IT'S bad news for wine connoisseurs and party time for cheapskates: new research has shown that £4-a-bottle plonk tastes just as good as the top vintages.

Confirming something many drinkers have long suspected, the study shows that quality is all in the mind.

Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at Hertfordshire University, tested eight different paired wines on 578 volunteers at the Edinburgh Science Festival.

Despite huge gulfs between price tags on competing bottles, tasters had no more luck differentiating them than they would have by guessing at random.

“I think it’s quite amazing,” Mr Wiseman said. “People are drinking wine for taste, so they’re wasting their money if they can’t tell them apart.”

To make sure his test was scientifically sound, all 500 tastings were carried out blind with labels removed. Neither the drinkers nor the people running the tests were told which wines were which to avoid any chance of subliminal suggestion.

Tasters were faced with eight different pairs, for example a £3.49 claret was put against a £15.99 bottle of the red.

Competing wines were selected from the same countries for consistency, and all the tasters had to do was identify whether the wine they tasted was the cheap one or the expensive one.

Bottles were sourced from a supermarket and bought without any special offers after being picked “pretty much at random”.

In each case, one bottle cost less than £5 and the other, from the same country and grape variety, cost more than £9. The exception was champagne, where the prices were £17.61 and £29.99.

Faced with eight separate taste tests, someone just guessing could expect to get around 50% right, and any perceptible differences should raise the figure above this.

Exactly 50% of tasters were right, suggesting either that tasting gives no clue to a wine’s price tag -- or that many of the subjects were lying.

Some wines came out with negative scores overall, meaning that regardless of which they preferred, the majority of drinkers could not tell which should cost more.

The study appears to confirm that a wine’s price tag has little bearing on how it will taste, a fact that will no doubt shock the many consumers who use price as a gauge of quality.

“These are remarkable results,” Professor Wiseman said. “People were unable to tell expensive from inexpensive wines, and so in these times of financial hardship the message is clear -- the inexpensive wines we tested taste the same as their expensive counterparts”.

Like any other product, the price of wine is determined by supply and demand. Even if it is no nicer than a mass-produced competitor, a wine’s rarity or any other interesting feature could push the price up.

Branding and labels can also increase the price of a wine by making it look more appealing than it tastes.

The biggest failure was seen with red wines, which confused more than half of all tasters into picking the wrong bottle. Just 39% of people were able to tell which claret was the more expensive from a pair costing £3.49 and £15.99 respectively.

For rioja 54% got it wrong, while 51% were thrown by shiraz. White wines fared slightly better, with 53% of drinkers getting it right. Nearly six in 10 people picked out the expensive one from two bottles of pinot grigio, one costing £4.29 and the other £9.49.

However, anyone thinking about splashing out on champagne should be wary of the power of advertising and a well-known label. Only 51% of people could correctly identify the expensive version when confronted with two bottles, one of them retailing at £17.61 and the other at £29.99.

The Science Festival runs until April 22.