What is driving wine appreciation? It has become clear in recent years that cognitive processes play a major role in wine perception and preferences: Experiencing wine is not just a physical experience but also a cognitive and an emotional one. Although the ‘intrinsic’ quality of a wine (i.e. how the wine tastes) is an important driver of wine appreciation, extrinsic information such as price, name or origin of the wine might modify the way the wine is perceived. For example, Wansink and his collaborators (2007) showed that knowing the origin of a wine (California vs North Dakota) influenced non only the wine rating but also the amount of food consumed [1]. Likewise, Siegrist et al [2] showed that ratings from wine critics influence consumers’ actual sensory experience of the wine and Danner et al [3] found that elaborate wine descriptions positively influenced people’s emotions, expectations and willingness to drink. In this talk I will discuss some cognitive mecanisms involved in those effects and present some recent work to illustrate the contributions of cognitive science to the understanding of the key drivers of wine appreciation.