Not all amateurs are lucky enough to be experts in the field. How do you recognize a good wine? Its colour, its aromas and… its price? Certainly a bit of all that (yes, the one who writes these lines is not very well versed on the subject either, that's fine…), but this last factor would have more impact than we think on our appreciation beverage, according to a study by the European Institute of Business Administration in collaboration with the University of Bonn. If a wine seems to us, it is not necessarily because it is, but because we paid more for it. To reach such conclusions, the researchers brought together 30 people, half of them women and half men, to whom they gave different wines to taste.
Before each tasting, the price of the wine was notified to the participants. They first tasted 1 milliliter of wine via a tube, rinsed their mouths, then tasted a second similar sample but at a different price. The scientists passed an MRI to each "tester" in order to observe the activity of the brain:the pleasure felt was greater during the tasting of the most expensive wine. They then rated the wines tasted on a scale of 1 to 9, and the sample that was notified as being more expensive was deemed better than the other (while, we repeat, the wine was the same) . Professor Hilke Plassmann, the originator of the study explains:“A wine generates a superior taste experience when higher quality is expected of it, mainly because of its price ". Well, we're not sure we wouldn't have been fooled either... Interesting, anyway!
