Pick your wine by price or taste?

When it comes to choosing a wine to enjoy with your meal, the price should not matter as much as the taste. But yet for women, it does.

This is not just my idle observation on the fairer sex. Recently academic researchers from the Stockholm School of Economics and from Harvard University conducted a detailed study to see how the price of a bottle of wine affects what people think of its taste.

The researchers found that women certainly prefer the top shelf bottles. Two hundred and twenty six volunteers tasted both a $5 dollar bottle and a $40 dollar bottle of Portugese red wine. One third of the tasters were aware of the prices, one third did not know, and one third were told the price of the bottle after they tasted from it.

The study found that women assigned higher ratings to the wine they knew cost more. An additional survey found that in a group of forty three hundred women, the vast majority, about thirty two hundred, said they choose wine based on price.

On the other hand men showed no preference. And in a blind test both sexes preferred the cheap wine based on taste alone.

So take note guys. If you’re looking for that second date, you might just spring for the expensive stuff on your first night out. And find a discrete way to slip in the price tag. She may just like it, and maybe you, a lot more.

(Brian Banmiller is a national Business Correspondent for CBS News Radio, free lance writer and public speaker. The former television business news anchor in San Francisco can be reached at brian@banmilleronbusiness.com .)