstein shows that novice wine drinkers have significantly different, and cheaper, tastes than wine experts (those who have had some sort of training or professional experience). This explains why, in the study of mostly novice wine drinkers, a $10 bottle of sparkling wine from Washington state outscored a $150 bottle of Dom Pérignon, while Two-Buck Chuck topped a $55 bottle of Napa Valley cabernet.

3. Unfortunately, personal taste is often swayed by emotion. And we can blame marketing for bringing emotion into the fold. Case in point - critter labels. What’s a critter label? Have you ever seen a wine bottle with a cat, dog, hippo or penguin? Now you know. An ACNielson survey conducted in 2006 showed that 18% of all wine bottles had an animal on them and accounted for over $600 million in sales in the U.S. I can’t even imagine how those numbers have changed over the last two years. Another study conducted in New York showed that a critter label can provide a 20% in sales versus a non-critter wine, and they are particularly popular among women shoppers.

4. An experiment by the California Institute of Technology and the Stanford Business School demonstrated that the more expensive consumers think a wine is, the more pleasure they take in drinking it. As the New York Times notes, “The fact is, the correlation between price and quality is so powerful that it affects not just our perception of wine but of all consumer goods.”

5. While scoring has helped us develop a sense of relative taste (”Look, honey. Parker scored this a 91!”), Eric Asimov of the New York Times points out that wine, or the enjoyment of it, is contextual - your enjoyment depends on where you are and who you are with. Asimov notes, “The proverbial little red wine, so delicious in a Tuscan village with your sweetie, never tastes the same back home in New Jersey. Meanwhile, the big California cabernet, which you enjoyed so much with your work buddies at a steakhouse, ties tucked between buttons, doesn’t have that triumphant lift with a bowl of spaghetti.”