Cheap and Expensive Wine Taste the Same in Blind Taste Tests by Ben Hayden.
Wine is a multi-billion dollar industry part of the modern world. There are stores devoted just to selling wine, magazines devoted to it, wineries are a major tourist destination, and so on. And yet, weirdly, we know that much of this is a psychological artifact.
We are quite bad at tasting the differences between different wines. Even experts are easily fooled. You put a misleading label on a bottle of wine and the experts’ opinions can change dramatically. You can even warm up white wine and color it red (with food coloring) and many judges will think it is a red wine.
This is not just true for wine. Most people can’t taste the difference between Coke and Pepsi (even though most people think they can – I’ve done the experiments). The same is probably true with your favorite drink – say, Powerade vs Gatorade, or your favorite vitamn water or even bourbon. Calling something Tahitian Vanilla makes it taste better than plain old Vanilla. Calling something Oaxaca black bean dip makes it taste better than calling it black bean dip. And so on.
More at PT.