Imagine a dinner where the host has one rule: every bottle goes into a carafe before the guests arrive.

Not for the wine. For the guests.

“Otherwise,” she says, “you’ll drink the label.”

Four carafes circulate, unnamed. One wine is declared serious, probably Chablis. Someone detects real class. The guest who brought the expensive bottle begins to look faintly uneasy because his contribution is disappearing considerably more slowly than expected.

The serious wine is finished first.

Eventually the bottles emerge from beneath the sideboard. The favourite turns out to be a perfectly respectable, relatively inexpensive Mâcon-Villages.

There is a short silence, followed by the most revealing sentence of the evening.

“Well, for a Mâcon, it’s very good.”

Ten minutes earlier, it had simply been very good.

The label hasn’t changed the wine. It has changed the terms on which the guests are prepared to admire it.