The wine delusion

More documents

Recommendations

Info

as expensive or cheap based on taste alone is 50:50. The same odds as flipping a coin. So bizarre is the wine market that is refuses to accommodate even the most basic law of economics. Which is, people buy more when the prices are low and less when the prices are high. Economists call this principle, ‘law of demand’. Because wine is unlike a typical good, its audience, the ‘loyals’, the ‘snobs’ and the ‘conspicuous’, often violate the law of demand while making decisions. For instance, the loyals may not buy more or buy less with change in prices; the snobs may not buy more when prices fall; the conspicuous would buy more when prices rise (Thornton, 2009, pp. 21921). The elixir of snobs There are over 15,000 wine products to choose from. No other industry offers people so many choices (Thornton, 2013, p. 3). People believe these products have different characteristics. Such is its toll on the human capacity, leaving people confused. Perhaps its confusion is an intended illusion, a trick. For wine comes in just two colours: red and white. And yet, it seems so hard to pick one. So hard that the English poet Kingsley thought ‘Red or white?’ were the three most depressing words in the English language (Sutherland, 2014). So, why is wine still popular? Why are people taking so much trouble drinking a drink so confusing? One that people can never get their heads around, let alone have the confidence to complain. Perhaps the wine market thrives itself on confusion at the expense of clarity. A startup named Vinetrade set up a simple site for people to buy and sell wines online. Vinetrade soon had to shut down because people resisted ordering wine online. Turns out, that the whole online thing killed the joy of being 4
part of an elite group that used fancy words like ‘tannin’ and ‘oak’ (Mayassi, 2013). So, why is confusion revered? What is the correlation between confusion and popularity? In popular culture for instance, there is a meme on the theme nerds are cool. It works because nerds seem to have a certain IQ, too hard for the average Joe to understand. So cool that Hollywood filmmakers have been ditching superheroes for nerds (Hu, 2013). Similarly, the British adman Rory Sutherland thinks that wine’s popularity may be Freudian, ‘not in the sexual sense, but in the sense of what the Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud called der Narzißmus der kleinen Differenzen or ‘the narcissism of small differences’ (Sutherland, 2013). As Sutherland (2013) puts, ‘The advertising business is often criticised for exploiting this bias: to provide customers with a superficial sense of uniqueness endless trivial product variations are created to provide “an ersatz sense of otherness which is only a mask for an underlying uniformity and sameness”.’ In other words, the absurd complexity of wine may be essential to its popularity. For its drinkers to show status and connoisseurship, it is necessary for the market to be absurdly confusing to navigate (Sutherland, 2013). Which creates a sense of snobbery among wine drinkers; the superficial culture that is, wine. This peculiar narcissistic urge opens up an opportunity for people to advertise their own discernment, of what good wine is. Is wine genuine? So, what really is good wine? How do people know what good wine is? What makes one wine better than another? The Château Lafite Rothschild Bordeaux is considered by many to be the world’s best wine. Thomas Jefferson was among its 5
Page 1 and 2: Economics and Philosophy PHIL S16
Page 3: A bizarre market The wine market wo
Page 7 and 8: Chen, 2014). Brochet served the sam
Page 9 and 10: on this area by teaching monkeys to
Page 11 and 12: you will become less of a slave to
Page 13 and 14: price, flavour expectations of such
Page 15 and 16: tried, their inconsistent results d
Page 17 and 18: quality consistently. So, how can p
Page 19 and 20: people are the more likely they are
Page 21: MoesgaardKjeldsen, S, 2014, ‘15

The wine delusion

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?