Fancy Wine Names Trick You Into Paying More

When you do actually go to the liquor store to buy a bottle of wine, do you head for the hard-to-pronounce, seemingly fancy bottle? Or do you lean toward the simply named wineries, like Cupcake? Research shows that you winos buying fancy bottles of wine are being duped.

NPR reports on research done by a Canadian professor, Antonia Mantonakis, who proposed the theory that those who buy wines with exceedingly hard-to-pronounce names think they're getting a better bottle. And that means they're willing to pay a lot more. After a blind tasting where participants tasted a wine and were told it was from a hard-to-pronounce winery or from an easy-to-pronounce winery, they liked the taste better, and were more willing to pay more for, the tongue-twister wine. The participants said they would pay about $2 more for the fancier-sounding bottle.

In short, you feel like a fancy drinker when drinking an impossible-to-pronouce wine. But the impossibly cute names also bring in big bucks: Mantonakis told NPR that wineries like Cupcake, Elephant on a Tight Rope, and Mommy's Time Out rake in the dollars from "low-knowledge" customers who are intrigued by the cute name, but may not know much about the taste.