On Vines and Minds is an excel­lent sum­mary of the his­tory and psy­chol­ogy of wine (pdf/html).

Some top­ics of note:

  • Music rad­i­cally influ­ences our pur­chas­ing habits: clas­si­cal music increases the amount we’re will­ing to spend while char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally French music sways us toward wine from that region (sim­i­larly for Ger­man music/wine).
  • Colour affects the brain’s response to odours; as demon­strated when an odour­less red die was mixed with white wine, fool­ing ‘Mas­ters of Wine’ into explain­ing its ‘nose’ using terms reserved for red wines.
  • Describ­ing a wine has a dras­tic effect on how we later per­ceive that same wine, as shown when non-experts matched experts in iden­ti­fy­ing wines dur­ing blind taste tests… unless they had to describe the wine between tast­ing sessions.
  • Per­ceived price influ­ences the amount of plea­sure we derive from wine: fMRI scans have shown more ‘real’ phys­i­o­log­i­cal plea­sure when tast­ing a wine labelled as more expen­sive com­pared to oth­ers at lower prices (even though it was the same wine through­out the study).

Another round-up of wine psychology—albeit a slightly less com­pre­hen­sive one—comes from Freako­nom­ics, where they point out that there is a zero (or even slightly neg­a­tive) cor­re­la­tion between the per­ceived qual­ity of a wine and its price when non-experts undergo blind taste tests. The arti­cle also notes:

  • This cor­re­la­tion is even stronger with cham­pagne: a study showed a $12 sparkling wine from Wash­ing­ton was pre­ferred nearly two to one to $150 Dom Perignon when the labels were removed.
  • Peo­ple dis­like a bev­er­age if it con­tains a typ­i­cally offen­sive flavour­ing, even though it actu­ally improves the flavour: adding a small amount of bal­samic vine­gar to beer will slightly improve its flavour, but tell peo­ple it’s added before a tast­ing and few will pre­fer it to an untainted ver­sion; inform them after a tast­ing and they’re indif­fer­ent; don’t inform them at all and the major­ity pre­fer the tainted beer.
  • Hardy Roden­stock, one of the most infa­mous wine coun­ter­feit­ers, fooled experts all around the world into pur­chas­ing fake 18th-century wine he claimed Thomas Jef­fer­son once owned. His ruse was even­tu­ally uncov­ered by a pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tion financed by mil­lion­aire Bill Cock (who Roden­stock duped), using a horde of for­mer FBI and MI5 agents. Inter­est­ingly, Roden­stock man­aged to dupe experts by “get­ting [them] shit­faced” (to quote the wine critic Robert Parker) prior to tast­ing the fake wine. (The story of the fraud is a lengthy—but fascinating—read.)

Finally, these two com­ple­men­tary stud­ies could make for an inter­est­ing busi­ness model (think: wine bar serv­ing cheap yet expen­sive look­ing wine, loud music, food available):

In con­clu­sion you could say that this quote encap­su­lates every­thing you need to know about wine:

Wine does not live in a vac­uum and it is sam­pled and savoured in the con­text of our life experiences.

P.S. Don’t for­get the sec­ond cheap­est wine syn­drome.