Pieter Colpaert
speaker
122 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Pieter Colpaert’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Listen, that's what I tell myself. But I think that's a way to cope with the fact that I cannot afford a bottle of magma.
Yeah, I mean, you're right there because, you know, this is a dynamic, again, you see it with all kinds of luxury products. Magma has this like near legendary status in the wine world. It's got glowing reviews, high ratings from collectors, and all those things contribute to price. There's also one wildcard, which is the winemaker. He says he uses this social pricing structure.
So he actually makes the magma more expensive to subsidize his other wines, like the Susukaru, so he can sell those at a more democratic price point. And so more people are able to try his wines. So that actually, that's smart.
Yeah. And as you say, it's about the scarcity. So the harder it is to find a wine, the more expensive it's going to be. And it's probably the same with a handbag. If it's harder to find a handbag, it'll be more expensive. Whether that's a single vineyard wine or it's from a specific rare vintage or this really prestigious vineyard, those are all factors.
And then reputation is another big one as well, because you have wines from very famous wine regions like Burgundy or Napa Valley. Those will fetch higher prices just based on the wine region they're from.
Yeah, and then selling a bottle right away that is cheaper for the producer than having to age and store it. So again, like with anything, production costs are a big factor. Cost of land, labor, storage, materials, and so on. And you know, like most of the wines we drink will be machine harvested, but then the premium wines, for those, most winemakers will still be handpicking their grapes.
Yeah, I think they're faster. But handpicking is still easier on the grapes and vines. Because, you know, when you're a human, you tend to be a little bit more judicious and careful about how you pick the grapes, what grapes you pick. So I think right now there's not really a substitute for the trained human eye.
Although, I mean, listen, I'm sure in a couple of years we'll have these like AI powered grape picking machines.
Yeah, I mean, do expensive wines taste better? That's the million-dollar question that we're trying to answer here. And I'm sorry to say I don't have a straightforward answer for you, because taste is super subjective, and then a wine that I'm raving about might leave you totally unimpressed. But there are actual studies about this. So the Journal of Wine Economics did a study.
They analyzed more than 4,000 wines that had been entered into 13 different competitions across the United States. And the researcher, he found that the probability of a wine winning a gold medal in one competition was completely statistically independent of whether it won a gold medal in any other competition. There is no correlation.
Yeah, I mean, but then these experts sometimes don't even agree with themselves. Because there's another study I like to cite, which is the same researcher. He found that only 10% of judges at the California State Fair wine competition, only 10% of judges were able to replicate their scores within the same medal group when they were tasting the same wine several times.
So, you know, there's all kinds of things that influence or bias their judgment, like the order in which they tasted the wines, the scores they gave to previous wines, even the reputation of the producer or the region. So, you know, one moment they'll give it a gold medal, the next they'll give it a silver medal. And this is the same taster.
Yeah, sorry. I think I have to burst that bubble because, I mean, humans are highly suggestible. You know, our expectations do influence how we experience things.
And then wine is no exception because a group of German researchers, they found that people's brain activity while they were drinking wine was influenced by the price they were told that wine costs, even when that information was completely fake.
Yeah. I mean, it wasn't a classic wine tasting. These subjects, let's call them, they were laying down in the scanner, the MRI scanner, and they had test tubes feeding them a milliliter of wine every time.
No, there's not. But they gave all these participants the same wines to drink and then told them different prices. And when people believed that they were drinking a more expensive wine, you saw the areas of their brain associated with reward and pleasure become more active.
Yeah, I don't know if they're pretending. I think it's a thing your brain does, you know, and it's a known dynamic because it's not limited to wine. You know, there's a name for this phenomenon. Psychologists have called it the price quality heuristic. which means that we kind of subconsciously associate higher prices with higher quality.
So that will then kind of affect your actual perception of the product.
Yeah, or maybe you should just start charging, see what happens.
But you know, I also want to note that the people in this very experiment, they were just kind of like regular, occasional wine drinkers like you and I. They weren't sommeliers or wine experts. So actually, one of the things these researchers didn't test but were interested in is whether you can train your taste buds to reduce those placebo marketing effects. Yeah.
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