This week's column is on the somewhat sticky topic of wine quality and the perception of quality -- at least in part. As most of us in the biz know, there are a lot of different factors that go into your enjoyment of what's in the glass and only a fraction of them have anything to do with what's in the glass! Everyone's palate is different and how you perceive the wine will vary by the time of day, your mood, if you're consuming anything else with it, if you're comfortable in your surroundings -- and, sadly as it turns out, how much you spent on it.
Dishearteningly for a company that makes it their mission to make stunning wines at stunningly good prices, the more you spend on a bottle of wine the higher quality you're likely to think it is.
"...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 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. "
That's not going to stop us, however. No, fear not! We will continue to make wines that will make you do a double take on the sticker price. In fact, what the heck? We'll do one better. This month in the tasting room come in for 31% off of a case of our scrumptious 2005 Night and Day and 44% off of a case of our 2006 Rosé. What do you have to say about that?
See you soon!
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