In wine-tasting, order trumps flavour

Assistant business professor Antonia Mantonakis found when people repeatedly sampled a wine, they thought the first sample was best.

At the Olympics, the best finish first. In wine, the first usually tends to finish best.

Lending credence to what cynics have long suspected, researchers in Ontario and Illinois have shown that, when presented with several unlabelled – and, unbeknownst to them, identical – wine samples, tasters had an irrational bias for the first.

As for flavour differences, they played no role in the results because the 142 tasters were given the same samples in each set of three to five wines. In fact, the samples were poured from the same bottle.

“There is always a first-is-best bias," said Antonia Mantonakis, an assistant business professor at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont., who was lead author of the study, published in U.S.-based Psychological Science.

The study, titled Order in Choice: Effects of Serial Position on Preferences, builds on similar work as far back as the mid-1950s by Ferrer Filipello, a wine researcher at the University of California at Davis.

But whereas previous studies tended to include no more than three samples, this one had as many as five. And it appeared to reconcile conflicting findings in other areas of consumer research that show subjects in fact tend to prefer the last in a series of samples.

As the sample size grew from three to five wines, the pendulum began swinging, specifically among wine-savvy tasters, toward the last sample over the first.

“As the number of options increases, especially for high-knowledge consumers, the primacy advantage starts to turn into a recency advantage, or a last-is-best advantage," Prof. Mantonakis said.

Several reasons have been offered to account for the primacy effect, or what might be more colloquially called the first-impression prejudice.

Sensory scientists have argued that the first food a person consumes during a meal is experienced more hedonistically, and thus tends to be remembered most favourably.

Another explanation might be dubbed the Olympic effect, or what Prof. Mantonakis describes as an inbred expectation.

“The first one is the gold medal, the first one is the best. It's this expectation we have in society."

But she and her fellow researchers at the faculty of business at Brock and the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business also wanted to test a hunch that wine aficionados ultimately would transcend the primacy prejudice if given enough choices.

Their reasoning: Wine geeks thrive on discovering new and ever-better drinking experiences, so they're more likely to give subsequent options a chance.

Indeed, the researchers found that wine aficionados not only gave subsequent samples more of a chance, but may have become over receptive to new choices down the line, tending to see them as better than what went before.

“They are persistent, they are engaged, and their goal is to make sure they find the best wine," Prof. Mantonakis said.

“So they will keep looking and they will give themselves even more of an opportunity for something later in the sequence to beat the current favourite."

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