Obvious stated, still fascinating. Mind Hacks: Higher price makes cheap wine taste better:
A new brain scanning study has supported what we’ve suspected all along, more expensive wine tastes better partly because we expect it to.
[…]
What the volunteers didn’t know was that there were only three different wines, and two of them were tasted twice. One one occasion it was described as costing $90 a bottle, on another as costing $10 a bottle.
The volunteers rated the ‘more expensive’ wine as significantly more likeable despite being identical to the ‘cheaper’ wine.
I’m sure the same must work when the upper end is more my price range (£15 is an expensive bottle of wine for me!).