Cover Psychology 101

I love Science Friday on NPR. I’ve never listened to a show that didn’t cover something fascinating. Over the past couple of months they’ve been doing a series on wine and the factors that affect its chemistry and flavor. In the third wine-related SciFri video from February 7, 2014, Dr. Brian Wansink, director of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell, talks about wine psychology and how much our expectations about a bottle influence how we actually experience the wine when we drink it. What he and his colleagues found is that all sorts of clues influence our perceptions. The quality of the glass, whether there’s a tablecloth and candles… all the elements of the physical setup contribute to what we experience when we take that first sip. And not only that. What they found was that drinkers’ perceptions could actually be guided. The most striking experiment they did was to take the exact same wine and put it into two different bottles. One had a label that said it was from a California wine-growing region. The other said it was from North Dakota