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Canberra Today 12°/16° | Saturday, March 30, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Wine / The rising price of pleasure

STOIC philosophers mistrusted and resisted the passions and advocated frugality. Spiritual joys may be more long lasting than the ephemeral pleasures of food and drink but the latter are more urgent and include the satisfaction of the base-line needs of man, as well as stimulating our cerebral pleasure centres.

Richard Calver.
Richard Calver.

That stimulation, in my view, had always arisen from the natural consequence of eating or drinking quality and of having the palette and the senses satisfied. Intrigued was I then when I read an item from “ABC Science” reporting that with an increase in the price of a bottle of wine the pleasure experience of drinking that wine is enhanced.

As well as collecting evidence about what the subjects being tested said about the wines, the people doing the research also scanned the drinkers’ brains. The researchers presented a $90 bottle of cabernet sauvignon as a $10 bottle and an el cheapo as one worth $45. The volunteers (and who wouldn’t respond to an advert for free wine!) gave better ratings to the so-called more expensive wines. The parts of the brain’s cortex where pleasure is located showed greater activity when they drank the falsely labelled but higher priced wine; it was a measurable physical issue.

Frank van de Loo, the winemaker from Canberra’s Mount Majura Vineyard, says that this effect means people will think wine is better than it is but people aren’t silly. People will go for the wines that are good if they’re not led – they can rely on their palettes.

“There is truth in what the palate tells you but you can be led by prior expectations,” he said. “Some would say this has produced ‘label drinking’ that is drinking the wine just because of the expectation from the brand.”

I’ve only ever personally discovered this phenomenon in a more perverse way: the more expensive my friend’s (or enemy’s) wine that I’m drinking, the happier I am. Wine schadenfreude. I do attest to happily drinking cheap wine if it tastes good so the experimental results were a surprise.

But the results raise a whole range of moral and, frankly, immoral questions. Do I get more pleasure from a woman when I spend more money on her? To what extent do the values we have and the perceptions we have about matters subjectively, especially their value as labelled, affect the way we perceive pleasure or the brain registers pleasure or pain?

Obviously if you believe this study, the answer is that this is a very weighty factor.

As Frank van de Loo says, the brain has shortcuts.

“If we think we already know the answer then we are more likely to be led by what is preconceived,” he says.

“That is why we have to be disciplined about the way we taste wine.”

The message is we must taste blind (not blind drunk) to be sure of its qualities.

The questions raised in the scientific study also reminded me of a law school story I heard while drinking wine at a faculty party when I used to teach law: a genie appeared at a law faculty meeting and offered the dean a choice of $1 million, wisdom, or beauty. Being an academic he, of course, chose wisdom. “Granted” said the genie and was gone on a hot air, law school breeze. Then all of the staff present at the meeting turned to the dean, waiting for the first words from the wisest man you could ever be in the law. They waited and waited for over an hour while the dean scanned the room and then fell into a state of meditation. All of a sudden the dean opened his eyes, sighed, and said: “I should have taken the money.”

 

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Ian Meikle, editor

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