Michael Broadbent, - former head of Christie's wine department - memorably observed that a glimpse of the label is worth a lifetime of experience. When you know what the wine is, you anticipate its quality and, of course, its price. If you believe an unidentified red is Meerlust Rubicon, you "recognise" the attributes you would expect to find in the glass and value it accordingly. This is why it is argued that the true value of blind tastings is that you have to draw qualitative conclusions free of your own self- delusions.

Wine marketing being what it is, a considerable percentage of the price of most premium wines is made up of the perceived value of the drink. This is probably no different from most other luxury goods. Once mere functionality has been addressed, the rest of the purchase price relates to the gratification experienced by the buyer precisely because they know what the object costs. Nothing else explains the disproportionately large sums spent on La Perla underwear.

Most boutique-style wineries aim to include a super-premium wine in their range. Since the market tolerates much higher prices for red wines than for whites, the odds are these "prestige" wines will be red. It also attributes more value to Cabernet and Shiraz (Syrah) than to Merlot or Pinotage. You can safely bet that most flagship reds will contain at least one of these preferred cultivars.

I decided to look at a few mid- to upper-priced reds to see how the taste experience lived up to the price positioning. Obviously this is an exercise which can only be done blind. However, having made the preliminary selection, I could easily have spent my time trying to guess which was which. I asked my colleague - who managed the tasting and kept the wine service unsighted - to include a wild card in the line-up.

I opted to apply a standard wine show rating system and award the wines medals (or not) based on their present appeal, but with an estimate of their evolutionary potential.

My line-up did not include any of the trophy wines which sell for more than R300 a bottle that have proliferated over the past couple of years. It goes without saying that while most of these are evidently well made, none can really justify its price-point on the basis of taste alone.

Instead I looked at the flagship reds of well-known producers working the upper price points of the regular trade: Oak Valley, La Motte, De Meye, Creation and one relative newcomer, Post House. The "joker" turned out to be foreign - a Baron de Chirel from Rioja, Spain.

Only one wine in the line-up - the Rioja Riserva - picked up a silver medal score (84). It's not available in SA, but if it were to be imported, it would have to sell at about R400. Divide the price by the score and you get an index of five - which, you will see, hardly suggests a value purchase.

Three wines scored between 77 and 80: the Bilton Sir Percy 2005, the La Motte Millennium 2006 and the Creation Grenache-Syrah 2007. Of these the Bilton was the most expensive - a cellar door price of R155 - yielding a value index of about two. It was by far the best bottle of wine I have tasted from the cellar, suggesting that it has rightly been identified as the flagship.The La Motte and the Creation both retail at about R125 - both are clearly not bad value.

The De Meye Trutina 2006 and the Post House Penny Black 2006 both scored in the high 60s. It doesn't much matter that the value index for the De Meye made it look better than some of the higher scoring wines - it wasn't interesting enough for its R90 cellar door price. The Post House at R120 was clearly out of the running.

The best-value affordable wine turned out to be the Oak Valley blend 2005 from Elgin: it scored 75 and it sells for less than R100. It seems the Rawbone-Viljoens know it's no match for their exceptional Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays and are not using premium pricing strategies to sucker consumers into buying it.

In some ways the Creation was potentially the most controversial wine. It had some quite strong gamey notes, not unpleasant and perfectly in line with the expectations generated by Mourvedre. Tasted blind, it suggested spoilage. Examined sighted, you might have guessed the aroma was an expression of one of the varieties in the blend. Revisited the next day, it was even pongier and would almost certainly have suffered a lower score in a competition. This served to remind me that even when we think blind tasting offers a promise of certainty, the nuances sometimes count for more than the overall impression.

People mostly drink what they know because "they know what they like". That's why it often makes sense to disregard everything written about a wine. The real test is simple enjoyment, even if this means the same sense of comfort (and sometimes, unfortunately, the same bouquet) as your favourite slippers.

From The Weekender, 24 October 2009