Women attached more value to pricey bottles of wine than the actual taste, a direct wine marketer club said on Wednesday.

This followed research by the Stockholm School of Economics and Harvard University which set out to find how the cost of wine affects what people thought about the taste.

"Interestingly, the research showed that disclosing the price of the wine before it was tasted generally resulted in much higher wine ratings... but basically only for women," said Colin Collard, chairperson of Wine of the Month Club.

During the study conducted by Johan Almenberg of Harvard University, 266 volunteers in Boston, US were asked to taste one of two Portuguese red wines, one costing five dollars while the other cost $40.

One-third of the volunteers was told the price before the tasting while other volunteers learned the price afterwards, said Collard.

All of the volunteers were asked to rate the wine on a scale that ranged from undrinkable to perfection.

"Women appeared to give far higher ratings when they were told that what they were about to drink was expensive.

"Men did not seem that affected by the price... They appeared to go more on taste. But women certainly seemed affected about the price — and this impacted on their wine rating," he said.

In a blind tasting, both sexes gave higher ratings for the cheaper wine that for the more expensive wine.

"This shows that people don't necessarily like more expensive wines," Collard said.

Almenberg said the impact of pricing on women could be "something evolutionary".

"If you look for what women find attractive in a man, the paycheque is probably not that important for either sex, but a lot of women attach more importance to that than men do," he said.

Sapa

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