People with Higher IQ Scores Tend to Know More About Wine, Study Finds

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink, goes an old line. But a new study finds that whether or not that horse wants to drink depends upon what kind of water – or, to be more accurate, wine.

We tend to think that people learn when it's important to them – because it's part of their job, for instance. But a new study finds that cognitive ability – the mental capacity of the brain used to think, learn, remember, reason and solve problems – drives the accumulation of deep, factual information independent of formal educational or financial rewards. The findings were published in the journal Intelligence & Cognitive Abilities.

“That intelligence shows up in what people pick up in their own time, for no reward at all,” Maximilian Krolo of Saarland University said. “Knowledge is not simply a residue of schooling and career. We think of general knowledge as broad but shallow – a thin layer of facts about many things. What we find is that the same cognitive machinery also sinks what we call deep shafts: mastery of an intricate taxonomy that nobody asked you to learn.”

The new study indicates that people with higher general intelligence tend to possess more specialized knowledge about wine, even if they do not work in the wine industry.

The research suggests that cognitive ability drives the accumulation of deep, factual information independent of formal educational or financial rewards.

General intelligence, often referred to as IQ, is a well-known predictor of success in areas like school and work. In these traditional environments, people are often driven by strong external incentives, such as earning higher grades, securing promotions, or making more money.

Krolo and Timothy C. Bates of the University of Edinburgh wanted to understand if this relationship extends to highly specialized knowledge that lacks these traditional rewards.

They chose to examine wine knowledge as a test case, driven partly by personal interest and partly by the topic’s unique properties. “The honest starting point is that Tim and I are both wine people,” Krolo told PsyPost.

“I have been collecting Burgundy for years, and later this month I will be back there helping with the harvest at a well-known domaine, as I do most years. But once you look at wine as a knowledge domain rather than a hobby, it becomes theoretically useful in a way that few domains are.”

The researchers aimed to test a psychological concept developed by Arthur Jensen known as the general intelligence nexus, or the “g nexus.” This concept proposes that intelligence acts as a universal engine for learning, helping people acquire, organize, and integrate complex information across almost any topic they encounter, regardless of formal schooling. Wine offers an ideal subject to test this idea.

“Wine lets you pull those apart,” Krolo explained. “It is genuinely complex – taxonomies of grape varieties, regional classifications, chemistry, a vocabulary of its own – it appears in no school curriculum, and for almost everyone it pays nothing. Nobody has ever been promoted for knowing the difference between Gevrey-Chambertin and Chambolle-Musigny.”

The authors wanted to see if raw problem-solving skills naturally lead to a higher accumulation of specialized facts, even when a person is just exploring a casual interest.

First, they measured the general intelligence of 257 women and 268 men, with an average age of about 43 years old. The researchers measured general intelligence using three parts of the International Cognitive Ability Resource. This test asked participants to identify patterns in sequences of numbers and letters, solve visual puzzles by finding missing shapes, and answer verbal reasoning questions.

The wine test covered topics such as vineyard environments, winemaking processes, regional wine styles, and proper storage. Participants scored an average of about 24.5 correct answers out of 68 possible points. The researchers also asked participants about their professional history with wine. The vast majority of the sample, 458 people, reported never having worked in the wine industry.

A small number of participants had varying levels of professional experience, ranging from entry-level vineyard work to certified retail positions. Additionally, the researchers tracked personal drinking habits by asking participants if they preferred wine, preferred beer, or did not drink alcohol at all. Tracking these factors allowed the authors to isolate the specific role of intelligence from the effects of just working around wine or drinking it regularly.

The results: Higher IQ scores consistently predicted higher scores on the wine knowledge test. Specifically, intelligence explained about 9.4% of the differences in wine knowledge among the participants. This association remained intact even after the researchers statistically accounted for whether participants worked in the wine industry or regularly drank wine.

People with higher IQ scores who also had professional exposure to wine demonstrated the highest levels of knowledge.

This amplification suggests that intelligence helps people extract and retain more information when they are placed in structured learning environments, like a workplace. Personal drinking habits also predicted higher wine knowledge. Participants who preferred drinking wine scored higher on the test than those who preferred beer or did not drink alcohol.

Unlike professional experience, personal drinking habits did not interact with intelligence. This means that while drinking wine is associated with knowing more about it, simply drinking wine did not multiply the learning advantages of higher intelligence in the same way that professional exposure did. It appears that structured environments trigger different learning mechanisms than casual consumption.

“The more interesting result was which kind of exposure amplified it,” Krolo said. “Working in the wine trade interacted with ability… people combining high ability with professional exposure scored disproportionately well. Self-directed wine drinking did not interact with ability at all, even though it predicted knowledge in its own right. The structured, obligation-bearing environment multiplies ability; the pleasurable one adds to it but does not multiply.”

These results help psychologists evaluate competing ideas about how people acquire knowledge, such as the experience-producing drive theory proposed by researcher Thomas Bouchard.

This theory suggests that higher intelligence mainly steers people to actively seek out and build richer environments for themselves, and it is this self-created niche that does the actual teaching. If this theory fully explained the results, the link between raw intelligence and wine knowledge would have faded once the researchers accounted for self-directed habits like drinking wine.

“The more interesting result was which kind of exposure amplified it,” Krolo said. “Working in the wine trade interacted with ability… people combining high ability with professional exposure scored disproportionately well. Self-directed wine drinking did not interact with ability at all, even though it predicted knowledge in its own right. The structured, obligation-bearing environment multiplies ability; the pleasurable one adds to it but does not multiply.”

The study was summarized in PsyPost, which is the basis for this article.