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You’re at a dinner party, and the host pours you a glass of red. “This one’s a bit special,” she says, mentioning the price. You take a sip, and it really does seem richer and smoother than the bottle you opened at home last week.
It’s easy to roll your eyes at people who rave about pricey wine. But what if the pleasure they describe is real, even when the wine inside the bottle is exactly the same? Brain scans suggest it might be.
Five wines, actually three
In a study published in 2008 in PNAS, researchers from Caltech and Stanford, led by Hilke Plassmann and Antonio Rangel, recruited 20 volunteers. Each person lay in an fMRI brain scanner and sipped small amounts of Cabernet Sauvignon through a tube, along with a neutral, tasteless solution to rinse between samples.
The participants were told they were tasting five different wines priced at $5, $10, $35, $45 and $90. In reality, there were only three wines. The $5 wine was also served labeled as $45, and the $90 wine was also served labeled as $10.
Participants rated how pleasant and how intense each wine tasted, while the scanner tracked their brain activity.
The price changed the pleasure
The results were striking. When the same wine carried a higher price, people rated it as more pleasant. The $5 wine was enjoyed more when people thought it cost $45, and the $90 wine was enjoyed less when people thought it cost $10.
Interestingly, price didn’t change how intense people said the flavor was. The wine didn’t seem stronger, just more enjoyable.
The brain scans told the same story. When people believed they were drinking more expensive wine, there was greater activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, a region just behind the forehead that is widely thought to track how pleasant an experience feels.
What the brain did and didn’t change
The study also looked at the brain’s primary taste areas, including parts of the insula, which process basic information like sweetness, sourness and bitterness. Activity in these areas didn’t change with price.
In other words, the raw sensory signal from the tongue seemed the same. What changed was how the brain valued that experience. The price label appeared to shape the pleasure people felt, not the basic taste.
This fits with what neuroscientists know about the brain’s reward system. Expectations play a big role in how rewarding something feels. When we expect something to be good, the brain can amplify the pleasure we experience.
The blind test twist
About eight weeks later, the researchers asked participants to taste the same wines again, this time with no prices shown. Without the labels, the results changed completely.
People rated the cheapest wine, the $5 bottle, as the most pleasant of all. The expensive $90 wine didn’t stand out.
As Rangel told reporters at the time, the participants weren’t experienced wine drinkers, and he hoped professional tasters would be harder to fool.
Not just snobbery
It would be easy to dismiss the effect as people saying what they thought they should say. But the brain scans suggest the effect was real at a neural level. People weren’t just reporting more pleasure. Their brains appeared to be generating it.
Co-author Baba Shiv of Stanford put it this way: price isn’t only a hint about quality, it can actually change the experience of quality.
So when someone insists the pricier bottle tastes better, they may not be showing off. Their brain may genuinely be enjoying it more.
Other research adds an important twist. A 2008 analysis of more than 6,000 blind tastings, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, found that ordinary wine drinkers, when they couldn’t see prices, tended to enjoy more expensive wines slightly less, not more. Wine experts were the exception. The extra pleasure seems to come from knowing the price, not from what’s in the glass.
A kind of placebo effect
Scientists sometimes describe this as a marketing placebo effect. Just as a sugar pill can ease pain if someone expects it to work, a high price tag can boost enjoyment if someone expects the product to be better.
The same effect has been found with other products, from energy drinks to pain relievers, where a higher price can increase how well people think something works.
The study had limits. It was small, and the participants didn’t actually pay for the wine, which may have affected how they felt about it. Still, the findings offer a useful reminder. The next time a pricey bottle seems especially delicious, part of what you’re tasting may be the price.
