My friend Thierry sent me a link to the following article from the BBC:

• Raising a glass to pricey wine – Wine, we know, gets better with age – but now it appears it tastes better the more it costs.

I would have loved to have been the researcher who wrote up the grant proposal for this one. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have shown that there are influences (ala brain scans) on the ‘taste’ of wine based on if someone is convinced that a wine is more expensive. An excerpt:

The volunteers’ brains were scanned to monitor the neural activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex – the area of the brain associated with decision-making and pleasure in terms of flavour. Higher ratings were given to the more “expensive” wines.