The wine delusion

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Putting on the sceptical hat Blind tasting may not take people to their true preferences. But finding true preferences can be a workinprogress even if it’s never found. If any, it opens up people to knowing how much they don’t know about what they really like (Berdik, 2012). Likes and dislikes are part of our own selves. Expectations may offer suggestions to our preferences; some useful, some not so much. Just as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus believed, ‘The only thing that is constant is change,’ our preferences, too, are anything but consistent. They are constantly being changed, evolved, influenced, and by nature, can certainly do with some questioning and discovery. At the heart of questioning and discovery is trial and error (Sutherland, 2014). In The Black Swan, the LebaneseAmerican mathematician Nassim Taleb explains the human tendency of trial and error in finding simplistic explanations retrospectively. The trial and error approach has defined human progress, from steam engine to aspirin. The human act of discovery through trial and error is what Taleb (cited in Sutherland, 2014) calls ‘stochastic tinkering’. The notion that people make progress on their own without really understanding how it works. In the notoriously complex wine market, where even expert preferences are about as consistent as flipping coins, trial and error seems like a reasonable way for people to find better and more genuine preferences (Sample, 2011; Sutherland, 2014; Berdik, 2012). How is Taleb’s use of the phrase ‘teaching birds to fly’ so different from unreliable experts telling people ‘how to drink’ or ‘how or enjoy’ a glass of wine? By using purchase data on more than 77 million shopping trips over 7 years, the Dutch economist Bart Bronnenberg matched shoppers’ actual choices to their knowledge and found an interesting correlation: the more informed 18
people are the more likely they are to pick store brands (Bronnenberg et al., 2014). If we flipped it around a bit, it makes sense the other way too. That is, if people simply recognised the wine market’s absurd complexity as an illusion to stay fancy, disregard advertising appeals and fluffy citics, the unfair bias against cheap wines would become redundant. While this isn’t the case for many other experiential goods, it certainly holds true to wine. Whether people find their true preferences or learn anything about wine at all, they can at least be happy by merely knowing that a $10 wine can give them a $100 experience. Or as Goldstein and Asimov believe, will motivate people to strip experts of their undue reverence, stay humble about not knowing wine, and be bold enough to wear a sceptical hat when it comes to picking wine. 19
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The wine delusion

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