Why Wine Drinkers Are Happy
Social scientists Elizabeth W. Dunn, Daniel T. Gilbert and Timothy D. Wilson study happiness. After surveying research conducted around the world, they reached some conclusions about the nature of happiness. They published a paper last year titled If Money Doesn’t Make Your Happy, You’re Probably Not Spending It Right, they spelled out a simple formula for emotional well-being.
Buy experiences instead of things; buy many small pleasures instead of a few big ones; pay now for things you can look forward to and enjoy later.
It occurs o me that this is what wine drinkers do all the time. We buy a lot of good but not dearly expensive wine, we hold it for a while but ultimately consume it ourselves, and we share the experience of that wine with others.
So we’re happy. Or, at least, we tend to be happier than people who don’t do stuff like that.
Hat tip: David Brooks, of all people.
September 1st, 2011 at 11:01 AM
Amen to that.
This makes me excited about two tangential points for potential future exploration:
- The Haimish line for wines
- The as-yet-to-be-named tiered hierarchy of wines and who we are willing to share which experiences with
Apropos of nothing, my wife has a crush on Brooks. Seriously.
September 1st, 2011 at 2:12 PM
Well phrased, my friend. This is what I keep trying to tell people about wine. It really doesn’t matter what the wine is or how much it costs or even what it tastes like; it’s about the experience. And if you can have a great experience with a sweet pink wine, what difference does anything else make? And who am I to tell you that you weren’t supposed to have a good experience?
September 1st, 2011 at 2:28 PM
Oh, Jeff…you HAD to make reference to a rosé. Now we’ll have to endure another one of Tom’s rants about pink wine!
September 1st, 2011 at 2:31 PM
Yes, I goofed, Steve. As soon as I hit “submit comment,” I thought of Tom’s — how shall we say — aversion to pink wine. But it was too late to change it.
September 1st, 2011 at 4:10 PM
What is characterized here as an “aversion” to pink wine is not, in fact, an aversion. It’s a lack of interest. If someone has “a great experience with a sweet pink wine,” that fulfills the formula for happiness — though I’m not sure I’d advise holding it for very long in anticipation of enjoying it.
In fact, as a side note, I would suspect that much of the affection for pink wine has to do with how enjoyable the experience of drinking it is — as that drinking usually takes place in bucolic settings on warm summer afternoons. This becomes the emotional association people make with pink wine: carefree, comfortable, and mildly intoxicating.
Not, come to think of it, a great deal different from myself.
September 2nd, 2011 at 1:02 PM
And your fleshtone color is actually more pink than anything else. However, putting you in an ice bucket is likely to have a less than satisfactory outcome.
September 14th, 2011 at 8:26 PM
Tip of the hat and shameless self promotion at the same time: http://www.winethropology.com/2011/09/wines-haimish-line.html