There Is One Big Reason You Buy the Wines You Buy (And It Isn’t Because of the Taste)

You might think you buy wine on its taste alone but evidence suggests otherwise

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I heard it every single day in my wine store and bar.

If I like the taste, that’s all that matters.

That phrase bothered me because I knew it to be unequivocally untrue.

And as it turns out, there is evidence to prove it.

I’m not saying the taste of a wine doesn’t matter. It does.

But there is something bigger at play here. There is the fact that different wines signify different things. They have cultural meaning. When you choose to drink a particular wine, it says something about who you are and what image you want to project to the world.

The same goes for what you don’t buy.

Wine comes with a lot of cultural baggage. And it turns out, you take on this baggage every time you go to buy a bottle.

Sometimes it matters even more than the taste.

When you think of Chardonnay, what do you think?

Most expensive white wine in the world with flavours that can blow your freaking mind? Or suburban mums with an unnatural attachment to live, love, laugh pillows?

You’d be forgiven if you think the latter. Many of my customers certainly did.

For years this bothered me. When it comes to our wine-buying choices, why do cultural meanings matter so much?

It was only until I recently read an article by writer

Joe Fattorini

(thanks Joe) that I discovered why this is.

The Meaning Transfer Model.

Back in the late 1980s, an economist called Grant McCracken wrote an influential journal article called Culture and Consumption which set out the Meaning Transfer Model.

In one sentence:

Cultural meaning is transferred from the world of culture to consumer goods. Then the cultural meaning is transferred from the goods to individual consumers.

In other words, we all store cultural references for different wines in our heads and they strongly influence our wine buying choices.

Let’s take Chardonnay as an example.