DaJudge
May 7th, 2008, 10:43 PM
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May 7, 2008
The Pour
Wine?s Pleasures: Are They All in Your Head?
By ERIC ASIMOV (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/eric_asimov/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
THE mind of the wine consumer is a woolly place, packed with odd and
arcane information fascinating to few. Like the pants pocket of a 7-year-old
boy, it?s full of bits of string, bottle caps and shiny rocks collected while
making the daily rounds of wine shops, restaurants, periodicals and the
wine-soaked back alleys of the Internet. It?s harmless stuff, really, except
to those within earshot when a wine lover finds it necessary to elaborate
on the nose, legs and body of a new infatuation.
Yet in recent months American wine drinkers have taken their turn as pop
culture?s punching bags. In press accounts of two studies on wine
psychology, consumers have been portrayed as dupes and twits, subject to
the manipulations of marketers, critics and charlatan producers who have
cloaked wine in mystique and sham sophistication in hopes of better
separating the public from its money.
One of the studies was devised by Robin Goldstein, a food writer, to try to
isolate consumers from outside influence so they could simply judge wine by
what?s in the glass. He had 500 volunteers sample and rate 540 unidentified
wines priced from $1.50 to $150 a bottle. The results are described in a
new book, ?The Wine Trials,? to be published this month by Fearless Critic
Media.
The book wraps the results in a discussion of marketing manipulations and
statistical validity, but a brief article in the April 7 issue of Newsweek
magazine, naturally, seized on the book?s populist triumphs: a $10 bottle of
bubbly from Washington state outscored Dom P?rignon, which sells for $150
a bottle, while Two-Buck Chuck, the cheap Charles Shaw California
cabernet sauvignon (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/w/wines/cabernet_sauvignon_us/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier), topped a $55 bottle of Napa Valley cabernet.
?Their results might rattle a few wine snobs, but the average oenophile can
rejoice: 100 wines under $15 consistently outperformed their upscale
cousins,? the article exulted.
Two caveats are in order here. First, it turns out that the results of the
tastings are more nuanced than the Newsweek article let on. In fact, the
book shows that what appeals to novice wine drinkers is significantly
different from what appeals to wine experts, which the book defines as
those who have had some sort of training or professional experience with
wine. The experts, by the way, preferred the Dom P?rignon.
Second, there is, of course, no such thing as the ?average oenophile,? as
Newsweek put it. Most people in the wine trade understand that consumers
have any number of reasons for their buying decisions, whatever their
psychological and financial state. Some are reassured by easy-to-
understand labels with friendly animals. Others want only naturally produced
wines or bottles with a modest carbon footprint. Some are status-seekers
and score-chasers, while others are contrarians, or only drink red wine.
But assuming for the moment that it?s true that most drinkers prefer the
cheap stuff, why does anyone bother buying $55 cabernet? One answer is
provided by a second experiment, in which presumably sober researchers at
the California Institute of Technology (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/california_institute_of_technology/index.html?inline=nyt-org) and the Stanford Business School
demonstrated that the more expensive consumers think a wine is, the more
pleasure they are apt to take in it.
The researchers scanned the brains of 21 volunteer wine novices as they
administered tiny tastes of wine, measuring sensations in the medial
orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain where flavor responses apparently
register. The subjects were told only the price of the wines. Without their
knowledge, they tasted one wine twice, and were given two different prices
for that wine. Invariably they preferred the one they thought was more
expensive.
?Forget those blurbs about bouquets, body and berries,? one newspaper
account crowed. ?A meticulous new study found that the more people think
a wine cost, the more they like it. And the less they think it cost, the less
they like it.?
Big surprise. Sommeliers all over know that the hardest wine to sell in a
restaurant is the cheapest bottle on the list. ?Yeah, clients don?t want to
be embarrassed in front of a date, so they don?t order the cheapest wines,?
said Fred Dexheimer, the wine director of the BLT restaurant group. 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.
?It?s not just about wine, it?s about everything!? said Prof. Dan Ariely, a
behavioral economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/massachusetts_institute_of_technology/index.html?inline=nyt-org) and
author of the book ?Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape
Our Decisions? (HarperCollins, $25.95), which examines how people make all
sorts of real life decisions. Regardless of the situation, Professor Ariely
found, suggestion has a powerful effect on perception and belief.
In one experiment, volunteers who received mild electric shocks were given
placebo pills to relieve the pain. They were told that the pills cost either 10
cents or $2.50. The participants believed that both kinds of pills helped
relieve pain, but the seemingly more expensive pills had a much greater
effect.
?If you expect not to get something as good, lo and behold, it?s not as
good,? Professor Ariely said. ?We think of it as an objective reality. We
don?t see how much is created by our mind.?
Even so, wine drinkers tend to be the punch line. People are unlikely to be
ridiculed for buying $300 jeans that are washed, bleached and beaten over
rocks instead of $60 jeans that will last a decade. But wine buyers who
prefer the $20 bottle over a $10 bottle? All that stuff about aromas and
complexity? Forget it!
Are wine consumers really easily manipulated victims, the flip side of the
stereotype of wine drinkers as pretentious snobs? What have they done to
be singled out from other consumers who might equally be portrayed as
knuckling under to hype and salesmanship, like connoisseurs of clothes,
handbags or shoes, car aficionados or golf fanatics, food or film lovers?
The answer rests, I think, both in the insecure and uncomfortable attitudes
that Americans hold toward wine and in the difficulty of bringing some sort
of objective and universal criteria to the fleeting and obscure realms of
aroma, taste and texture.
The consumption of wine has been growing steadily in the United States
rising to 283 million cases in 2006 from almost 189 million cases in 1993,
according to the Adams Wine Handbook, which tracks consumption.
Yet drinking more hasn?t made Americans more comfortable with wine.
People with little interest in wine tend to see it as somehow foreign and
threatening. Even among the curious, fears abound, of being embarrassed
or appearing unsophisticated, of choosing the wrong wine, or of liking the
wrong one. Every year books come out purporting to help the winephobic
avoid embarrassment, impress their bosses or learn shortcuts to wine
knowledge. But I sense no decrease in the number of people whose
questions to me are prefaced by a sheepish, ?I don?t know anything about
wine, though I really should.?
Meanwhile, consumers face an impenetrable swamp of winespeak: Wine
Spectator recently evaluated one Argentine red as, ?Dark and rich, with lots
of fig bread, mocha, ganache, prune and loam notes. Stays fine-grained on
the finish, with lingering sage and toast hints.?
To hack through it all, consumers embrace scores, an easy shorthand that
unfortunately requires that every wine be judged on the same seemingly
objective scale, regardless of the subjective nature of taste. Anybody can
understand that a wine rated 90 beats an 89, right?
Yet the rating system has bred an attitude toward wine that ignores
context, which is perhaps more important a consideration to the enjoyment
of wine than anything else. 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.
This is one problem with trying to judge wine in the sort of clinical vacuum
sought by studies like the one in ?The Wine Trials.? In the end, I don?t think
you can ever eliminate context. The trick is to distinguish between the
harmful or disingenuous ? the marketing come-ons, the point chasing, what
the guy next to you thinks ? from the beneficial: the food, the company,
the environment. Even in a blind tasting situation, wine is evaluated in the
company of other wines, which is a different sort of context but a context
nonetheless. Perhaps they?ve chosen the best wines to be sipped and spat
out, but not the best wines for dinner.
May 7, 2008
The Pour
Wine?s Pleasures: Are They All in Your Head?
By ERIC ASIMOV (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/eric_asimov/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
THE mind of the wine consumer is a woolly place, packed with odd and
arcane information fascinating to few. Like the pants pocket of a 7-year-old
boy, it?s full of bits of string, bottle caps and shiny rocks collected while
making the daily rounds of wine shops, restaurants, periodicals and the
wine-soaked back alleys of the Internet. It?s harmless stuff, really, except
to those within earshot when a wine lover finds it necessary to elaborate
on the nose, legs and body of a new infatuation.
Yet in recent months American wine drinkers have taken their turn as pop
culture?s punching bags. In press accounts of two studies on wine
psychology, consumers have been portrayed as dupes and twits, subject to
the manipulations of marketers, critics and charlatan producers who have
cloaked wine in mystique and sham sophistication in hopes of better
separating the public from its money.
One of the studies was devised by Robin Goldstein, a food writer, to try to
isolate consumers from outside influence so they could simply judge wine by
what?s in the glass. He had 500 volunteers sample and rate 540 unidentified
wines priced from $1.50 to $150 a bottle. The results are described in a
new book, ?The Wine Trials,? to be published this month by Fearless Critic
Media.
The book wraps the results in a discussion of marketing manipulations and
statistical validity, but a brief article in the April 7 issue of Newsweek
magazine, naturally, seized on the book?s populist triumphs: a $10 bottle of
bubbly from Washington state outscored Dom P?rignon, which sells for $150
a bottle, while Two-Buck Chuck, the cheap Charles Shaw California
cabernet sauvignon (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/w/wines/cabernet_sauvignon_us/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier), topped a $55 bottle of Napa Valley cabernet.
?Their results might rattle a few wine snobs, but the average oenophile can
rejoice: 100 wines under $15 consistently outperformed their upscale
cousins,? the article exulted.
Two caveats are in order here. First, it turns out that the results of the
tastings are more nuanced than the Newsweek article let on. In fact, the
book shows that what appeals to novice wine drinkers is significantly
different from what appeals to wine experts, which the book defines as
those who have had some sort of training or professional experience with
wine. The experts, by the way, preferred the Dom P?rignon.
Second, there is, of course, no such thing as the ?average oenophile,? as
Newsweek put it. Most people in the wine trade understand that consumers
have any number of reasons for their buying decisions, whatever their
psychological and financial state. Some are reassured by easy-to-
understand labels with friendly animals. Others want only naturally produced
wines or bottles with a modest carbon footprint. Some are status-seekers
and score-chasers, while others are contrarians, or only drink red wine.
But assuming for the moment that it?s true that most drinkers prefer the
cheap stuff, why does anyone bother buying $55 cabernet? One answer is
provided by a second experiment, in which presumably sober researchers at
the California Institute of Technology (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/california_institute_of_technology/index.html?inline=nyt-org) and the Stanford Business School
demonstrated that the more expensive consumers think a wine is, the more
pleasure they are apt to take in it.
The researchers scanned the brains of 21 volunteer wine novices as they
administered tiny tastes of wine, measuring sensations in the medial
orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain where flavor responses apparently
register. The subjects were told only the price of the wines. Without their
knowledge, they tasted one wine twice, and were given two different prices
for that wine. Invariably they preferred the one they thought was more
expensive.
?Forget those blurbs about bouquets, body and berries,? one newspaper
account crowed. ?A meticulous new study found that the more people think
a wine cost, the more they like it. And the less they think it cost, the less
they like it.?
Big surprise. Sommeliers all over know that the hardest wine to sell in a
restaurant is the cheapest bottle on the list. ?Yeah, clients don?t want to
be embarrassed in front of a date, so they don?t order the cheapest wines,?
said Fred Dexheimer, the wine director of the BLT restaurant group. 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.
?It?s not just about wine, it?s about everything!? said Prof. Dan Ariely, a
behavioral economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/massachusetts_institute_of_technology/index.html?inline=nyt-org) and
author of the book ?Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape
Our Decisions? (HarperCollins, $25.95), which examines how people make all
sorts of real life decisions. Regardless of the situation, Professor Ariely
found, suggestion has a powerful effect on perception and belief.
In one experiment, volunteers who received mild electric shocks were given
placebo pills to relieve the pain. They were told that the pills cost either 10
cents or $2.50. The participants believed that both kinds of pills helped
relieve pain, but the seemingly more expensive pills had a much greater
effect.
?If you expect not to get something as good, lo and behold, it?s not as
good,? Professor Ariely said. ?We think of it as an objective reality. We
don?t see how much is created by our mind.?
Even so, wine drinkers tend to be the punch line. People are unlikely to be
ridiculed for buying $300 jeans that are washed, bleached and beaten over
rocks instead of $60 jeans that will last a decade. But wine buyers who
prefer the $20 bottle over a $10 bottle? All that stuff about aromas and
complexity? Forget it!
Are wine consumers really easily manipulated victims, the flip side of the
stereotype of wine drinkers as pretentious snobs? What have they done to
be singled out from other consumers who might equally be portrayed as
knuckling under to hype and salesmanship, like connoisseurs of clothes,
handbags or shoes, car aficionados or golf fanatics, food or film lovers?
The answer rests, I think, both in the insecure and uncomfortable attitudes
that Americans hold toward wine and in the difficulty of bringing some sort
of objective and universal criteria to the fleeting and obscure realms of
aroma, taste and texture.
The consumption of wine has been growing steadily in the United States
rising to 283 million cases in 2006 from almost 189 million cases in 1993,
according to the Adams Wine Handbook, which tracks consumption.
Yet drinking more hasn?t made Americans more comfortable with wine.
People with little interest in wine tend to see it as somehow foreign and
threatening. Even among the curious, fears abound, of being embarrassed
or appearing unsophisticated, of choosing the wrong wine, or of liking the
wrong one. Every year books come out purporting to help the winephobic
avoid embarrassment, impress their bosses or learn shortcuts to wine
knowledge. But I sense no decrease in the number of people whose
questions to me are prefaced by a sheepish, ?I don?t know anything about
wine, though I really should.?
Meanwhile, consumers face an impenetrable swamp of winespeak: Wine
Spectator recently evaluated one Argentine red as, ?Dark and rich, with lots
of fig bread, mocha, ganache, prune and loam notes. Stays fine-grained on
the finish, with lingering sage and toast hints.?
To hack through it all, consumers embrace scores, an easy shorthand that
unfortunately requires that every wine be judged on the same seemingly
objective scale, regardless of the subjective nature of taste. Anybody can
understand that a wine rated 90 beats an 89, right?
Yet the rating system has bred an attitude toward wine that ignores
context, which is perhaps more important a consideration to the enjoyment
of wine than anything else. 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.
This is one problem with trying to judge wine in the sort of clinical vacuum
sought by studies like the one in ?The Wine Trials.? In the end, I don?t think
you can ever eliminate context. The trick is to distinguish between the
harmful or disingenuous ? the marketing come-ons, the point chasing, what
the guy next to you thinks ? from the beneficial: the food, the company,
the environment. Even in a blind tasting situation, wine is evaluated in the
company of other wines, which is a different sort of context but a context
nonetheless. Perhaps they?ve chosen the best wines to be sipped and spat
out, but not the best wines for dinner.