Do you get more enjoyment out of cheap food and expensive wine? That is, does eating an inexpensive meal provide the same self-satisfied buzz as consuming a pricey bottle of wine? Condé Nast Porfolio writer Felix Salmon seems to think that it does.
Salmon cites Frank Bruni of the New York Times, who is trying to make the best of the euro-dollar exchange rate in Italy and claims that a “plate of pasta goes down a lot easier at $12—it even tastes better at $12—than it does at $16.” Salmon believes that most people enjoy cheap eats because they are confident in their taste in food and don’t need a price tag to tell them what they like.
But when it comes to wine, Salmon argues that a high price “intimidates us into liking the bottle more.” He goes on to say:
When navigating a strange and scary and unfamiliar land—which is how most people feel when they enter a wine shop—one grasps at anything one knows, which means that people (a) buy brands they recognize, and (b) navigate by price, in the absence of any other means by which to narrow down the selection.
But is it fair to compare an affection for cheap food to a taste for cheap wine? As one commenter notes, wine prices tend to correlate with their point scores from Robert Parker, which “are considered quite accurate by experts and non-experts.” Thus, a bargain price may increase the appeal of a meal, but a cheap plate of pasta isn’t necessarily tastier than its more expensive counterpart. However, spendier wine, in most cases, really is better than cheaper.
This might have been referring to a number of tests that have been done where when serving even the exact same wine to people but telling them that it costs more or less has a direct impact on their perceived enjoyment of the wine. People feel that expensive wine must be good, and then enjoy it more. Might be a conditioned response from having better expensive wine than cheap wine over the years, but it still has held up when it’s the same wine with different stated prices.
Our minds seem to do us a favour: most often (expensive) quality wines, especially reds, are most enjoyed with simple, and thus often cheaper, food. As a rule of thumb these wines tend to be overpowering (concentration, tannins) for many (more expensive) delicate dishes when young, whereas aged bottles reach a level of subtil complexity, sometimes somewhat fragile even, that one wouldn’t want to distrub with impactfull tastes and aromas of complex (more expensive) food – if a similar level of complexity even can be reached. Especially modern cooking, where many flavours are combined in a dish, contrasting flavoures are used, or where (raw) vegetables provide quite a lot of acidity, is a hard match for great red wine.
On the Parker point correlation with price: the great thing about statistics is that you will always be able to find outliers from the mean. There are many great wines, which score 90+, around $15,-!
On wine prices there truly is a strong correlation between price and quality. Though I must say there is a limit. There are almost no wines that cost over lets say $30,- or $40,- to make (perhaps some noble sweet wines excluded, for which grapes are often picked berry by berry, right on the day when each individual berry is ripe). So for wines that retail above $100,- you can conclude that a great part of the mark up is correlated more with demand than with quality. Under this ‘limit’, and especially excluding famous winesmakers or famous regions like Bordeaux, Burgundy, Napa Cabernet, etceteras, it is relatively save to expect a higher priced bottle from an honest retailer to be better. In my personal experience, one can easily nd great wines from around $15,-, and around $50,- you surely can find astonishing wines that ‘compete’ at the highest levels (as is also reflected in Scores from parker and orthers). This aside from that perception induced be the price level itself.