Yesterday, the BBC reported that wine drinkers tested by scientists thought a wine tasted better when they were told it cost $45 rather than its actual cost of $5.
I thought this was really interesting.
I really don’t think price has ever affected my judgement — it certainly didn’t in the case of pricey Belgian ‘champagne beer’ DEUS.
But I am happy to admit that beers sometimes seem to taste better or worse to me depending on context, presentation and my own expectations.
I suspect that I might be sucker enough to favourably review, say, UK-brewed Fosters, if it was presented to me in a big German stein and I was told it was traditionally brewed in Augsburg.
I’m a marketing man’s dream.
Bailey
3 replies on “D'oh! Stupid tastebuds…”
The key to that study, as I believe someone else in the blogosphere pointed out, was that these people were not paying for the wine themselves. They posited that folks who are tight fisted would get more pleasure from wine if they were not paying compounded by more pleasure on the perceived savings of paying for expensive wine.
Appelation Beer also cover the story here:
http://appellationbeer.com/blog/why-you-might-like-expensive-beer-more/
I think it’s unlikely that you would confuse Fosters with any half decent German beer. The Fosters will always be the one that tastes like fizzy water. I had a Tiger beer in a Chinese restaurant recently and had no idea what it was going to be like (yes it turned out to be fizzy water). Later in the evening a couple of bottles of Tescos Boheme 1795 redresses the flavour balance (much better) there’s an odd condradiction on the label though, see if you can work out what it is when you’re next in Tesco!