Blind tasting may help professionals strip away bias, but for consumers, bias is the reality.

I’ll never forget a lesson at the Escuela Argentina de Sommelier. Our teacher poured wine from a decanter, announcing: “This is the most expensive wine you will taste in this course.” Excitement buzzed around the room. Students began describing it with elaborate praise: “so elegant… refined… structured… the most beautiful wine I’ve ever tried.” Word after word piled on, each more glowing than the last.

And then came the reveal. It wasn’t a grand cru at all. It was cheap Tetra Pak wine, poured into a decanter. The room went silent. Everyone felt a little foolish. But the lesson was unforgettable: we hadn’t been tasting the liquid. We had been tasting the story.

Our guest Marco Baldocchi put it perfectly: “If you don’t put the value first and the price at the end, people are going to think you are so expensive.” Value, in other words, is not an absolute, it is PERCEPTION.

This is also what Rory Sutherland calls psycho-logic in his book Alchemy. Value lives in the “black box” of the human mind. A $30 bottle can feel like a waste of money or like a revelation depending entirely on how expectations are framed.

We can see the same truth outside wine. Consider the famous Coke vs. Pepsi study. When people tasted the sodas blind, preferences were split nearly 50–50. But when participants knew which brand they were drinking, Coke was strongly preferred. Brain scans revealed why: when the Coke brand was visible, regions linked to memory and emotion lit up. Pepsi didn’t trigger the same response. The taste hadn’t changed, but the story had, and that story rewired the brain’s experience of pleasure.

This is the same reason Coca-Cola’s “New Coke” experiment collapsed in the 1980s. Blind tests said people preferred the new formula. But without the emotional halo of classic Coke - the red can, the Christmas ads, the cultural symbolism - the product failed. Perception won over chemistry.

Wine is no different. Its “price” is just a number. Its “value” lives in the story, the context, and the expectation people bring to the glass. A pop of cork, a heavy bottle, a label that resonates, these elements build value before taste ever confirms it. As Marco said: “The important thing is how you let me feel.”

Consumers drink perception. And perception is value.The business equation is simple: Value – Price = Gain.

And that should make us ask: if wine is increasingly seen as old-fashioned, complicated, or disconnected from everyday life, what story is the majority really telling themselves about wine today?

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