Obvi­ous stated, still fas­ci­nat­ing. Mind Hacks: Higher price makes cheap wine taste bet­ter:

A new brain scan­ning study has sup­ported what we’ve sus­pected all along, more expen­sive wine tastes bet­ter partly because we expect it to.

[…]

What the vol­un­teers didn’t know was that there were only three dif­fer­ent wines, and two of them were tasted twice. One one occa­sion it was described as cost­ing $90 a bot­tle, on another as cost­ing $10 a bottle.

The vol­un­teers rated the ‘more expen­sive’ wine as sig­nif­i­cantly more like­able despite being iden­ti­cal to the ‘cheaper’ wine.

I’m sure the same must work when the upper end is more my price range (£15 is an expen­sive bot­tle of wine for me!).