If so you'll have trouble relating to the startling news that 500 wine tasters preferred Trader Joe's Two Buck Chuck over a $55.00 Sonoma Cabernet and a domestic $10.00 bubbly over illustrious Dom Perignon (which at $110.00 per liter makes Shell's premium gas seem like a bargain!)

Robin Goldstein, a food writer, conducted this experiment by isolating consumers from outside influence so they could simply judge wine by what's in the glass. He had 500 volunteers sample and rate 540 unidentified wines priced from $1.50 to $150 a bottle. The results are described in a new book, "The Wine Trials," to be published this month by Fearless Critic Media.

So why does anyone bother buying a $55.00 cabernet?

A possible answer was provided by a second experiment at the California Institute of Technology and the Stanford Business School, in which presumably sober researchers demonstrated that the more expensive consumers think a wine is, the more pleasure they are apt to take in it. (That may explain the appeal of Porsches and Jags!)

The researchers scanned the brains of 21 volunteer wine novices as they administered tiny tastes of wine, measuring sensations in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain where flavor responses apparently register. The subjects were told only the price of the wines. Without their knowledge, they tasted one wine twice, and were given two different prices for that wine. Invariably they preferred the one they thought was more expensive.

"It's not just about wine, it's about everything," said Prof. Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (HarperCollins), which examines how people make all sorts of real life decisions. Regardless of the situation, Professor Ariely discovered that suggestion has a powerful effect on perception and belief.

In our shops and boutiques we can see this in action. Upgrade your frame collection and put in some luxury product. Notice how your (formerly) "Top of The Line" begins to look shabby and down-market. Rationally nothing has changed, but irrationally everything has changed, a few well-chosen comments from you and the seed is planted, "exclusive and stylish, limited production, hand made, etc." (Hey, they're your customers – make up your own words, you know them best!)

We don't invent these phenomena, but we might as well take advantage of them!