“It tastes like the mountains”

One can argue that taste is a psychological experience as much as a sensory one. ("Is that bleu cheese or sweaty socks?")

My kids showed me a video from a YouTube star named Stanley Chen, who demonstrates how small details can change our perception of a product experience—in this case, bottled water.

Chen and a friend got a bunch of wine bottles, peeled off the labels, filled them with water from a garden hose, and hosted a "four-course luxury water-tasting experience" at a pop-up water store gloriously named Acqua di Rubinetto, which is Italian for "tap water."

The four courses included one actual $300 bottle of water and—unbeknownst to the patrons—three servings of water from the hose. Chen dressed up the hose water servings in fancy bottles and gave them elaborate origin stories ("From Mount Etna" or "A Japanese water filtered through 100 leaves using the 1,000-drip technique.")  

He also added some theatrical nonsense, like asking people to smell boiling water between courses because it supposedly had a big impact on taste, or to taste the water by letting it drip into their mouths from a pipette.

Hilarity ensued. The patrons went on about the intricate taste profiles of the different waters, even though all three servings of the hose water were the same.  They picked up notes of chocolate in one, debated how another was more sour than the rest, and perceived that one "tasted like the mountains."

When asked how much you could charge for water like this, they said anywhere from $300 to $1,000 a bottle—and none of them could distinguish the actual expensive water from what came right from the spigot.

As Chen observes at the end, "As long as you market something like it's worth a million bucks, you can charge whatever you want."

The psychology of flavor is fascinating. So much of how we perceive it is shaped by ostensibly meaningless variables that unconsciously affect our experiences.  Packaging, rituals, colors, and stories are all critical to how we perceive what that food or drink is doing on our tongues.