Do Expensive Wines Really Taste Better?

Does our brain trick us when we have the choice between two wines – one more expensive than the other?  It seems that we tend to like the taste of the more expensive wine.

A study from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the California Institute of Technology discovered that when people were given two different bottles of wine and told that one cost $5 and the other $45 (in reality, both bottles were identical), the pleasure-center part of the brain became more active when the participants were drinking what they believed to be the more expensive bottle.

They also reported that the wine they believed to be more expensive tasted better.

Baba Shiv, one of the study’s authors and associate professor of marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, previously found that people who paid full price for Red Bull energy drinks were able to solve more brain teasers than those who paid less for the same product.In other words, how much you pay for something can affect how you perceive it.