Studies on the relationship between the price and appreciation of wine are coming in faster than I can process them. Disappointingly, the most recent one that I’ve read doesn’t involve any convoluted mechanisms for consuming wine; I was looking forward to seeing what unconventional procedures the experts would come up with next.

This study has also received more press than the others I’ve seen so far, because it’s at the core of a heavily promoted book called The Wine Trials by Robin Goldstein. I haven’t had a chance to look at the book, but the promotional materials suggests that Goldstein has an agenda to push. Specifically, it appears that he’s looking to make a name for himself by assaulting the conventional wisdom that more expensive wine is necessarily better.

Taking this agenda into account, I read the results of the statistical analysis of the many blind tastings that Goldstein conducted, results that were published as a working paper by the American Association of Wine Economists. Evidently, Goldstein, whom the working paper refers to as a “food and wine critic,” organized seventeen blind tastings across the country, using a variety of different types of wine, ranging from $1.65 to $150 per bottle. Tasters then rated the wines they sampled on a four-point scale: “1″ denoting “Bad”, “4″ denoting “Great.”

Even without elaborate systems for delivering wine to the subjects, this study found that tasters with no specialized wine knowledge took greater satisfaction from less expensive wines than they did from more expensive ones. Throwing the question of expertise into the mix altered the results. Wine experts were regularly able to differentiate cheaper wines from more expensive wines during the blind tests, and they assigned higher scores to the more expensive wines.