People with higher IQ scores tend to know more about wine, study finds

A 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. The findings were published in the journal Intelligence & Cognitive Abilities.

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. Maximilian Krolo of Saarland University 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.”

Almost everything psychologists know about intelligence and learning comes from environments with built-in pressures. “Almost everything we know about intelligence and knowledge comes from domains where somebody is pushing you: school subjects, job knowledge, financial literacy,” Krolo said. “That makes the classic finding hard to interpret. Brighter people know more – but they also sit in classrooms longer, work in more information-rich jobs, and are rewarded for knowing things.”

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.”

To understand this process, psychologists often distinguish between two types of mental ability. Fluid intelligence refers to the capacity to think logically and solve novel problems, while crystallized intelligence involves the accumulation of facts and experiences over time. 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.

To explore this question, the researchers recruited 525 participants through an online platform. The sample included 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.

These scores were combined into a standardized IQ score. The average score for the sample was set to 100 with a standard deviation of 15, providing a baseline to compare individual performance. Next, the authors assessed wine knowledge using a custom 68-question multiple-choice test. They adapted these questions from study materials for a widely recognized certification exam created by the Wine and Spirit Education Trust.

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 data indicates a positive relationship between intelligence and wine knowledge. Higher IQ scores consistently predicted higher scores on the wine knowledge test. Specifically, intelligence explained about 9.4 percent 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.

Krolo noted how surprisingly stable this relationship turned out to be across different statistical models. “Intelligence predicted wine knowledge at β = 0.31 in 525 respondents, explaining 9.4 percent of the differences,” Krolo said. “The number that matters more for the argument is what happens next: with occupational exposure to the wine trade in the model, the coefficient stayed at 0.31. With drinking preference added as well, it was still 0.31. Three models, same estimate. The association is simply not a by-product of who ends up working around wine or who drinks more of it.”

The stability of the statistical link between intelligence and knowledge stood out to the research team. “How immovable that coefficient was,” Krolo recalled when asked about the most surprising finding. “I had expected a good part of it to dissolve once exposure was controlled. It did not budge at all – which is about as direct a confirmation of Jensen’s default hypothesis as a study of this kind can give.”

When looking at occupational exposure, the authors noticed an interactive effect. Working in the wine industry naturally predicted higher test scores on its own. However, the combination of high intelligence and industry experience amplified the results. 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.

“That is where the two accounts part company,” Krolo explained. “Experience-producing drive theory says knowledge is built by actively seeking out rich environments – so ability should fade once you control for a proximal measure of self-directed experience, and self-directed experience should be where ability does its work. Neither held. Intelligence did not lose an inch of its coefficient next to drinking preference, and the amplification appeared only in the occupational route, not the self-chosen one.”

“The g nexus reaches into a domain nobody is graded or paid for; the niche-building story does not explain why,” Krolo added. “I would not say one cross-sectional study refutes a theory, but this is evidence that account has to absorb. Whether it is enough to lead a horse to water, or whether the wanting to drink is what matters, turns out to depend on what kind of water.”

The overarching takeaway is that cognitive ability drives learning even in the absence of external rewards. “That intelligence shows up in what people pick up in their own time, for no reward at all,” Krolo 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.”

Readers should avoid misinterpreting these results as a way to guess someone’s intelligence at a dinner party. “At the individual level none of this is diagnostic,” Krolo warned. “You cannot read someone’s IQ off their wine knowledge, and I know formidably knowledgeable people who would not thank me for an ability test. The interest is theoretical: what matters is that the association holds at all in a domain stripped of incentives.”

The research focuses entirely on factual, declarative knowledge about wine, such as geography and production methods. It does not measure sensory skills, like the ability to taste, smell, or differentiate between actual glasses of wine. These sensory abilities might rely on different mental processes, such as perceptual learning and memory for smells, which were not tested in this survey.

“We measured knowledge, not palate,” Krolo emphasized. “Nothing here says that more intelligent people taste better, enjoy wine more, or judge what is in the glass more accurately – and emphatically nothing about wine doing anything for your brain.”

The study, “Bright People Know More About Wine,” was authored by Maximilian Krolo and Timothy C. Bates.