14. Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better?

They should! It's a cardinal rule: more expensive items are supposed to be qualitatively better than their cheaper versions. But is that true for wine?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:46Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:27Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:12Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Levitt, a college friend of yours once told me that your favorite meal during college was a dill pickle, beef jerky, and grape soda. Is that true?

• 2:38Speaker 01

  I did indeed have that for breakfast. But to tell you the truth, it sounded better before I ate it than after.

• 2:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Steve Levitt, my Freakonomics friend and co-author, an esteemed economist at the University of Chicago, has an extremely refined palate. All right, so you've got beef jerky, you've got dill pickle. What are your favorite foods? Like, what are your favorite places? Like, if you could drive across America and pick any place to stop and eat, what's it going to be?

• 3:05Speaker 01

  You know, I love the Billy Goat Tavern. It's the cheap place that was made famous in the 19, probably 70s, on Saturday Night Live with the cheeseburger, cheeseburger, no Pepsi Coke. Anyway, they have an incredible ribeye steak sandwich. Pretty much the cheaper the food, the better. There's almost no fast food that I don't adore.

• 3:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  So KFC?

• 3:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like KFC, burgers, Chipotle. I'd kill for Chipotle.

• 3:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  So how would you describe your palate?

• 3:38Speaker 01

  Underdeveloped. You know, but it's good. I mean, the thing is, it's a wonderful, wonderful gift to like cheap food. I mean, some people just happen to like expensive food. And then they're unhappy most of the time, or else they spend all their money on food. But if you just, by chance, are born loving cheap food, then you can eat, you know, everything that you love.

• 4:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, how much do you like wine?

• 4:06Speaker 01

  Wine, I do not like at all.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  From American Public Media and WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Today, why wine experts should just put a cork in it, and why having an untrained palate can save you lots of dough. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 4:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  Good wine, we're told, is the province of smart, superior people. They taste things on a whole nother level than people like you and me.

• 4:40Speaker 03

  It's got a little minerality.

• 4:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  But I have a question for you. Is that superiority deserved? The wines that experts love, the ones that bring out the natural beauty of the grape but aren't too funky, they cost a lot more.

• 4:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  But are expensive wines really that much better than cheap wines? Or is it possible that developing your palate just mucks things up, complicates things? Maybe we'd all be better off if we had taste buds like Steve Levitt.

• 5:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  After graduate school, Levitt was invited to join an elite club at Harvard called the Society of Fellows. A junior fellow like him was paid a modest salary to work on his own research with few obligations, other than a formal Monday night dinner with the senior fellows, who were some of the most remarkable scholars alive.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  People like Amartya Sen and Nobel Prize-winning physicists and whatnot. And you sit around the table, and I believe the table was Oliver Wendell Holmes' table initially, and he gifted it to Society of Fellows.

• 5:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Over dinner, they engaged in witty, learned conversation. They ate venison, other fine food, and they drank expensive wine, bottle after bottle. To this budding young economist with the beef jerky taste and the grape soda budget, all that pricey wine, it wasn't doing him any good. He had a thought.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Innocently. I was young. I didn't understand how the world worked, I thought, like an economist. I suggested that perhaps we should have two tracks at the Society Fellows. There would be the drinking track and the abstinence track. And for those of us who chose the abstinence track, because the cost of the wine was perhaps $60 per meal, that over the course of 50 weeks of the year, that would work out to be about $3,000, and they could add $3,000 to the paycheck of those of us on the abstinence path.

• 6:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  And did you have any other people in your abstinence camp, or was this just Levitt?

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Well, you know, it didn't really get that far because the reaction was quite negative.

• 6:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  Levitt's the kind of person who likes to use data, not a personal agenda, to make his arguments. So he set out to get some data, wine data. The wine they were drinking at these dinners cost five or 10 times what a cheap bottle of wine cost. Was it really five or 10 times better? He hatched a plan. The Society of Fellows held wine tastings from time to time. He suggested that the next one be his to organize.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  So I worked with the wine steward to select two excellent bottles of wine, expensive bottles of wine, probably close to $100 bottles of wine. And then I went to the liquor store that was down the street and I said, can I have the cheapest bottle of wine you have that was the same grape? I don't remember which grape it was.

• 7:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Levitt used four decanters. Into the first decanter, he poured one of the expensive bottles of wine. The other expensive wine went into decanter number two. In the third decanter, he poured the cheap wine, which cost around $8. In the fourth decanter, he repeated one of the expensive wines.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  So as far as the people knew, there were four different wines, and these were all wines that were coming out of the wine cellar of the Society of Fellows.

• 7:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you're tricking them from the outset. You're leading them to believe that the fourth, the cheap wine, is also from the wine cellar.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  I don't, you know, uh, yes.

• 8:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  They swirled them a bit, sniffed them, and sipped. They wrote down their ratings. As he looked at the numbers, Levitt's cold economist heart warmed.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  The data could not have cooperated more completely with my hypotheses. So for starters, the four wines received almost identical ratings on average. Although there were a widespread among individuals, on average, it's tallied up, people did not prefer the expensive wines to the cheap wine. On top of that, and this was the thing that I was hoping for and dreaming of, but didn't believe it actually came to, it turned out when you made among individuals, if you compared how differently they rated any two of the wines that they had, it turned out that by a small margin, people actually rated the same wine, from the same bottle,

• 9:04Speaker 01

  but presented in a different decanter, as being the most different among the two wines. So the two wines that were absolutely identical, when you looked at the gap between the ratings that an individual gave to those wines, the gap was bigger than they did between the other wines, which actually were different.

• 9:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  A few minutes after the tasting was over, Steve Levitt shared the results with the senior fellows.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  The jovial mood in the room suddenly went dark. People realized they had been tricked, that there had been this cheap wine, the same wine was in twice, and they really realized that the nature of the game had been somewhat different than what they thought. And when they heard the results, that collectively they had no ability to identify wines, they were not happy. And in particular, there was one senior fellow, so one of the professors at Harvard, who was quite outspoken about his knowledge of wine, and he loudly announced that he had a cold. Otherwise, he clearly could have made the distinctions, and he stormed from the room and left the party prematurely. What was his discipline?

• 10:11Speaker 01

  I think for the sake of anonymity, I should not reveal that particular piece of information. He was a humanist.

• 10:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Not an economist, in other words.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 10:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  The opposite of an economist. So what does Levitt's evil little experiment teach us about wine? Maybe not all that much. It wasn't a very scientific tasting, really. Perhaps the society of fellows was just having an off night, the humanist had a cold, right? Or maybe this was just a group of people who didn't know as much about wine as they thought they knew. You'd never be able to pull this kind of stunt on wine experts. Would you?

• 10:47Speaker 04

  On my team, we have a Master sommelier, two Master of Wine candidates, four people that have been in the trade for many years. These are sophisticated wine professionals.

• 10:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Brian DiMarco, talking about the people that he gathered for a blind tasting of his own. Before we get to that, let's hear a little bit more about Brian.

• 11:05Speaker 04

  I specialize in helping customers, consumers, private collectors, and retailers and restaurants decide what wines to put on their list, what wines to collect, what wines to sell. And I have a small import business and wholesale company, and we distribute wine that we find all over Europe and South America in New York City.

• 11:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Cool. So you're almost a wine agent, then, yeah? In a way, more than just an importer?

• 11:34Speaker 04

  In many ways, yes.

• 11:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Brian DiMarco is one of the people who decide what we drink. He goes to France, Italy, California, tastes wine fresh out of the tank. So he determines what's good or bad without any critics whispering sweet ratings into his ear. Then, he puts his money where his taste buds are. He writes a check. Now, according to DiMarco, he makes as much money selling a $15 bottle of wine to a restaurant or shop as he does selling a $50 bottle. That's true. DiMarco is an honest broker. His job is simply to find wine that you or I would want to drink. Because if you think about it, there are thousands upon thousands of bottles to choose from. Just picture the rows of bottles lining the shelves at every wine shop.

• 12:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  You kind of, sort of, maybe think you want to buy a Merlot. So do you pick the one with the pretty flowers on the label? You go with the one that Robert Parker, the high priest of wine ratings, awarded a lot of his Parker points to? Or, like a lot of people, do you let price be your guide? If you believe even a little bit in the free market, you'd have to think that expensive wines cost more because they taste better, right? Brian DeMarco wanted to know how much people were tasting the dollars when they drank inexpensive wine. So, like Steve Levitt, he conducted a little experiment with some of the people who work for him. As DeMarco said, these were no amateurs.

• 12:58Speaker 04

  We did a tasting, a brown bag, and we had this exact same wine in both bags. And we told them that one bottle was a $50 bottle and to write their reviews. And we said another one was a $10 bottle to write their reviews. And of course, they're both $20 bottles, according to retail, what they would sell at any retail store. And then we reversed it. And we said, now the $10 bottle is really the $50. And everyone liked the $50 bottle better in both circumstances, because they perceived that the price they had, either they thought there's something they're missing. When really, they're like, these wines are so similar. Yeah, but they're different. And so, a lot of people called, two or three people said, is this the same wine? And we said, well, that's for you to determine.

• 13:43Speaker 04

  And the more they thought about it, the more they intellectualized it, the more they decided there was differences to the wine.

• 13:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  So this wasn't a wildly scientific experiment either. But to Brian DeMarco, the message couldn't have been clearer. When people know a wine is more expensive, or even think it is, it tastes better. Now, obviously, this idea doesn't apply just to wine. A house that costs $500,000 ought to be five times better on some level than a $100,000 house, the size, the construction, the schools, the neighborhood. So, is a wine that costs $50 five times better than a $10 bottle? Or is it even better at all?

• 14:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up, we go looking for hardcore empirical evidence that expensive wines actually taste better than cheap wines. And we look beyond price to prestige, to wine ratings, the awards, the whole shebang. Because if your wine, or your whole wine list, wins an award from a magazine like Wine Spectator, it's gotta be good, right? Right?

• 15:15Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 15:58Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 16:19Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 16:52Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 17:26Speaker 02

  Swirl, sip, and spit. We're back with Freakonomics Radio from American Public Media and WNYC. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 17:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  So tell me your name and kind of what you do or how you describe yourself.

• 17:42Speaker 05

  My name's Robin Goldstein. I write about wine and food. Basically, my book, The Wine Trials, has been my, I guess, principal outlet for writing about wine. But I've also been publishing academic papers on topics of taste from a cognitive perspective and an economic perspective, usually co-authored with colleagues from different academic fields. I've been exploring the neuroscience side of it a bit. I've been exploring kind of the behavioral side of it. And in particular, I'm interested in price signals and how people's knowledge of price affects their experience of wine on the most basic sensory level.

• 18:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, first, let me just ask you, I've heard good things about this lovely little restaurant in Milan called Osteria Lintrepido. You ever been there?

• 18:31Speaker 05

  I've actually, I've been to the restaurant, but it's actually located in my friend Giuliano's former apartment in Milan. The restaurant, really, I wouldn't say it's great. Mostly, they serve leftover pizza, and their wine cellar consists mostly of some leftover bottles of Monte Pulciano da Brutto from three weeks ago.

• 18:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Meaning it's not really a restaurant, is it?

• 18:54Speaker 05

  It's an apartment. So it's just an address, really.

• 18:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Osteria Lintrepido doesn't exist. It's a fake restaurant that Robin Goldstein made up. Why? Well, it's a strange story.

• 19:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Goldstein's research and writing on wine made him skeptical about critics and awards. He believed that so-called experts were, at best, subjective, and that they carried way too much influence. He wondered about the awards that magazines like Wine Spectator gave to restaurants for their wine lists. Did an award like that really mean that the wines at that restaurant were excellent? So he invented Osteria Lintrepido, or Fearless Restaurant. He created a fake menu, a fake website, and a fake voicemail message, saying the restaurant was closed for vacation.

• 19:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  As for the Osteria Lintrepido wine list, Goldstein made that up too. He included several expensive wines that Wine Spectator itself had given bad reviews in the past. One of them was a 1982 Brunello di Montalcino, which the magazine had given 67 points or a D-plus rating, calling it "barnyardy" and "decayed." He listed another vintage that Wine Spectator had reviewed as "unacceptable, sweet and cloying, and smells like bug spray." Then off his application went, with the fake wine list and a real money order.

• 20:25Speaker 05

  My hypothesis was that the $250 fee was really the functional part of the application. In other words, that the entire awards program was really just an advertising scheme and that it was being fraudulently misrepresented as an exercise of expert judgment by Wine Spectator.

• 20:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  I see. Now, was a little piece of you expecting that when you applied for this, that they would send someone around to drink some of your wine or eat some of your food?

• 20:58Speaker 05

  Well, of course, that's the experiment, right? So I didn't know. I mean, I wasn't sure going into this that I would win an award. There were two questions being tested here. One was, do you have to have a good wine list to win a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence? And the second was, do you have to exist to win a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence? And so I thought that it was quite possible that my experiment would fail.

• 21:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  He didn't fail.

• 21:26Speaker 06

  I am calling from the Wine Spectator magazine in New York, calling to congratulate you and let you know that your restaurant was selected as a Wine Spectator Restaurant Award winner. Hopefully, you did receive some information from us. But I'm calling to follow up and see if you might have an interest in publicizing your award with an ad in the upcoming issue, which comes out in August, as we do have a lot of international business travelers who may be coming to Milan.

• 21:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what was the name of the award that you won for your fictional restaurant?

• 22:02Speaker 05

  The Wine Spectator Award of Excellence.

• 22:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  So congratulations. It's awesome that you're a winner.

• 22:07Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 22:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  I too could be a winner presumably?

• 22:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, if you if your wines were bad enough.

• 22:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Thank you so much. Have a great day. Bye bye. In August of 2008, a new organization called the American Association of Wine Economists held its annual conference in Portland, Oregon. That's where Goldstein revealed his fake Award of Excellence. The press drank it up. From the New York Post, "Wine Mag Humbled by Hoax." According to the LA Times, Wine Spectator was now "drinking a hearty glass of blush." Wine Spectator vigorously defended its award system. The executive editor said the magazine never claimed to visit every restaurant, and that it did its due diligence on Osteria Lintrepido, looking over its website and calling the restaurant, but that it kept reaching an answering machine.

• 22:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  Grazie. Robin Goldstein, for his part, was convinced. The wine system was fundamentally flawed. If a fake restaurant with a wine list that included bad, expensive wines could win an Award of Excellence from one of the most prestigious wine magazines in the world? Who are we supposed to trust?

• 23:17Speaker 05

  My takeaway is that expert sources in the media are trusted too much, and that they're prone to abusing their positions of power as a way of making money. So the phenomenon where an ad, what's really an ad, is posing as real expert judgment is very problematic for consumers, because consumers really put trust in these magazines. You know, we put trust in experts. There's so many fields out there that we don't know as much about as the experts do. And so we use experts as an information intermediary, as a proxy for good judgment, and in an area that we don't know as much as the experts are supposed

• 24:00Speaker 05

  to. And when we, you know, when we trust experts too much, and they sell their awards to entities that are really their customers, that's quite problematic.

• 24:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Robin Goldstein also had an academic paper to present at that conference of wine economists. The paper was called "Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better?"

• 24:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  If the Osiriel Intrepido stunt was just a stunt, and if the Steve Levitt and Brian DiMarco blind tastings we heard about earlier were just unscientific tricks, well, Goldstein's paper was the opposite of that. It gathered up data from 17 blind tastings that Goldstein himself organized. The data included more than 6,000 observations from more than 500 people, from amateur wine drinkers to sommeliers and winemakers. He tested red wines, whites, rosés. The prices ranged from $1.65 a bottle to $150 a bottle. It was as rigorous as you could get. And what did Goldstein learn?

• 25:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  That overall, people liked expensive wines less than cheap wines. When you don't know what a bottle of wine costs, apparently, you don't know how good it's supposed to taste. Even the most expert tasters could barely tell the difference between expensive wines and cheap ones. It's unsettling, isn't it? Buying a bottle of wine shouldn't be as complicated as buying a house. But thanks to the layers of experts between us and the grapes, we've got performance anxiety. Wine isn't supposed to be a drag. It's a celebration, a beloved recipe. It's civilization in a bottle. You are drinking the handcrafted fruit of some farmer's vines

• 25:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  that may go back hundreds of years, grown under the same sun that's been shining for billions of years. Wouldn't it be nice to drop the pretense? To set aside the ratings and price? And just drink? Brian DiMarco, the wine importer? That's what he's really after.

• 26:08Speaker 04

  Who are we to tell the Connecticut housewife that that okie chardonnay she's been slamming down for the last 10 years from California? She's not deriving pleasure from that. She surely is. But there are so many other things. It's like limiting your musical notes to only playing F.

• 26:30Speaker 04

  And C notes. The rest of your life, it's only eating cheeseburgers and hamburgers, you know, the rest of your life. If you want to try other foods and other cultures and other things, if opening this bottle of Rioja somehow takes you to Spain and makes you feel like you want tapas, then it's done its job. And whether it's a $15 bottle or a $30 bottle is irrelevant at that point. I mean, then you're getting into nuances of good and great. But I think the bottle of wine is the ability to either change your day, from an alcoholic standpoint, you know, getting to a certain point where you're like, okay, this is, this is, or for people like myself in the trade, it's, it's something you have

• 27:12Speaker 04

  with food. I mean, growing up in Italian household, we weren't drinking great wine, but to me, wine wasn't alcohol. Wine was Carlo Rossini in a jug that was poured in the juice glasses from my grandfather, and that was what you have with dinner. Drinking, to me, was Budweiser and Jack Daniels, you know, you know, sneaking out on Friday night to go drink.

• 27:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let me just ask you, we're sitting here in a, a radio studio in downtown New York with kind of mucus colored sound padding and artificial light, and there's basically nothing good about this space. There's no air, there's nothing but-

• 27:46Speaker 04

  Soulless.

• 27:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  But transport me for a minute. So tell me, Brian, the room that you would like to be sitting in right now, and the food that you'd like to be eating right now, and most of all, what the wine is with that food, and what that wine tastes like to you.

• 28:00Speaker 04

  I think a crisp Saint Sere would be perfect right now, and with some sort of croque mûre, and maybe, I don't know, a salad with a little vinaigrette, and would be kind of perfect. You know, not too decadent, but definitely has its place, and, and maybe have a backup bottle on ice.

• 28:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Your table got room for another guy there?

• 28:24Speaker 04

  You're sitting with me right now. This, this pressed wood table is, I think it can hold an ice bucket. I'm pretty, pretty confident.

• 28:42Speaker 02

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC, American Public Media, and Dubner Productions. Our producers include Andrew Gartrell, whose taste guided this podcast, and Susie Lechtenberg, who views life as a blind tasting. This podcast is mixed by David Herman, who never touches the stuff. Our executive producer is Colin Campbell. Subscribe to this podcast on iTunes and you'll get the next episode in your sleep. You can find more audio at FreakonomicsRadio.com. And as always, if you want to read more about the hidden side of everything, go to Freakonomics.com.

• 29:35Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 30:07Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 30:38Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 31:16Speaker 07

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