This is the truth behind expensive wine

Say wine, snacks or haute cuisine and the gourmands at online food magazine FavorFlav know where to drink, how to eat it and what to cook. This time our cheffies serve you: the truth behind expensive wine that everyone always falls for.

New scientific research on wine: the more expensive a wine is, the better it tastes. At least, that's what we think. Wait a minute, does cheap headache wine suddenly taste much better in an expensive decanter?

Swiss researchers asked 140 people what they thought of the wine served at a party. The people who knew nothing about the wine thought it was meh. Not great, not bad, the kind of wine you can't really have anything against. Ideal for a reception, so to speak. The wine drinkers who thought they were drinking an extremely expensive wine rated their glass of wine much higher. The wine suddenly tasted much better, and that was only due to a bit of – misleading – information.

Sommeliers can fool
It seems to have something to do with the reward center in our brains: it gets stimulated more strongly when we think we are dealing with a delicacy, concludes behavioral researcher Bernd Weber from the University of Bonn, based on the results of this research. The appreciation for cheap ass wine therefore rises significantly when you think you have something special in your glass. That's quite a conclusion. Can sommeliers pour us anything, as long as they have a good story to go with it?

Nod neck in decanter
A joke at a dinner with wine friends makes me suspect so. Everyone brought a bottle of wine, one bottle more exclusive than the other. I had a bottle left from a press trip JP Chenet and decided to pour that. In a decanter of course, otherwise the connoisseurs would have immediately recognized that nod neck of the Chenet. Poured from crystal into beautiful wine glasses, with the expectation that something beautiful and special was being poured into their glass, significantly raised the judgment. A nice Fleurie, according to one of the tasters. And when we started guessing what my bottle would cost, it turned out that I could ask €40 for my gifted wine with a retail value of €3.49.

You taste quality
Of course, the scientists also investigated the reverse effect: they poured in expensive wine. It was well received by everyone, both by those who thought they were drinking cheap wine and by people who actually knew nothing about the wine. Quality does not lie, you could say.