Stick to the $10 limit

Study: $90 wine tastes better than the same wine at $10

This was a very fascinating study on the how expectations influence perceptions:

Researchers ...have directly seen that the sensation of pleasantness that people experience when tasting wine is linked directly to its price. And that's true even when, unbeknownst to the test subjects, it's exactly the same Cabernet Sauvignon with a dramatically different price tag.

Specifically, the researchers found that with the higher priced wines, more blood and oxygen is sent to a part of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex, whose activity reflects pleasure. Brain scanning using a method called functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) showed evidence for the researchers' hypothesis that "changes in the price of a product can influence neural computations associated with experienced pleasantness," they said.

You see, people should just take my approach and make it a personal challenge to find the best wines you can at no more than $10 a bottle. (For many years, De Borteli's Sacred Hill range has usually been the most reliably pleasing sub-$10 wine, although you have to move between varieties from year to year. The Jacobs Creek sparkling range - often on special at $8 a bottle - is also consistently good.)

The report about the American study notes even this strange effect:

"Even more intriguingly, changing the price at which an energy drink is purchased can influence the ability to solve puzzles."

Very odd, hey?