wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

'I will bring a twinkle to the eyes of your old woman, the old
companion of your daily sorrows and of your oldest hopes. I will
impart tenderness to her glances and I will let the sparkle of youth
gleam again from the depths of her eyes. And as for your dear little
son, all pale and wan, that poor little donkey harnessed to the same
exhausting tasks as the shaft-horse, I will restore to him the healthy
glow of the baby's cradle, and I will be for this new athlete entering
life's arena the oil that firmed up the muscles of wrestlers in
ancient times.

'I will drop to the depths of your breast like an organic elixir. I
will be the seed that fertilises the laboriously dug furrow. Our
intimate commingling will create poetry. Between the two of us we
will produce a god, and flutter off into the infinite, like birds,
butterflies, gossamer threads, perfumes, and all winged things.'

That is what wine sings in its mysterious language. Woe betide the man
whose selfish heart, closed to the sorrows of his brothers, has never
heard this song!"

From Charles Baudelaire, "On Wine and Hashish"

"It sometimes seems to me that I can hear wine talking--he speaks with
his soul, with that voice of the spirits which only spirits can hear
and understand--and says: 'Man, my beloved, I want to sing out to you,
despite my prison of glass and my bolts of cork, a song full of
fraternity, a song full of joy, light and hope. I am not ungrateful; I
know I owe my life to you. I know how much labour it costs you, and
how long you endured the sun's heat on your back. You gave me life,
and I will reward you. I will pay off my debt to the full; for I feel
an extraordinary joy when I tumble deep down a throat parched by hard
work. The breast of a decent man is a dwelling-place that I far prefer
to these melancholy and impassive cellars. It is a joyous tomb in
which I eagerly accomplish my destiny. I make a great commotion in the
worker's stomach, and form there by invisible staircases I slip up to
his brain where I perform my sublime dance.

'Can you hear stirring in me the echo of the powerful refrains of old
times, the songs of love and glory? I am the soul of the fatherland, I
am half lover, half soldier. I am the hope of Sundays. Work makes
weekdays prosperous, wine makes Sundays happy. Elbows on the family
table and sleeves rolled up, you will proudly sing my praises, and you
will be filled with contentment.

This connects with my second objection. The experiment, by its very design, attempt artificially to separate the integrated experience of pleasure. Yes, there most likely exists a link between the subject's expectations of the object (in this case, wine drinkers predisposed to enjoying what has been previously verified as 'good'--i.e. expensive--wine), but absent are any considerations of setting, participants involved, conversation made, memories evoked, motives for drinking... Science should not be so deaf to the poets. Economists should not be so quick to reduce definitions of pleasure to calculations of miserliness. Perhaps if we listen to wine itself, we will be able to understand its appeal. Luckily, as scientific data finds its interpreters in white lab coats, so to does wine have those who will decipher its passionate song.

Sorry to be behind the times; I just got around to listening to this show.
This study is seriously flawed, but that is not the fault of the professor. The flaw exists on two levels.
The first is an internal contradiction with the study, the second is a meta-contradiction in these kinds of cognitive-science influenced studies of human behavior.
First: Try to recreate the situation in your mind. You are being fed wine through a straw powered by mechanical pumps while in the midst of an MRI machine. By most standards (save, for perhaps, some fringe fetishist), a thoroughly uncomfortable and displeasing setting. To measure pleasure in this setting seems misguided. It is science's hubris that allows such experiments to comment upon the nature of the full human experience.

I think tastebuds have a lot to do with the experience. I do not like sweet wines. I probably would reject a Cabernet that was too sweet. Conversely some people do not like dry wines and would find the experience less pleasureable.

Some wines are definitely over priced. But a cheap wine can easily be picked by taste.

While war was raging in my country, one of the expensive and hard to get things was coffee. My parents have been using coffee substitute for months. I brought as a gift a really good Italian coffee and with everyone's excitement went to make it for them. By habit, I reached for the "old" coffee jar and made a grain substitute instead of Italian coffee. When I realized what happened, I decided to see if they will notice. While making it I could hear from the living room comments like "Ahhh, I can smell the goodness!" "Ahh. the REAL coffee". Coffee substitute is grainy and tastes horrible, and I thought they will notice the mistake once the coffee was in front of them. But, not! They kept ahhhing and oohhhing and drunk it with great pleasure. We had a big laugh and bigger lesson about the power of imagination, when I finally told them what had happened.

From my experience, the company you are with when drinking wine dramatically affects how wine tastes.

It's possible that the expensive wine didn't actually *taste* better, just that they *enjoyed* it more.

when I was a little girl in the 60's my mother was married to a gourmand who introduced our family to the finest of EVERYTHING. we ate in the best restaurants around the world & my mother & stepfather use to say that my older brother's "appetite increased with the prices on the menu."
I just heard my 88 year old mother repeat that about my 61 year old brother a month ago.