CHOOSING WINE.

CHOOSING WINE. One of the objections to Barry Schwartz’s argument in THE PARADOX OF CHOICE is, as Annalisa suggested in her comment on consumer choices, that many people love to shop. Barry Schwartz in this interview uses wine as an example. He compares favorably his experience buying wine in a small town in Oregon with only five choices available to what it would have been in New York with the hundreds of possible varieties of wine available. I think wine is a good counterexample to Schwartz’s theory. Wine has been available in thousands of varieties for a long time, and I can’t think of an example of anybody complaining about the burden all these choices imposed on wine afficionados. I also can’t imagine the movement to save the consumer by restricting choice ever to begin with restricting choices of wine. I think that already, without any intervention, people who care about wine welcome the myriad of choices, and those who like me don’t care so much choose quickly. (I choose a wine that has a nice picture of a chateau on the label). In the late seventies I was traveling with a fellow lawyer who was bringing a $300 bottle of wine (kids, think of $1200 today) across the country to share with friends. I asked her about it, and she said that if she were to have the same kind of wine years later, she would remember the taste and the friends who shared the occasion with her. When I told Mary Jane about the $300 bottle of wine, she said, “Three hundred dollars! How big is it?”