Wine lovers, get ready to be embarrassed.

A newly published study by researchers at the INSEAD Business School and the University of Bonn found that price tags sway our tastebuds — or rather, our medial pre-frontal cortex and ventral striatum — and trick our brains into thinking the higher the price, the better the hooch.

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Chef Michael Mina’s first Wine Country restaurant opening soon In economist circles, the idea that price translates to quality is called the marketing placebo effect. And it was on full display during the research study, which put 30 wine lovers — 15 women and 15 men — into an MRI to taste wine while lying down, so changes in the decision-making core of the brain could be measured.

The study raises some obvious questions — first and foremost, how do you drink wine while lying down and not end up with cabernet in your ears? How many wines are we talking? And what’s INSEAD?

Answer: The test subjects saw a price tag, then sipped a single milliliter (slightly less than ¼ teaspoon) of wine through a tube. After they rated each wine on a one to nine-point scale, they rinsed their mouths and tasted the next wine — which was actually the same wine, a $14 red, with a different price tag.

The more expensive the test subjects thought the wine was, the more excited the medial pre-frontal cortex became and the better the subjects thought the wine tasted. (We can’t help wondering if ¼ teaspoon of wine is enough to cover the taste of plastic tube …)

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(And INSEAD is an international graduate business school with campuses in France, Singapore and Dubai, and partnerships with the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Northwestern’s Kellogg and other U.S. universities.)

The question now, says Bernd Weber, acting director of the Center for Economics and Neuroscience at the University of Bonn, is how to retrain your brain to not fall for the placebo trick.