Overview
Few beverages have as much history, popularity, and notoriety as wine. It’s been around for millennia, dating back to biblical times. Indeed, Jesus was known to have turn water into wine at a wedding party (and pretty good wine at that). 2,000 years later, the beverage is still being served at celebrations, restaurants, and on the tables of homes around the world.
In pop culture, wine is often depicted as a refined drink. Nothing quite screams sophistication in a movie like a 1945 Rothschild from the Bordeaux region of France.
On the other hand, for all its feel-good effects, concerns about the effects of alcohol on one’s health and the well-being of others has left a stain on the industry. Just as wine has been depicted as a refined drink in pop culture, it can also summon images of a snobby or self-centered person.
So, we ask, in addition to impairing our inhibitions, does wine imbue the drinker with an air of sophistication?
Experiment
We ran an experiment with 400 people on Amazon Mechanical Turk in which participants were told to “Imagine you’re meeting up with a new co-worker at a nearby restaurant after work. Your co-worker places an order and asks for a glass of [water / wine] (pictured below).” Unbeknownst to participants, we randomly assigned whether they saw “water” or “wine” and the corresponding image below.
Participants were then asked, "How sophisticated do you think this co-worker is? (i.e., has good cultural taste)" and responded by answering on a 1-7 scale (1 = Not at all, 7 = Extremely).
Results
Our wine-drinking coworker was indeed rated higher in sophistication than our water drinking. We found a small-to-medium sized difference between drinking water (avg. = 4.41) and drinking wine (avg. = 4.83), about a 10% boost in perceived sophistication (p < 0.001). The results did not change when accounting for differences in age, gender, or frequency of drinking alcohol.
Conclusion
Drinking wine does appear to make you seem a bit more refined. So, if you’re in a social situation and want to appear cultured, a glass of wine may just do the trick.
Of course, this leaves open the question… red or white? While this study can only attest to the power of reds, stay tuned for the next experiment in which we test red vs. white.
Methods Note
To test for significant differences in likability between our experimental conditions, we used an independent samples t-test. For statistically significant results, the difference between the averages of the two groups would be large, and the corresponding “p-value” would be small (p < 0.05). This indicates that if we were to replicate the study with the same population, we would likely obtain a similar effect. Additionally, we utilized OLS regression analyses with interaction terms to explore potential significant interactions between the main results and participant demographics, such as age and gender.
Data and survey materials used for this experiment are available upon request.