Higher Prices Make Wine Taste Better

from Mind Hacks:

A new brain scanning study has supported what we've suspected all along, more expensive wine tastes better partly because we expect it to.

Neuroscientist Hilke Plassman led a brain-scanning study, shortly to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, where volunteers were asked to taste and rate five different wines, each individually priced.

What the volunteers didn't know was that there were only three different wines, and two of them were tasted twice. One one occasion it was described as costing $90 a bottle, on another as costing $10 a bottle.

The volunteers rated the 'more expensive' wine as significantly more likeable despite being identical to the 'cheaper' wine...

Although, mightn't people just say they liked the expensive stuff more because they didn't wish to appear unsophisticated, not because they actually thought it tasted any differently?

An Oenological Mystery

Patrick Keefe, in the New Yorker :

The most expensive bottle of wine ever sold at auction was offered at Christie’s in London, on December 5, 1985. The bottle was handblown dark-green glass and capped with a nubby seal of thick black wax. It had no label, but etched into the glass in a spindly hand was the year 1787, the word “Lafitte,” and the letters “Th.J.”

The bottle came from a collection of wine that had reportedly been discovered behind a bricked-up cellar wall in an old building in Paris. The wines bore the names of top vineyards—along with Lafitte (which is now spelled “Lafite”), there were bottles from Châteaux d’Yquem, Mouton, and Margaux—and those initials, “Th.J.” According to the catalogue, evidence suggested that the wine had belonged to Thomas Jefferson, and that the bottle at auction could “rightly be considered one of the world’s greatest rarities.” The level of the wine was “exceptionally high” for such an old bottle—just half an inch below the cork—and the color “remarkably deep for its age.” The wine’s value was listed as “inestimable.”...

continued

(HT Tim Crane)

Is Blind Wine-Tasting Best?

Mike Steinberger, at Slate:

Don't drink the label, drink the wine. Among the many (unwritten) rules of wine appreciation, this is easily the most important. It's also the hardest one to follow. Even the most discriminating oenophiles find it difficult not to be influenced by the name on the bottle, particularly if the name is a hallowed one. For this reason, many people believe that the only reliable way to judge wines is to taste them blind-that is, to taste them without knowing who made them. (Indeed, a blind tasting is the one occasion when drinking out of a brown paper bag is not only respectable but a sign of intellectual rigor.) When people don't have the benefit of seeing the label, the argument goes, they have no choice but to judge a wine solely on its merits.

read all

Viognier: A Rediscovered Grape

"If you are quick you may get onto the band waggon of this wonderful Rhone variety. There are lots of bargain wines still around.

First a little history. The Viognier [pronounced vee-own-yay] white grape variety was rescued from near extinction just a few decades ago and is now one of the hottest varietals going around. If you are becoming a little jaded by Chardonnay and can't quite cop the aggressive characters in Sauvignon blanc then this variety may be the drink for you. Legend has it that the variety was introduced, along with Syrah, to the Rhone Valley during the Roman occupation.

After two millennia of barbarian invasions, dark ages, wars and the ravages of time just a few hectares of Viognier were left by the 1960s. It occupied a small corner of the Rhone around Condrieu where it made cult wines known only to a small group of enthusiasts. But the word got out and thanks to modern viticultural techniques Viognier is now widely planted Languedoc and Ardeche in France as well as in Italy, California and Australia...

full article: Vinodiversity

Coming Soon: Guinness Red

"Guinness is a dry stout and is one of the most successful beer brands in the world. It is best known for its unique slow pour and the creamy head, along with its dark body, which is blacker than the blackest black (times infinity). (But actually brown.)

Recently, there has been a “beta test” of sorts to introduce a new beer: Guinness Red. Just like the name implies, Guinness Red has a distinctive dark red body, which comes from the barley being roasted more lightly in the style of an Irish red ale. It is on trial at a several UK pubs, should carry the same alcohol content (4.1%), and costs the same as a regular pint of Guinness."

Dethroner

Touching Tribute to a Life Well Lived

Time Magazine on Len Evans, the wine-writer and vineyard owner who helped put Aussie wine on the map.

(H/T Tim Blair)