Are More Expensive Wines Better?

Trying to compare wine quality based on price is a theosophical exercise best engaged in only by the strong of heart.

The discussions of cheap wines vs expensive wines uses up a lot of energy that could be better spent washing your hair or taking a nap but fortunately, I am here to save you lots of time and just give you the answer.

There is no answer.

Doesn’t that feel better now?

It’s complicated but here are a couple of obvious points:

First, maybe you just don’t have the money to plop down $20 for wine. That’s fine. The easiest way to get around that is look for tastings near you and taste for free, or by the glass for $5 instead. A wine is only “better” if you can afford to taste it.

Second, if you can’t taste the difference in Gallo Hearty Burgundy and Romanée Conti then you’re right. For you there is really is no use in spending $1000 for a bottle that tastes the same to you as a $2 bottle. Only pay for what you can taste.

Third, for most wine lovers, it is the differences in taste that are the fun of wine. To get the most fun, compare wines with differences you can notice and afford. Travel to any vineyard anywhere and taste there, see what’s going on—talk with the people who make and grow the stuff. You don’t need $500 bottles of wine to have fun.

Fourth, and most importantly, ultimately you and I can never know if we are experiencing the same taste or not. The taste of wine occurs in your brain, not your mouth. There’s no way to measure if we are actually tasting the same taste or not.

So “better” is in the mind of the beholder. “Better” has nothing to do with price. It has to do with you.

And yet people still pursue the elusive $5 bottle that is “just as good” as a $50 bottle. So I’ll just refer you to the rather famous practical experiments below. Blind monks are involved. At least one anyway.

Sean Connery as James Bond made Dom Perignon sales explode. The wine was good but the price went up because of James Bond, not inherent quality differences—it was after all, the same wine at different prices.

Dom Perignon

Dom Perignon was a blind old French Benedictine Monk who invented champagne in 1697. When he first tasted it —he was blind after all, he couldn’t see it—he famously said, “I am tasting stars.” It was in fact, a miracle.

It was also an accident. Spring came and his musty old cave warmed up and the bottles of wine went back into fermentation. Mostly this resulted in a lot of exploding bottles and shattered glass. And, stars.

Which is very cool except that Dom Perignon wasn’t blind and there’s no mention of that tasting stars thing until a 19th century ad, 300 years after the old monk was dead.

Nice copywriting, though.

Also, champagne (sparkling wine) was invented in England not France. Gloucester to be precise. By a doctor named Christopher Merret at Christmas in 1662. He was looking into new innovations in apple cider production. Previously, the good doctor was known mainly for his investigations into tin and smelting.

So, there you have it. French Champagne was invented in England by a tin smelting expert.

Another miracle.

You need to know these things. That’s why I’m here.

But what you say, do miracles have to do with the price of wine?

Chateau Saint Michelle

For that, we must consider Chateau St. Michelle in Washington State. Chateau St. Michelle is a rather large U.S. winery that has nothing to do with monks or stars either one. It owns spectacular properties in Washington near Seattle and Napa Valley, among other places, which are much more fun to visit than musty old caves which hardly ever serve refreshments.

Saint Michelle also makes Domaine St. Michelle—a sparkling wine (aka Champagne) which is quite nice but not up to Dom Perignon standards. It also sells for about a quarter of the cost.

Domaine St. Michelle is made exactly the same way that Dom Perignon is made, and packages in the same shape and weight bottle, except that the grapes are from the U.S., not France.

The Tests

In 2011 Robin Goldstein, Alexis Herschkowitzsch and Tyce Walters decided to see how much of the quality of wine was reflected in the price. Being classy folks of fine standing, hopefully on an expense account, they and their team of intrepid statistical mathematicians conducted blind tastings with those same two wines—Dom Perignon and Domaine St. Michelle—but they kept getting results that didn’t seem to make sense.

So, they served them to a group of professional chefs, certified sommeliers (professional wine tasters) and food writers.

Wouldn’t you know? 70% of the professionals picked the $12 bottle over the $150 bottle.

Just to be sure, the scientists then threw in a Veuve Cliquot Champagne, which was sold by the same parent company as Dom Perignon. Veuve Cliquot sold for $40 a bottle. So, it was priced in the middle of the other two.

Great Scott, 85% of the professionals picked the $12 bottle over the $40 bottle too.

The higher the price, the worse the wine was rated when professional tasters didn’t know the price.

Curiously, when people do know the price, they rate the more expensive wine higher. You may be starting to see the problem here.

You could just blow off those results and attribute them to chance (if you refused to look at the statistical mathematical validations these people did).

But then, besides the $12 wine beating the $150 wine, Goldstein’s group found 150 wines under $15 that beat bottles costing $50 and up.

That would be 150 wines under $15 that were rated higher by professional wine tasters than wines costing $50 and up. At the very least there are either a lot of very good bottles out there under $15 or a lot of very bad bottles over $50.

Well, OK. That was one group, but there are lots of other groups. For instance, a series of blind tastings conducted by Hilke Plassmann and Antonio Rangel at Stanford University as part of a brain scanning study. Let’s see, I have the results of that here someplace. Ah, yes.

The cheaper wines were rated higher than the expensive wines.

Bummer.

And if that’s not enough, there is Frederic Brochet. Monsieur Brochet polled 57 French wine experts by pouring them the same wine---one in an expensive Grand Cru bottle (French), the other in a cheap Vin de Table (also French).

The French wine experts rated the wine in the expensive bottle way over the same wine in a cheap bottle.

When the wine was in the expensive bottle, the experts used words like “excellent,”,“complex,” and “long”. The same wine in a cheap bottle got rated with words like “short,” “flat,” and “simple”.

(Note: See “You can’t sell wine in a hat” in my book, “The Secret Life of Wine” for more on containers’ effect on wine taste.)

Like I said before, when people know, or in this case, think they know, the price of the wines, they rate the most expensive ones the highest.

So, what’s the answer?

Does that mean that all below $15 wines are better than all $50 wines? Of course not. There could have been 4 million wines under $15 that couldn’t beat $50 wines. And they could have picked the worst $50 wines in the world.

But, that part is never reported.

In addition, French tasters rate wines radically differently than American tasters. Or German tasters. Or Australian tasters. Or my cousins who drink beer and ride bulls. “Better” is different for all of them.

So, in the end, it turns out that statistics are theosophical too. Only you can decide if a wine is worth what you paid for it.

In the words of ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras, “Man is the measure of all things.” Women too. Absolute value in wine doesn’t exist. The value is in you.

So, don’t just stand there.

Buy some wine and taste something!