Difference Between Cheap Wine Vs. Expensive Wine

Let the controversy begin. This article about cheap wine from Wired.com makes a lot of statements that has made many wine snobs get angry and upset.

The author, Jonah Lehrer, makes a pretty good case that expensive wines simply are not worth the price based on taste alone. He comes to that conclusion using studies where people were asked to select expensive wines from a range of wines priced $5 to $50. The tasters did not know the prices of the wines they were tasting. In this test the tasters could not tell the difference. This is not a definitive conclusion but it does make one wonder so Lehrer goes on.

Wine researchers apparently are willing to go through some lengths to get interesting data. Imagine sipping wine from a tube inside an MRI machine and having your brain examined to see if you liked it or not. Believe it or not that exact thing happened and what they found, to no one’s surprise, when told a wine was expensive they liked it more based on the imagery from their brains. What did surprise some was people preferred an expensive wine to a cheaper one in this study even though they were the same wine.

That leads to the conclusion a wine’s recommendation from a knowledgeable source, such as a sommelier in a restaurant, could influence how much one would enjoy the wine. Now you should read on for the controversy about the article’s studies and conclusions.

The wine snobs seem to feel the study results would have been far different had the tasting panel been made up of serious wine lovers. They feel there is a marked and distinct difference between cheap wines and expensive wines. In other words they don’t doubt casual wine drinkers can’t tell the difference but experienced wine lovers can tell the difference.

This leads to another counter argument. How come inexpensive wines, sometimes costing far less than $15, a bottle can get 90+ ratings from respected magazines such as Wine spectator and Wine Enthusiast? Is there a difference between a 90 point bottle costing, say $10 to another wine of the same grape and year costing $50+? Of course there is, you might say. Okay, why?