If the wine is hard to pronounce, is it worth more?
In a recent psychological study, researchers at Brock University in Niagara found that people were willing to pay an average of $2 more for a wine based purely on the sound of its name. Specifically, they tended to favour a tongue-twisting brand versus one they could more easily pronounce. The findings suggest that unfamiliar or exotic sounds imply scarcity, and that’s an attribute frequently associated with quality in the highly impressionable minds of wine shoppers.