The secret to tastier wine: jacking up the price

Study: People given identical reds liked the one they were told cost more.

By Denise Gellene | Special to The Morning Call
January 15, 2008

When it comes to wine tasting, pleasure is in the price.

Using brain scanners to monitor the minds of wine drinkers, scientists found that people given two identical red wines got more pleasure from tasting the one they were told cost more.

The study, reported Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrated for the first time how marketing tactics -- such as raising the price of a product -- can cause the brain to play tricks on itself.

Researchers led by Antonio Rangel, associate professor of economics at the California Institute of Technology, asked 20 volunteers to rank their enjoyment of small sips of five differently priced Cabernet Sauvignon wines while a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine monitored the brain response. Volunteers also were asked to rate the flavor intensity of the wines.

Unbeknown to volunteers, two sets of wine samples were identical -- the $5 and $45 wines ($5 was the actual price) and the $10 and $90 wines ($90 was the actual price). The fifth wine was identified by its actual $35 price.

Volunteers were asked to rank the pleasantness of the wines. They liked the $90 wine best and the $5 wine least.

Brain scans showed that activity in the part of the brain that detects pleasure also moved in lock-step with price. This brain area, the medial orbital prefrontal cortex, which is located behind the eyes, showed the greatest activity when volunteers drank the wine marked $90 and the least activity when they sipped the wine priced at $5.

Prices had no impact on flavor intensity ratings. Volunteers said the $5 and $45 wines and the $10 and $90 wines were identically sweet.

Rangel said the findings show that the pleasantness of consuming a product depends on more than the product's intrinsic properties, such as flavor in the case of wine. The brain also relies on certain beliefs, such as the notion that expensive wines probably will taste better, he said.

By manipulating prices, ''we can change how wine tastes without changing the wine,'' Rangel said. ''It's mind-blowing.''

Two weeks after the initial experiment, volunteers were asked to rate the wines in the absence of price information. They liked the wines originally marked $5 and $45 best and the samples labeled $10 and $90 second best.

George Loewenstein, professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the study, said the findings support other research on consumer behavior.

''People pay high prices for water from Italy and we know that water tastes about the same wherever it comes from,'' he said. ''Price is one of the many attributes that people pay attention to, and it affects how we perceive things as a consumer.''

Denise Gellene is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune Publishing newspaper.

PRICING IT RIGHT

Twenty volunteers in the study were given five wines on several different occasions and asked to rank their preferred vintages.

While they drank small sips from long plastic straws, researchers gave them fake prices for the varieties they drank. The wines cost $5 to $90 a bottle at stores.

Researchers observed brain activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, an area of the brain that's responsible for perceptions of pleasure.

Preference shown by brain patterns were highest for wines with the highest prices.

Source: Study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Bloomberg News)

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