I promised I’d write about the wines I enjoyed over my birthday, but sadly, none of them really stood out. So instead, here is an exploration on the power of labels, inspired by one particularly good wine I drank by accident.

I have a confession to make. The first time I saw a Louis Vuitton bag, decorated with the brand’s signature LV logo, and worth several times more than my weekly earnings, I thought of Luncheon Vouchers.

Now, these LVs were really useful, a tax-free form of salary, introduced in Britain in 1946 to ensure that post-war poms could afford a healthy meal. Apparently, you could also use them as payment in certain brothels. They were the polar opposite of the famous French fashion house. I’m both embarrassed and proud of this faux-pas but if anyone is the proud owner of an LV bag don’t worry, I can’t imagine too many people have confused the two.

To my mind, overt labels really took off in the 80s, part of Thatcherism, Hooray Henries and Yuppies – young money was here, and it wanted you to know it. (Remember Michael J Fox’s character Marty McFly and how his mother in the 50s thought his name was Calvin because it was on his undies?) But why plaster your logo all over your product? Isn’t it a bit crass? A sign of insecurity?

As Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman pointed out, people are lazy thinkers. We like to make quick decisions and a bag, covered in LV logos works a treat. The target audience – one’s peers – know what it is and how much it costs, and they can immediately assume that the owner has good taste and a good salary. A quick Google dive into the psychology of labels introduced me to labelling theory and shows that our tendency to short-cut opinions can be very damaging.

“A classic study conducted at Princeton University showed the enormous scope of labels.

These psychologists showed a group of people a video of a girl playing in a low-income neighborhood and to another group showed the same girl, playing in the same way, but in a high-middle class neighborhood. In the video were also asked some questions to the girl, to some she answered well, with others she made mistakes.

Darley and Gross discovered that people used the socioeconomic status label as an index of academic ability. When the girl was labeled as “middle class”, people believed that her cognitive performance was better. This reveals to us that a simple label, apparently innocuous and objective, activates a series of prejudices or preconceived ideas that end up determining our image of people or reality.”

What’s that got to do with wine, you ask. Back to the ‘accidental wine’ I had when I opened a bottle without looking at the label properly. I had assumed it was a $20 Beaujolais Villages which I knew I had lying around, and which I knew wasn’t that great. But this was fantastic, so rich, intense and refined. Then I looked at the label. It was a 2017 Givry Premier Cru, Domaine Francois Lumpp, Petit Marole, yours for $105.

What was going on here?

I hadn’t expected it to be good, so it exceeded my expectations – the key to most good things in life. Had I known what it was these would have been higher – $100+ bottle after all. Equally, I would have been had all my tastebuds on standby. Perhaps it was a purer way to experience wine?

Wine labels are signposts on the road to Bacchanalian heaven, but there are so many of the buggers. Staring at the shelves of a bottle shop is like driving around a roundabout with a thousand exits. Trends in label design aren’t helping. The more a wine tries to stand-out, the more chaotic the landscape. You can’t see the wood for the trees (mind you, Moss Wood does leap out). The Lumpp label was what I’d call, ‘quietly confident’. There was nothing insecure about this wine. It stood out because it was simple and elegant. At least in the eyes of this beholder, once I got around to looking at it.