Higher IQ Predicts Wine Knowledge Even Without Formal Training, Study Finds

Deep knowledge of wine, which grape suits which region, which vintages reward cellaring, how a sparkling bottle gets its fizz, tends to look like the territory of sommeliers, collectors, and people raised around the trade. A new study points somewhere else. Researchers found that people with higher IQs tend to know more about wine, including many with no professional experience in the field and no obvious reason to have learned it.

Conducted by researchers at Saarland University and the University of Edinburgh and published in the journal Intelligence & Cognitive Abilities, the study tested whether general intelligence predicts wine knowledge, a subject almost never taught in schools and one that offers little financial reward to the non-professionals who learn it anyway. The answer, according to the results, was a clear yes: smarter participants knew more about wine, regardless of whether they worked in the industry or whether they preferred wine, beer, or no alcohol at all.

That finding stretches well beyond Chardonnay and Cabernet. Scientists have long known that higher IQ tends to predict success in school and at work, but those environments come loaded with incentives like grades, promotions, and paychecks. This study was designed to test whether intelligence would still predict knowledge in a field with far fewer of those obvious rewards. It did.

How the Wine and IQ Study Was Conducted

Researchers recruited 525 adults through an online research platform and asked them to complete two tasks. First, they took a brief but well-validated cognitive ability test covering number and letter sequences, visual pattern recognition, and verbal reasoning. Second, they answered 68 multiple-choice questions adapted from publicly available materials built around the Wine and Spirit Education Trust Level 2 Award in Wines, an internationally recognized wine qualification used by trade professionals and enthusiasts alike. Questions covered grape varieties, regional wine styles, winemaking processes, and proper storage conditions.

Participants also answered questions about their professional background in wine and their personal drinking habits. Researchers sorted people into groups based on whether they had never worked in wine, had some entry-level experience, worked in wine retail, or held certified wine retail roles with formal qualifications. Drinking behavior was divided into three categories: those who abstained from alcohol entirely, those who primarily drank beer, and those who primarily drank wine. Ages ranged broadly, with an average around 43 years old, and the group was split roughly evenly between men and women.

What the Numbers Showed

Intelligence was a meaningful predictor of wine quiz scores. Even after accounting for whether someone worked in the wine industry, the connection between IQ and wine knowledge held firm. Occupational experience in wine also independently boosted scores, and those who had both higher intelligence and more professional exposure showed the highest scores of all. Researchers described this as an amplifying effect: professional experience in the field made the IQ advantage even larger.

Preferring wine was also linked to higher knowledge scores overall, but that relationship did not interact with IQ. Wine drinkers scored higher on average regardless of how smart they were, yet the preference did not give high-IQ individuals any extra edge the way working in the industry did. Researchers suggested this distinction may reflect the difference between casual, unstructured exposure to wine and the more systematic learning that comes with a professional role.

Why This Matters Beyond a Wine Quiz

For decades, intelligence researchers have debated whether IQ really measures how much schooling someone has had, or how much their upbringing rewarded learning. Wine knowledge offers a clean test case precisely because it sits outside all of that. Most schools do not teach it. Most jobs do not require it. And for most participants in this study, knowing the difference between a Beaujolais and a Meursault was never going to earn them a promotion.

Yet smarter people knew more anyway. Researchers framed this as evidence that general intelligence acts as a universal engine for acquiring detailed information, one that keeps running even when there is little external reward. They called this a “deep shaft” of knowledge, meaning that intelligence helps people do more than collect a wide range of surface-level facts. It also helps them go unusually deep into a single, highly specific subject.

This study points to something running beneath it all. Higher cognitive ability appears to make acquiring, organizing, and retaining detailed information more efficient, so brighter people tend to end up knowing more even in a field that never asked them to. Notably, the researchers tested whether a self-directed “drive” to seek out wine could explain the pattern, and they found no support for it: intelligence predicted knowledge, while their measure of self-guided wine exposure did not.

Future research, the authors suggested, could explore whether the same pattern holds in other niche hobby areas, like birdwatching or classical music, and could use richer measures of how deeply someone engages with a subject, such as how often they visit vineyards, discuss wine with others, or spend money on bottles.

For now, the picture is fairly clear. Intelligence appears to be linked to learning across settings, not just in classrooms or boardrooms. When it comes to picking up detailed, specialized knowledge for no particular practical reason, brighter people still tend to know more.

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