Why the Dearer Wine Tastes Better
Tell people a wine costs more and they enjoy it more, and a pleasure-related brain region responds with them. Blind tastings and larger recent studies show the effect is real but less dependable than its reputation.
Key takeaways
- In a 2008 brain-scanning study, 20 people rated the same wine as more pleasant when told it cost $45 rather than $5, and a pleasure-related brain region responded too.
- Across more than 6,000 blind tastings analysed in 2008, people who could not see prices liked more expensive bottles slightly less.
- A 2017 replication in Bonn found the price effect came mostly from a cheap €3 label lowering enjoyment, with an €18 label adding little.
- Six studies with 2,842 participants in 2023 found that price reliably raised expectations but changed actual liking only inconsistently.
The dearer wine does taste better to many drinkers, as long as they can see the price. Tell people a wine costs more and they report enjoying it more, and a brain region linked to pleasure moves with them. Hide the label and the advantage disappears, and the largest recent studies find the effect less dependable than its fame suggests.
David Robson's The Expectation Effect (2022) supplies the mechanism. In chapter 1 he describes the brain as a prediction machine, in which what we perceive is assembled partly from what we expect to perceive. His food and drink material sits on pages 23 to 24, where he argues that labels and branding change perceived taste and the brain's response to it, and the same section includes wine dyed a misleading colour. A price tag is a label of the same kind. Researchers have tested it often, and it carries the clearest commercial stakes.
What happened when one wine wore two prices?
The best-known test was published in 2008 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Hilke Plassmann and colleagues at the California Institute of Technology and Stanford. Twenty adults who liked red wine lay in a brain scanner and were told they would sample five Cabernet Sauvignons, each identified by its retail price. Three wines were used, and two were shown twice. One appeared once at $5 and once at $45. Another appeared once at $10 and once at $90, and the third appeared once, at $35.
Participants rated each repeated bottle as more pleasant when it carried the higher price. Activity rose in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, an area behind the eyes that is widely thought to track how pleasant an experience is. Ratings of how intense it tasted showed no matching shift, so the price moved enjoyment and left the strength of the flavour alone.
Eight weeks later the same people tasted them again with no prices shown, and the differences in reported pleasantness were gone. The authors raised the obvious objection to their own result: some participants might have felt it inappropriate to tell an experimenter that a cheaper wine tasted better. The brain measure answers part of that worry, because it is harder to perform for an audience. Twenty people in one scanner is a small base.
A detail that rarely makes the retelling is that the effect of price on brain activity was larger for the $5 bottle than for the $90 one. The authors suggested that a price rise may do more at the bottom of the range than at the top.
Can a price tag change what a product does?
Pleasure is easy to talk yourself into, so the harder test is whether a price changes performance. In 2005 Baba Shiv, Ziv Carmon and Dan Ariely reported three experiments in the Journal of Marketing Research in which people drank an energy drink sold as improving mental sharpness. Those who paid a discounted price solved fewer puzzles afterwards than those who paid the regular price for the same drink. The authors traced the gap to expectations, and described the process as one that appears not to be conscious.
In 2008 Rebecca Waber, working with the same three researchers, applied the idea to pain in a short research letter in JAMA. Volunteers received mild electric shocks before and after taking a pill presented as a new painkiller, which was inert. According to Stanford's summary of the study, 85 per cent of those who believed they had the expensive pill reported less pain, against 61 per cent of those given the cheap version.
Richard Shotton's The Choice Factory (2018) carries the painkiller study in its chapter on Veblen goods, at pages 141 to 142, and credits Waber as first author, a detail often lost when the study is attributed to its best-known co-author. Shotton adds a test of his own on page 142, in which office colleagues rated a perfume more highly once its price was doubled from £40 to £80. The book gives no sample size for that test, so we treat it as an anecdote.
Does the effect survive a blind tasting?
If price works through expectation, removing the price should remove the advantage. The largest test of that points the same way. In 2008 Robin Goldstein and five co-authors analysed more than 6,000 blind tastings in the Journal of Wine Economics. The correlation between a wine's price and how much people liked it was small and negative, so people who could not see the price enjoyed more expensive bottles slightly less on average. Tasters with wine training showed signs of a relationship that was not negative.
Robert Ashton put that finding to a tasting club in 2014, using red Bordeaux and white Burgundy priced between $20 and $119. In three of the four tastings, price and enjoyment were unrelated. In the fourth, the cheaper bottles did better.
Colour shapes how a wine is described. In 2001 Gil Morrot and two colleagues reported in Brain and Language that a white wine coloured red with an odourless dye was described by a panel of 54 tasters in the vocabulary used for reds. Morrot is the first author, although the study is often attributed to his co-author Frédéric Brochet.
A white wine dyed red was described in the language of red wine.
The price result has also been run again. In 2017 Liane Schmidt, with Plassmann as senior author, repeated the tasting task in Bonn with 54 recruits, 30 of whom gave usable brain data. Higher prices again raised pleasantness ratings for identical wines. A blind tasting a week later provided a baseline, and against it most of the effect came from a €3 label pulling ratings down, with the €18 label adding little.
The strongest evidence on the other side arrived in 2023. Jacqueline Kurz and two colleagues ran six studies with 2,842 participants, reported in Psychology and Marketing, using larger samples. A higher price raised expectations of quality and liking in every study. Once people had tried the product, the effect of price on how good they judged it, and how much they liked it, was inconsistent. The authors concluded that the marketing placebo effect may be less dependable and less general than has been assumed.
What should you do with the price tag?
Our reading is that the price effect on enjoyment is real, and smaller and patchier than its reputation. Two brain-scanning studies from one research group, alongside the energy drink and painkiller results, show that a price can change what people report and what a pleasure-related brain region does. Six larger behavioural studies show that a price reliably changes what people expect and only sometimes what they experience. We lean to the cautious reading for everyday products, because large samples are the better guide to ordinary life. Wine may be the exception, since most buyers have little else to judge it by, though that remains a guess.
Six larger behavioural studies show that a price reliably changes what people expect and only sometimes what they experience.
Against that, the large studies measured ratings, while the scanner studies found a pleasure-related brain region responding as well. A rating scale may miss a change in experience that people do not think to report, and the brain data, like the puzzle scores in the energy drink study, do not depend on what participants are willing to say.
The useful exercise for a buyer is a blind tasting at home. Pour two bottles at different prices into identical glasses, have someone else number them, and pick a favourite before learning which is which. If you cannot tell them apart, the extra money is buying the label, and the Goldstein data suggest that is the usual outcome for anyone without wine training.
Hosts can run the finding in reverse. Schmidt's results suggest a visible low price costs more enjoyment than a high price adds, which argues for decanting a modest bottle rather than announcing it. Decanting itself has not been studied. Restaurants that print prices beside each glass may be shaping how it tastes, so when you can, taste the wine before you look at what it cost.
Common questions
Does expensive wine taste better?
Only when you know the price. In Hilke Plassmann's 2008 study, 20 people rated the same wine as more pleasant when told it cost $45 rather than $5, and the difference vanished in a blind tasting eight weeks later. Across more than 6,000 blind tastings analysed in 2008, tasters on average liked dearer bottles slightly less, while those with wine training did not.
What is the marketing placebo effect?
It is the finding that a price or label changes how well a product works or how much it is enjoyed. In Baba Shiv's 2005 experiments, people who bought an energy drink at a discount solved fewer puzzles than people who paid the regular price for the same drink.
Has the price placebo effect been replicated?
Partly. Liane Schmidt's 2017 study in Bonn found higher ratings again for identical wines labelled at a higher price. But six studies with 2,842 participants, published in 2023, found that price raised expectations every time and changed actual liking only inconsistently.
Why does the price change how a wine tastes?
The usual explanation is expectation. David Robson's The Expectation Effect (2022) describes the brain as a prediction machine that builds perception partly from what it expects. In the 2008 scanner study, a region linked to pleasure responded more strongly to the same drink when it carried the higher price.
Sources
Plassmann, H., O’Doherty, J., Shiv, B., & Rangel, A. (2008). “Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness.” PNAS, 105(3), 1050–1054.
Shiv, B., Carmon, Z., & Ariely, D. (2005). “Placebo effects of marketing actions: consumers may get what they pay for.” Journal of Marketing Research, 42(4), 383-393. doi:10.1509/jmkr.2005.42.4.383. Abstract read: three experiments; consumers who paid a discounted price for an energy drink thought to increase mental acuity solved fewer puzzles than those who paid the regular price; expectancies mediate the effect, a process that appears not to be conscious.
Waber, R. L., Shiv, B., Carmon, Z., & Ariely, D. (2008). “Commercial features of placebo and therapeutic efficacy.” JAMA, 299(9), 1016-1017. doi:10.1001/jama.299.9.1016. Abstract read: none published, as this is a research letter, and the full text could not be opened; read the PubMed record (authors, title, pages) and Stanford Graduate School of Business's summary, which gives electric shocks to the wrist before and after a placebo, with 85 per cent of the expensive-pill group and 61 per cent of the low-priced group reporting reduced pain; figures cross-checked against The Choice Factory, pp. 141 to 142, which gives n = 82.
Goldstein, R., Almenberg, J., Dreber, A., Emerson, J. W., Herschkowitsch, A., & Katz, J. (2008). “Do more expensive wines taste better? Evidence from a large sample of blind tastings.” Journal of Wine Economics, 3(1), 1-9. doi:10.1017/S1931436100000523. Abstract read: more than 6,000 blind tastings; correlation between price and overall rating small and negative; indications of a non-negative relationship for individuals with wine training; results hold with individual fixed effects and when top and bottom price deciles are dropped.
Ashton, R. H. (2014). “Wine as an experience good: price versus enjoyment in blind tastings of expensive and inexpensive wines.” Journal of Wine Economics, 9(2), 171-182. doi:10.1017/jwe.2014.7. Abstract read: four blind tastings of 2006 red Bordeaux and 2009 white Burgundy, $20 to $119, wine club members; no relationship between price and enjoyment in three, a negative relationship in the fourth.
Morrot, G., Brochet, F., & Dubourdieu, D. (2001). “The Color of Odors.” Brain and Language, 79(2), 309–320.
Schmidt, L., Skvortsova, V., Kullen, C., Weber, B., & Plassmann, H. (2017). “How context alters value: the brain’s valuation and affective regulation system link price cues to experienced taste pleasantness.” Scientific Reports, 7, 8098. doi:10.1038/s41598-017-08080-0. Full text read: 54 recruited at Bonn University, 30 analysed after exclusions; price cues of €3 and €18 on identical wines; higher prices raised pleasantness ratings (described by the authors as replicating the 2008 effect); against a blind baseline a week later (mean 5.03), the effect was driven by lower ratings at €3 (4.19) rather than higher ratings at €18 (5.21).
Kurz, J., Efendić, E., & Goukens, C. (2023). “Pricey therefore good? Price affects expectations, but not quality perceptions and liking.” Psychology and Marketing, 40(6), 1115-1129. doi:10.1002/mar.21799. Abstract read: six studies, total N = 2,842, students at a Dutch university and US participants from Prolific and MTurk; higher prices raised quality and liking expectations in all studies; no consistent effect on perceived quality and liking once the product was experienced; the marketing placebo effect may be less dependable or general than assumed.
Robson, D. (2022). The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Transform Your Life. Canongate. Read in full by this publication, with a reliability audit. Ch. 1, The prediction machine, pp. 23 to 24: branding and labelling effects on perceived taste and neural response, with coloured wine in the gastronomy section. This publication's review of the book found no passage on wine pricing as such.
Shotton, R. (2018). The Choice Factory: 25 Behavioural Biases That Influence What We Buy. Harriman House. Read in full by this publication, with a reliability audit. Bias 21, Veblen Goods, pp. 141 to 142 (Waber et al. painkiller study, first author credited in the References) and p. 142 (the author's perfume test, £40 against £80, no sample size given).