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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

Twenty years ago I was a tea-totaller, but there was a group of people I wanted to hang out with who would get together to drink wine so I decided to try to develop a taste for it. I eventually got to be a pretty hard-core wine snob. My wife and I even ran a wine-tasting group for several years. Then one day we decided to start doing blind tastings, and we soon learned that there was very little correlation between what we liked and what the wine critics and the market liked. The real turning point came when we did a blind tasting of Cabernets, all from California. The wines ranged from a $5 bottle of Barefoot cab up to a $100 bottle of Silver Oak. There were twelve of us in the group and every single one rated the Silver Oak dead last, and the Barefoot either first or second. Since then we've repeated similar experiments many times, usually with similar results. We can still freak out wine snob friends on occasion by sneaking a bottle of Barefoot in to a high-end tasting.

On another occasion we were at a bed-and-breakfast that served afternoon wine and cheese. The whole room (including us) was raving about how complex and delicately nuanced the white wine was. It turned out to be Gallo Rhine Wine in a box.

(BTW, it's absolutely not the case that all cheap wines taste good. We tried the notorious two-buck chuck and thought it was absolutely horrible.)

The point is: wine snobbery is bullshit. Find what you like and drink that, and don't pay attention to anything that anyone else says. If Beringer white zinfandel is what turns you one, more power to you. (Actually, the worst possible outcome for a real wine fan is to discover that they really do enjoy Romanee Conti or Screaming Eagle. I really like Opus 1, but I wish I didn't :-)

So I think this roll-your-own-wine blender is a terrific idea. I can't wait to try it. (I wish I'd thought of it!)

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I don't quite understand why you winos take your critics so seriously in the first place.

Critics are just people with opinions. Sometimes they can provide good justification for why whatever they're reviewing is good or bad. But not one of them is impartial enough that their opinion can be taken at face value, specially if you're not into the stuff they're pushing.

This is more obvious with film and videogame. It wouldn't matter at all if a critic I liked ever said that there's this one Adam Sandler movie that everyone should totally watch. I'm not into that crap.

Very efficient decision-process, when you know that no one's opinions can be strong enough to overcome your preferences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punch-Drunk_Love

A good friend of mine is actually a food/wine critic. He has said (and I think this applies to all good critics) that there's nothing special about the tastes of a critic. Some people may be more sensitive than others but critics are pretty much in the same population as the rest of us. The difference between a good critic and someone flapping their gums on Yelp is the ability TO WRITE something worthwhile about the subject, be it wine or food.

Boiling what a critic says down to "good/bad" or "like/dislike" means the reader hasn't taken the time to really understand what was said-- or the critic wasn't very good.

I agree. To me, a good critic is not necessarily one with impeccable tastes, but one whose reviews give me all I need to know about whether I will like the subject in question.

I don't fully buy this. I expect my chosen jazz critic to be knowledgeable, like, a lot. Same for food and wine. I want to read the words of someone who has eaten on more places, more foods and more flavors than me, not less.

Your friend might be too humble.

But even then, they're not any better at 'tasting well'. You don't have to care about the fancy properties of the wine, just whether it tastes good to you.

The same argument can be brought when comparing top 40 pop music and jazz, say. There isn't an objective truth to aesthetics, but that doesn't mean that everyone's opinions has equal depth or nuance.

Some things you get more out of if you choose to spend time with them, but will in turn change your own sense of it, and the experience you are having.

So in some sense you actually do become "better " at tasting/listening well - or at least you become more sophisticated. Which doesn't invalidate the enjoyment that someone else can get from a more superficial engagement, at all.

But who thinks they are better at tasting? If they had extra special tastebuds, that would only make their recommendations less relevant to the rest of us. I mean a dog might find a piece of music lovely for its ultrasonic components, but I won't.

I'm not saying that experience or background isn't important for a critic. I am just saying that they're NOT extraordinarily sensitive. They taste the same things we do, but they're able to pay attention and then put that experience into compelling words.

I will say that some people's palate are quite limited. They only identify a few things as good. I've met people who basically wouldn't eat a green vegetable because it was yucky.

I'd expect critics to have eaten enough where they can judge many things.

I do agree putting it into words so someone else could have a sense of what it would taste like and possible be able to say if they would like it.

It's part of the fun, no? You read about five different wines, you select one after much consideration, you take it home and talk about the salient points -- good and bad -- of the reviews that you had read, and you uncork the bottle. Everyone takes a few sips to a concert of many "oohs," several "aahs," and a smattering of "this is really good" and "I like this pairing." Finally, after the guests have eaten and some are a little bit buzzed, they all go back to their boring realities. It's a more human form of dogs playing with a ball.

Personally I like it.

I definitely enjoy video-game, and comic criticism from people I share opinions with, so I can see how someone would do the same thing with taste.

"This critic knows more than me, and tends to like merlots, maybe he'll suggest a reason why I like it, or a new wine that I'll like as well". Of course, taste is subjective, and that may never happen, but it tends to give people an idea of what wine/vidoe-game/comic they want to try next.

Exactly. And there are certain critics who happen to have the exact opposite taste of mine, which is also helpful if you just flip the recommendations.

My father has been a wine lover for all his, now long, adult life. He has an impressive cellar with some of the best wines of Spain and France. He was also fooled in some blind tastings, like believing a white wine was actually red. But he can also tell the difference between most of his favorite wines, and so do I. So this is not a black or white situation. While some blind taste tests are difficult, others are easy to pass. Depends on what are you prepared to or exposed to. There are plenty of sommelier competitions where they tell apart years and zones very precisely.

On the other hand. I don't know about those wines your are talking about but throwing, for example, a 34 years old wine to compete in a blind test against a cheap modern wine is a bad idea and I might prefer the modern one too in that setting. You need to prepare a good meal or cheese to have that old wine with, a table and good people, time for the wine to breath, good glasses... a pleasure setting. Then, only then the 34 years old wine will reveal why it costs that much.

I still agree with you that there are many good wines on the low price range, and people should drink what it tastes best for them.

The wine blender idea seems terrible to me. I can't believe it will output anything good, but hey, I would try it.

I'm from a wine region in Spain, by the way.

> There are plenty of sommelier competitions where they tell apart years and zones very precisely.

There's a documentary called Somm that follows a few people as they prepare for the Master Sommelier exam, it's impressive how precisely they can determine the year and region of a wine.

Example tasting from the doc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKNmcCCE15E

The followup doco is even better - the newly minted master sommeliers proceed to contradict each other, and seem to have a lot more fun than the first one.

i like the 2nd one also. in the first one they were basically college kids, like gradschool aged, in the 2nd one they are adult professionals, very close to 30 if not over. good perspective on growth. and they all have very different opinions on things which is nice. surprisingly, none of them are snobby, just very knowledgeable.

Honest question. Your example of the external conditions that enable the 34 year old wine to shine. How does that work with the wine? In other words, if I substitute the cheap modern wine that otherwise won in the blind taste test, what happens differently in the setting you describe?

Simple example; I used the whole day to prepare a strong wild boar stew and that will be a perfect pairing for a very strong wine, possibly old. If you bring a light wine of the year to that table it will get diluted on the strong flavors of the stew. We might have a good night but the wine won't shine.

It seems like you are saying that the wine's qualities and how they pair with the food are very important. I don't think anyone would disagree.

The question at hand is whether a cheap/expensive wine, of the same type, would matter in the boar stew example.

Personally, I have no reason to believe that a more expensive wine would only shine under these types of conditions. I also think it's a matter of subjective taste, and there is no arguing matters of taste ;).

From the non-oenophile POV, my objection is the pretension of objectivity. "This wine is better than the other one" is a subjective statement masquerading as an objective one.

If you're not drinking a specific wine every day so to speak, and are tasting the subsequent vintages of the wine every year, your pallet won't be able to tell the difference really.

That's how it is for most everyone, I think the disconnect is that the newbie isn't aware of that and make take the "expert's" opinion out of context or too serious. And the experts can be jerks too, but I think it's more people unfamiliar with wine seem to come into contact with the jerks first for some reason and wine gets a bad knock because of that.

I don't know how these wine comparisons are done, but it's tricky to set up comparisons.

A famous version of this was the "Pepsi challenge". It turns out that people preferred the taste of pepsi in the test conditions, but coke in other, longer testing conditions. So part of it is biochemical (e.g. the taste you experience on the first bite/sip of something is not the same as the 20th) but some is also mental. Your experience of the taste of something can change with the environment you sample it in.

> You need to prepare a good meal or cheese to have that old wine with, a table and good people, time for the wine to breath, good glasses... a pleasure setting.

Is there a wine for having with bad people?

prison hooch

"He was also fooled in some blind tastings, like believing a white wine was actually red."

This propensity (being "fooled" by white/red of a wine) is very often cited as "proof" that wine drinkers don't know what they are talking about.

In fact, the broad taste profiles of either white or red grapes - and the difference in expression of those profiles based on temperature - can make it very difficult to discern certain reds from certain whites.

"Fooling" someone with red vs. white really isn't that interesting at all.

It is amazing how much apparently unrelated information can sway out impressions of the taste of a product, hence the infamous "dyed white wine described as you would a red by experts" experiment - the visual cue can have a massive effect on how the wine tasting experience was reported.

Another classic example is many people not being able to distinguish between the small of parmesan and vomit, how they rate the smell of either being affected by what they are told it is (in this case the key molecules that the nose picks up on are the same, or at least similar enough to activate the same receptors, so the subconscious bias caused by other verbal or environmental cues is enough to sway the perception one way or the other).

The results of such priming experiments are notoriously varied though - reproduction is often unreliable.

> hence the infamous "dyed white wine described as you would a red by experts" experiment

That turns out to be somewhat of an urban legend.

http://sciencesnopes.blogspot.com/2013/05/about-that-wine-ex...

> The results of such priming experiments are notoriously varied though - reproduction is often unreliable.

Yes, this is why it's important for everyone to just do these experiments for themselves and decide what they like, and not bother with what anyone else thinks.

I was challenged on this after repeating the misleading account of Brochet's experiment, and I, and everyone else with me, could easily tell the difference blindfolded. However, none of us was an "expert" wine taster, we knew that one glass was white and the other red, and our eyes were covered. It transpires that colour does affect your perception of flavour, the subjects in Brochet's experiment were deliberately deceived, and "experts" would have more to lose if they described a wine as white if it really was red.

Your expectations have a huge effect on your subjective perceptions. One thing I've found is that wine tastes better to me in a "proper" glass, i.e. one with a large bowl and thin walls. But I have no idea whether this is a "real" effect or all in my head because there's no way to do a blind comparison. On the other hand, does it really matter? You can suck all the pleasure out of just about any activity by overthinking it.

> Find what you like and drink that, and don't pay attention to anything that anyone else says.

This is of course the right approach to most things in life. But just because "to each their own", that doesn't imply there aren't real complexities and nuances in foods that exist only in more expensive things.

Take for example someone who eats fast food burgers every day and try to take them to eat sushi. They just won't like it.

In the case of wine (heh), sure different palates like different wines. But I think a lot of people take that and jump to the conclusion that "all wines are the same, the only difference is the palates". I don't think the conclusion is true.

> the notorious two-buck chuck

At least this year, the "two-buck chuck" (which, depending on your state, usually costs around $3 now) comes in 7 different varieties: 3 different reds, 3 whites, and 1 rose.

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/05/ranking-trade...

And for the sake of redundancy, try the Oak Leaf brand sold by Wal Mart, if that's an easier store to get to.

My problem with wine is that I know what I like when I taste it, but as best I can tell, there is no language with which to express that, after "red". There's "headache flavor", which never shows up in cheap wine: it doesn't taste bad, but it means I'm going to get a headache if I drink more that 4oz of a wine tasting like that. No bottle has ever been labeled with "headache flavor". I ask wine people, and they hand wave something about tanins, but I've tasted high tanin and low tanin wine, and the flavor is completely orthogonal.

Given the lack of information, I never bet a lot on a bottle. My favorite wine ever was a Consumato Nero D'Avolo from 2010 (I paid $22), but other years of that label have been wildly inconsistent, and now I can't find it any more. It was very close in flavor to a wine I had at a wine bar that they called a "California Malbec" which I've never found again, and another at a restaurant where -

WTF restaurants! Whenever stumble on a wine I especially like at a restaurant, I go to Google and find out the label doesn't exist! It's some fictional house label!

Not my very favorite, but something I liked with meals was Corbet Canyon Malbec, so of course they don't make it any more.

Even if I had the time and money to make thorough study of this, I'd have spent a year being drunk and discovering perhaps a dozen excellent bottles - which would henceforth never be made again. Screw that. Inexpensive box wine for me.

Or, just as often, an IPA. The beer people know how to produce consistent quality and have categories where the product consistently meets expectation, while still having entertaining variations between brewers.

Point-of-sale wine blender, the time has come!

I agree it is best to not to depend on price, score, or reviews when finding a good wine. Its all about your own senses.

The best advice I ever got at a wine tasting was, actually, tasting advice. Basically just savor a glass of wine and develop a memory of the sensory experience. If one takes the time and attention to do it right the mind will automatically tuck that away and recall it for comparison when tasting other wines months or years into the future.

Former wine store worker here. Was it the case that the Silver Oak bottle probably needed some time to open up?

Still, I agree with your general thrust. I find that my favorite wines, especially per dollar spent, are between $8-20.

> Was it the case that the Silver Oak bottle probably needed some time to open up?

This was a long time ago so it's hard to say. But I've had plenty of reds that tasted great straight out of the bottle, so IMHO any wine that needs to "open up" is not as good as one that doesn't. Also, while it is absolutely true that the taste of a wine will change over the course of an evening, it's far from clear how much of this is due to the flavor of the wine changing and how much due to your perceptions changing. Taste buds can get fatigued (I get "wined out" after trying 5 or 6 different wines) and food makes a huge difference too.

My bottom line: I now know plenty of wines that reliably taste great (to me) straight out of the gate and keep tasting great through the whole bottle even if I keep it for a couple of days, and which cost a lot less than Silver Oak. So I just drink those :-)

> IMHO any wine that needs to "open up" is not as good as one that doesn't.

Yikes. Gonna have to disagree with you on that. The effect of a wine being aerated/oxidized after being opened and/or decanted is obvious even to a casual wine drinker.

> I now know plenty of wines that reliably taste great (to me) straight out of the gate and keep tasting great through the whole bottle even if I keep it for a couple of days

And, by the same token, the taste of red wine degrades fast and is generally completely unrecognizable within 24-48 hours of opening, even if it's well kept with a fancy stopper.

Reading those two comments of yours makes me seriously doubt your ability to make observations that generalize to other people.

Exactly this.

There are a huge range of wines that need to be decanted. The effect is not only obvious but marvelous, how they start smelling and evolve into something much deeper, specially on the oldest bottles.

Same with the degradation. I have a vacuum pump for the bottles I left open and the degradation is still obvious.

I didn't make myself clear. I don't deny that decanting and/or aerating will improve many (perhaps even most) reds. But in my experience, for my own personal tastes, any wine that requires this very rarely ends up tasting as good as one that doesn't.

> Reading those two comments of yours makes me seriously doubt your ability to make observations that generalize to other people.

Two responses:

1. What I've said here is not based just on my own experience, but also on the firsthand observations of other people who have participated in blind tastings along with me. And...

2. The general impossibility of generalizing one's own subjective experience to other people when it comes to wine is kind of my whole point.

I'm not sure blind tastings with relative newbies gives the best signal here. If you give someone cocktails for the first time they'll probably like screwdrivers the most; if you let kids choose between doritos and oysters they'll pick the doritos.

After having had a lot of moderately expensive wine over the past few years, I'm sometimes surprised when I go back to a $5 bottle that I like. Usually if I think about it harder, I find that I'm enjoying a combination of sweetness and oak that are pleasant, but not really that fun to dwell on. It's similar to that balance of salt, sugar, and fat that snack foods use to be broadly liked but not have much depth.

Not to say that such wines are bad, but I think you're missing the point to say that expensive wines are supposed to be appreciated by the masses.

I also find myself getting fatigued of "bliss point" snack foods. When I was young I could eat Oreos for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Now I might have a couple of Oreos once a year just to reminisce about old times I suppose.

> I'm not sure blind tastings with relative newbies gives the best signal here.

Sure, that's why we repeat the experiment regularly (though less formally than we used to). In fact, we just did it a few weeks ago with a friend who is a really hard-core wine snob. He has a 10,000 bottle collection in off-site temperature controlled storage. And he's not just a rich asshole showing off his wealth. He's upper-middle class and really passionate and knowledgeable about wine, as is his wife. Both of them rated the Barefoot cab very highly. No Silver Oak in the lineup this time, but some very comparable bottles, like a Franciscan and a Veeder Reserve, alongside a few other varietals (we were actually trying to see if we could pick out varietals blind). The Barefoot didn't come out on top, but it made a very respectable showing. One of the things we rated the wines on was, "How much would you guess this wine sells for?" My friend gave the Barefoot a $50 rating, and his wife said $130.

Cool, I'll have to give this a try sometime. I've only tasted one wine that retails for over $100/bottle, so I'd be hard pressed to guess that any wine I'm trying costs that much!

I'm curious how the other varietals did. Cabs have so many flavors going on that it might be easier for cheaper wines to "hide behind" oak and alcohol. (Relatedly, the general wisdom for homebrewers is that Budweiser-style beers are much harder to emulate at home than IPAs, because any bad flavors in a light beer will stick out much more than a flavorful ale.) I've heard some wine people talk about how hard it is to find "good" Pinot Noirs for under $30, presumably because that grape has a bit more nuance and it's hard for (at least the snobby) people to find cheaper bottles that don't have sharp edges.

I'd certainly encourage people to try natural wines if they do a tasting. They're on the cheaper end of the good wine spectrum, don't need aging, and almost universally taste better than the median wine at 2x the price. Something like Raisins Gaulois is a good starting point.

I find it amazing that all restaurants open a fresh bottle of wine at your table, and never seem to offer a decanted bottle.

If I trust you to make my food in secret, out of sight, I trust you to open my wine in secret, out of sight.

Is it really about the bottle being decanted, or being ensured you're getting the wine you asked for? If I order the vegetarian lasagna, but I get the beef lasagna I'll immediately realize something is wrong. I think that's less true for drinking wine, especially if you're not super good at sensing nuances.

Better restaurants serving older vintages will definitely decant, though I agree it's rarer than it should be.

I've seen a few use those aerating pourers, which is better than nothing.

>so IMHO any wine that needs to "open up" is not as good as one that doesn't.

I respectfully disagree. Basically I stick to cheap wines (for budget reasons), and my decanter will turn almost any unbearable red into acceptable. A newly opened red sometimes just needs to be smoothed out via air a bit -- at the extreme of things, if you leave a glass out overnight it will be flat (not to mention, the alcohol will have evaporated of course).

edit: not sure if "evaporate" is the right scientific term

> my decanter

Myhrvold in Modernist Cuisine recommends to use a... blender. It really works ;-)

I can see what you mean—but in picturing it, now I'm curious what would happen if you ran some wine through a reflux condensation.

The Vinturi aerators are pretty good.

Are you saying the alcohol will be gone overnight? I doubt that.

if not completely gone, then dramatically reduced.

source: have left a glass of wine on my nitestand before, and in the morning it was glass of sour grape juice.

70% of the alcohol will remains after overnight.[1]

[1] http://www.ars.usda.gov/SP2UserFiles/Place/12354500/Data/ret... (see page 12)

> We tried the notorious two-buck chuck and thought it was absolutely horrible

Then you should try it again! Not only are there many varietals, but they change far more year over year than your traditional wine would as it's basically a blend of whatever was available as overage from many different California wineries. Some years there is a bit of a hidden gem worth spending a few bucks to find.

In my (somewhat dated) experience, grabbing a bottle of Charles Shaw of arbitrary year and varietal was about like grabbing an arbitrary ~$10-$15 bottle of wine. There's some good stuff and some stuff not worth drinking. Not much that's amazing, but surprising for the price point.

This was published in 2008:

The Wine Trials: 100 Everyday Wines Under $15 that Beat $50 to $150 Wines in Brown-Bag Blind Tastings

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0974014354/

It currently can be found for $0.01 (!!) It's a great book.

Well, except that blending is a big part of what a winemaker does and, basically, it should be left to professionals. All else is monkeys and typewriters. If you can't tell the diff between a Barefoot and a Silver Oak, what do you think home blending is going to accomplish?

Wine snobbery may be bullshit, just like jazz snobbery. But that's not the same as 'appreciation,' which requires some education and experience, maybe even some aptitude.

Or think instead of sex: Wow, that sure was great! Why would I want to try anything different? tl;dr: You don't know what you're missing, or you're doing it wrong--or, more likely, both.

https://winemakermag.com/95-blending-batches-tips-from-the-p...

> But that's not the same as 'appreciation,' which requires some education and experience, maybe even some aptitude.

OP's point is that without the information about the price and make of the wine, your brain alone can't "appreciate" anything not matter how educated and experienced you are. If someone tells you you are drinking a rare extremely expensive french 100-year-old vintage, your brain will "appreciate" it, even if it's actually cheap box wine.

Not a biggie, but thus the "doing it wrong" bit. Sure, everyone can like can what they like, but it's inaccurate to equate discernment with snobbery--except in snobs who, themselves, are doing it wrong. Cheers, as I grab a jug of Paisano to take to the patio while I grill burgers. The 2010 Silver Oak cab continues to collect dust and cat hair on the wine rack. Thus the downside of good wine: afraid to drink it.

I wish that I couldn't tell the difference between expensive wine and cheap plonk. While there are plenty of expensive duds, there are very few cheap good wines. The wine industry might not be able to make good wine on demand, but they can certainly make sure no good wine is cheap.

The only real exception that I know of is Hunter Valley (Australia) wines. The Hunter Valley is a very unreliable wine region and it only gets a really good vintage every 5 to 10 years. Wine makers just can't charge the correct price for hunter wines in the good vintages because they have to be able to shift their production the rest of the time. In a good year you can get totally amazing wines for a very reasonable price - the only problem is the long wait.

I don't know a lot about wine in particular. But this does ring a little bit like an argument that because more people enjoy reading Harry Potter than Moby Dick that therefore the latter has no merits over the former. Not so sure about that.

Had a private tasting with JGregory (Mark Jessup, who was the original wine maker for Opus 1)... The tasting was amazing, the experience was amazing... Bought several bottles for $68/each

Got them home - had some later, tasted nothing like what we had in the tasting room... weren't as impressed.

Same thing with Raymond, but Caymus is always consistent.

But if you like to drink wine - it doesn't make sense to drink a 30/60/90 dollar bottle of wine a week. You need to find a bottle that is something you like and is also affordable. Save the Special Selection for a special occasion.

> There were twelve of us in the group and every single one rated the Silver Oak dead last, and the Barefoot either first or second.

I've always been of the opinion that Barefoot punches above its price, so to speak.

And Silver Oak is literally and figuratively vanilla. Not a great California red, and particularly not at its price.

> Twenty years ago I was a tea-totaller, but there was a group of people I wanted to hang out with who would get together to drink wine so I decided to try to develop a taste for it.

Could you go into a bit more detail on this? The very idea of forcing myself to "acquire the taste" for alcohol seems distasteful in itself. I've got additional reasons for choosing not to do so, but I'd be interested to hear another point of view and why you'd want to make a fairly drastic change.

It's just learning to appreciate something. Like how most people have to learn to appreciate coffee, olives, blue cheese and so on

It was purely succumbing to peer pressure. Not something I'm particularly proud of, nor something I would recommend. If you don't like alcohol, and you don't feel like that's holding you back socially, then by all means don't drink. If you don't feel like you're missing out on anything, then you aren't. That's my whole point: you should ignore what other people think and just decide for yourself what you like, even if (maybe especially if) what you like is not to start drinking in the first place.

no one(maybe some) likes alcohol the first time. one must acquire a taste for it. that doesn't mean it's not worth it. scotch was so disgusting to me the first time i had it and now it's one of the great pleasures in my life.

Adding to this - half of developing a taste for scotch is developing the skill of tasting scotch. Which is to say, take smaller sips. I've personally found that 80% or so of people who say they don't like scotch will enjoy a good scotch if they can be convinced to take a sufficiently small sip. Agreed, one of the great pleasures in life!

I've introduced some people to craft beer as their first alcohol, and they've tended to seriously enjoy it when given a few options and allowed to taste and choose. Of course, if you're given a house vodka and coke or a bottle of Whatever Light as your first alcohol, you're not going to like it.

You don't drink wine for the alcohol, you drink it for the flavor. It's just like tea; no one drinks a nice cup of Earl Grey with Bourgamot for the caffeine. If you want to get liquored up, there's far cheaper and more efficient ways to do it than wine, and if you want caffeine, there's faster and more effective ways of getting that too that don't require carefully heating water and steeping a teabag.

A lot of people do like the effect of the alcohol, but it's a side-effect, not the main purpose of drinking wine. Personally, it seems to have no effect on me, but I also don't drink very much at a time.

Forcing yourself to "acquire the taste" for wine is no different than forcing yourself to "acquire the taste" for expensive, fine cheeses, or doing the same for fine cuts of meat instead of eating a McDonald's burger.

> You don't drink wine for the alcohol, you drink it for the flavor.

I really wish that synthehol (of Star Trek fame) were a thing. I was at a champagne tasting of 60+ wines from the best producers (Krug and Roederer come to mind), and made it through 25 or so, spitting each one, and was still terribly buzzed.

If there were a way to enjoy the taste without the effects I would be all for it.

>I was at a champagne tasting of 60+ wines from the best producers (Krug and Roederer come to mind), and made it through 25 or so, spitting each one, and was still terribly buzzed.

I've never actually had that feeling, and always wondered what this "buzz" effect is. I've been to wine tastings, drank multiple glasses at once, etc., and never felt a thing.

> The very idea of forcing myself to "acquire the taste" for alcohol seems distasteful in itself.

The logic of any acquired taste is simple:

It takes a finite amount of effort to acquire the taste.

In return, you get satisfaction for the acquired taste that is only bound by the length of your life. The sooner you acquire the taste, the longer you get to amortize the value.

I've taught myself to enjoy damn near every food and drink out there and I am immensely glad that I have—I now inhabit a world filled with delights.

> I've taught myself to enjoy damn near every food and drink out there and I am immensely glad that I have—I now inhabit a world filled with delights.

Well yeah, when you have drugs to "teach" your brain how to enjoy something (i.e. "this flavor = feel goods"), it's not that hard. I always figure that having to aqcuire the taste of something via drugs is a warning sign that said thing is probably not good for your body. Take tobacco connoisseurs for example.

I don't doubt that they can taste and enjoy lots of "woody" and "grassy" flavors in their smoke, but to someone like me without the acquired taste, it smells foul and acrid, and my brain is warning me to stay away.

Who said anything about having to use drugs to acquire a taste?

Are there any acquired tastes that don't require some form of drug usage (alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, etc.)?

Organ meats

Lots of people don't naturally like: avocados, olives, kombucha, stinky cheeses, offal, sushi, etc.

Even with coffee and tea, the acquisition works just as well if you drink decaf. (I only have one cup of caffeinated beverage a day, but I still occasionally enjoy a cup of decaf in the afternoons.)

Ummmm... Plenty. Wikipedia has many examples

>An acquired taste often refers to an appreciation for a food or beverage that is unlikely to be enjoyed by a person who has not had substantial exposure to it, usually because of some unfamiliar aspect of the food or beverage, including a strong or strange odor (e.g. stinky tofu, Gefilte fish, durian, hákarl, black salt, nattō, stinking toe, asafoetida, surströmming, or certain types of cheese), taste (such as alcoholic beverages, vegemite/marmite, bitter teas, salty liquorice, malt bread, unsweetened chocolate or garnatálg), or appearance.

Macedonian trad/jazz fusion music. Dadaist art. Sauna (the Finnish way).

There's nothing wrong with Esma Redzepova.

Oh, you can go to wineries and make your own blend, then they will save the recipe for you and you can go back and get more of them at any later date.

What, every winery will do this for you?

Well, I know that Buena Vista will - and I am going there tomorrow... but the people I am going with know a hell-of-a-lot more about this than I do. But the last two times I went to Buena Vista, this was brought up by my date and the group. They did it once. You create your custom blend - then they keep that on file and you can request/buy it any time.

https://www.buenavistawinery.com/

You might also enjoy:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/10/you-are-no...

I've found that over the past 20 years my taste in wine has gotten more particular, it's really more about how your palate changes over time. The expensive and famous wines aren't completely without merit however, and if you go off of the taste alone, well that's not really what wine is about either. :) Wine is also your company, the food, the smell of the earth (terroir), the balmy afternoon.

But I've found I have had to get more clever about the wines I like by finding vineyards near to the fancy ones, such as a wine from Gigondas vs. its more expensive neighbour Chateau-du-Pape, or a good Cremant or Prosecco vs. Champagne. Even at that not every supposedly "great" wine is transcendent, but from the right areas I've occasionally I gotten lucky and it's really something else. And some of the best wines I've had weren't for sale, small hotel in Tuscany making it's own wine, or a professor in Hungary who happened to own a vineyard were stunning.

Wait… It isn't about the taste alone?

No! That's sort of where this snobbishness comes from, the real wine culture isn't snobby... maybe even a mediocre wine turns to a great one in the right company. At least that's been my experience.

Nondrinker so I didn't consider that. Thanks

I'm not a connoisseur at all but I like the Barefoot Pinot Grigio. I've tasted better whites but most cheap whites I've tried were worse.

Years ago, I had a relative who was running a restaurant, and she did a wine-tasting for the staff to educate them on wines and pairings, and I got to sit in on it. It wasn't a blind taste-test, but they opened a bunch of bottles of wine, port, and champagne (only ones that'd be served at a restaurant though, not some ultra-cheap supermarket stuff).

Invariably, I found that I liked the cheapest varieties the best. The $100/bottle port tasted like crap to me ("Grandfathers"? I think that might have been the name), whereas the cheapest port was fantastic paired with chocolate, which was something I had never tried at the time. Same with wines and champagnes; the cheap Asti Spumanti tasted good to me, the expensive stuff was just nasty.

I also think the roll-your-own is a great idea. Wine snobbery is annoying; I try to only buy bottles where they show right on the label what kind of wine it is (sweet vs. dry) instead of a bunch of stupid flowery language about notes and aromas.

I also wish they'd cut it out with the stupid corks. Those make as much sense now as wooden spokes on car wheels, or 50-pin SCSI ports on computers. Screw-on caps are superior in every way.

One thing you wrote made me curious: That good wine box -- will a wine box from another batch also impress as much? I assume one of the problems with the cheap stuff is the std deviation values?

I might add that I got a Moldovan 2 bucks wine in a PET bottle this week and quite liked it. :-)

(I prefer dry red Spanish that you almost have to chew (I think the English term i s "rich"?). I should probably just admit defeat and replace the wine with a bit of vodka in espresso. :-) )

Edit: Hmm, I guess the cheap stuff is blended in giant volumes and hence consistent? Thanks for the information, lisper. I should try to widen my experience.

Actually one of the nice things about the mass-produced "plonk" is that it is very consistent. One bottle of Barefoot cab will taste pretty much the same as another, whereas with more expensive wines you get a lot more variation, particularly from year to year. (Wine snobs consider this a feature!)

> vodka in espresso

Whatever works! My wife likes vanilla vodka with olives, and raspberry martinis with a dash of tabasco. But I love her anyway :-)

Barefoot and other mass produced wines are chemically treated. This is why they always taste the same. Variation from year to year is actually a good sign that what you're tasting is not just chemical flavoring.

> and we soon learned that there was very little correlation between what we liked and what the wine critics and the market liked

What the market "likes" isn't correlated to taste, it is correlated to scarcity.

Certain climates and variations in climate that one year, coupled with name, garner the premiums.

It isn't age or "complex nuance". Although these are one form of magic the industry relies on being perpetuated by consumers, the other is the idea that climates cannot be replicated.

i wonder if it's the same for whiskeys or really any alchohol.

Yes, absolutely. Since the infamous cab tasting we've done blind tastings of spirits with similar results. Our favorite vodka, for example, turns out to be Seagrams Extra Smooth, which is about half the price of a "high end" vodka. Unfortunately, it doesn't always turn out that way. My favorite scotch turns out to be Lagavulin or Laphroaig -- I really like the smokey flavor of Islay malts -- both of which are rather pricey.

Very neat to hear, as I've been trying all sorts of different vodkas since one pivotal tasting. So I knew a Frenchman who was in the wine business and thought the market was too saturated, too tough, so he looked into spirits and saw vodka's large (~30%) market share and jumped in to the ultra premium space, the shelf above Grey Goose. His trick was to hire a skilled French distillery to run the vodka through 9 times, effectively cleansing it far beyond what most processing would be like (at the time). I had it over ice and can absolutely recall the pleasant experience drinking that came through. It was like no other vodka I'd had.

In the 10+ years since, however, I can go to my local shop and pick up a made in Texas (!) vodka distilled 6 times for about $20 a liter. Is it as good? No. Is it leaps and bounds better than what I remember from college and in general drinking out and about? Drastically better.

People look at me funny but I claim to be able to taste the copper still pots used in the making of Titos. Can't really over OJ, but if it's stiff enough. Just not my thing!

Personally, I find that whiskey, beer, tequila and mescal are the only alcohol products where price really does line up with quality.

The problem with wine is that the mass market products really do vary primarily in sweetness, spiciness, and viscosity. There are hundreds of different brands, but not really all that many variables to play with. What's worse is that wine distributors are expert marketers and cover the price spectrum, so you can pay a lot of money for something that is essentially a mass market product.

But go to an extremely nice restaurant sometime --- my revelation happened at Alinea in Chicago --- and get a tasting menu with a wine pairing. Clearly it is not the case that all wine falls within the parameters of mass market wine. You'll get glasses of wine that blow your head off. Frustratingly: they will probably be "conventional" wines: I still remember the Pinot Noir they served me, but I've had no luck reproducing any of that experience by shopping for Pinot Noirs at any part of the price spectrum at wine stores. The wines a place like Alinea sells are very difficult to source.

You're starting to see some of the same effect in American whiskey: the so-called "craft" distiller movement is really just an excuse for branding firms to stake out different points on the whiskey product price spectrum, and all of them taste either like Makers, VOB, or something in between.

I don't. There is a whole booming industry right now in relabelling mass produced spirits and marking them up.

Now older whiskey for instance is going to always cost more than younger, and its usually going to be better, but you can get similarly aged whiskeys produced with the same or similar mash bills from the exact same facility that vary dramatically in price.

I suppose I should have narrowed what I mean by whiskey to scotch-from-scotland, as price very much lines up with quality for scotch. The same is true for mezcal-from-oaxaca.

The current trend of "craft" distillers relabeling factory made bourbons and ryes is a different animal.

There are fewer out-and-out fake scotch whiskey products; I can't, for instance, think of the Scottish equivalent of Templeton Rye.

But that doesn't mean price and quality are aligned. There are good deals in scotch, and there are bad deals. There are mediocre scotches that command huge prices for their brand. There's a sharp trend towards no-age-statement scotches clearing the way for more like that.

Also: part of the reason there are fewer fake whiskeys in Scotland is that they're practically all owned by Diageo and Pernod Ricard. Within those corporate families, distilleries are outsourcing a lot of their grain production, malting, &c. The stills themselves are mostly software-controlled. The median scotch is probably better than the median bourbon, but there's a case to be made for bourbon having higher highs.

There's also a trend towards startups lighting up silent distilleries in Scotland, so prepare yourself for craft scotch as well.

Well, of course it doesn't work for vodka. The definition of vodka is to be odorless and flavorless. "High end" vodka is almost literally a scam. (Read up on the founding of Grey Goose... the business plan was basically "Hey, I bet if we charge way too much for vodka we can get gullible Americans to pay it!")

I used to think that too, but it turns out that vodkas actually do have distinctive flavors, some of which are better than others (to me). I was skeptical until we tried it, and it turned out that my wife and I could both identify many high-end vodkas very reliably in blind tastings. Ciroc is particularly distinctive.

Vodka is almost universally manufactured from the same high-grade industrial ethanol, which is essentially pure. However, you are correct that some of them taste different! You might be disappointed, though, to discover that these flavors are often introduced as a small quantity of concentrates added to industrial ethanol during the bottling process. Not every brand has a subtle character modifier added to it but many do.

I know the family that owns the bottling plant for most of the vodka brands sold in California, from premium to bum brands; they bottle everything from the same railroad tanker cars of ethanol from ADM. It was eye-opening to see but it makes sense; ethanol distillation is a highly refined, industrial scale process. Ironically, some of the cheapest stuff is the purest (it costs money to add adulterants to ethanol, after all). The industrial distillation columns are extremely efficient, so extra "distillations" don't buy much.

Wow. Not that I doubt you, but is there any way to corroborate this story?

I'd also be interested to know about the flavoring used. It seems like this would run afoul of the US labeling laws for vodka, which require it to be "without distinctive character, aroma, or taste". This technicality of course doesn't mean that it's not done exactly as Andrew describes.

Here's a couple background articles on the bottler's role, without specific reference to flavorings:

http://adiforums.com/index.php?/topic/452-whiskey-bottling-v...

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18360315

> It seems like this would run afoul of the US labeling laws for vodka, which require it to be "without distinctive character, aroma, or taste".

That seems improbable because flavored vodkas are common.

That rule is specific to products labeled "Vodka".

Flavored vodka has to include the flavor on the label. Pages 2 and 11:

https://www.ttb.gov/spirits/bam/chapter4.pdf

Ah. Well, what can I say? I can easily tell the difference between different vodkas in blind tastings, though I can't necessarily tell you which is which. But my wife can consistently pick her favorite vodka out of a blind lineup.

For vodka, this is why I seek out actual russian imports, and I have a strong preference for potato distilled vodka. Unfortunately, finding these are few and far between, so grain it is. Still, when that's the case, I go for cheap vodka, and there's quite a strong difference there too. I'm talking 750ml for 7-8 dollars, some is just undrinkable, others are smoother than smirnoff (also not high end, just comparing to a well known, marketed as highish end).

Come on. No, it isn't. Nobody in the world is going to confuse Laphroiag with Glenlivet, let alone with Buffalo Trace. They're fundamentally different products: they have different mash bills (so comparing them can be like comparing a Barolo to an Oregon Raspberry wine), they're produced differently (the Laphroaig is peat smoked), and they're aged differently (the Buffalo Trace in new oak for a short time, the Glenlivet in sherry butts for up to two decades).

I hear people make this comparison between wine tasting and whiskey tasting and drives me a little batty.

It's especially unfortunate that this comparison brings vodka into the mix, because vodka is a neutral spirit --- it's not supposed to be distinctive (Dave Arnold, when he was at the French Culinary, used to "make his own" by ordering potable ethyl lab alcohol and diluting it). But try to say the same thing for rum or gin: different brands are wildly different.

He's not talking about mixing styles, he's saying preference within style doesn't correlate with price, and I absolutely believe that holds with whiskey (cough whistle pig cough).

The difference between wine and whiskey is how few options you get within a style in whiskey tasting compared to wine. The options are small enough in whiskey that an amateur on a budget can memorize all of the flavor profiles relatively easily.

But that doesn't change the point that blind tasting whiskeys can give you interesting non-price correlated results.

Oh: strong agree, especially for American whiskey, where there's an extremely drinkable "well whiskey" price range, and an extremely memorable and excellent "boutique" price range (taken up mostly by Buffalo antiques), and virtually nothing worth paying for in the middle, where everyone shops.

(What's worse is that a lot of brands want to claim a price in the boutique price range --- like WhistlePig --- and so you really have to know what you're shopping for if you want to pay extra for it).

Sorry, Ron! I'm knee-jerk about people comparing wine tasting to beer and whiskey tasting. :)

No worries :-)

> virtually nothing worth paying for in the middle

I presume you know this, but an awful lot of those craft brands in the middle (including some of the Whistle Pig line) are made by the same distillery in Indiana. Which doesn't mean that they are bad, but it does disincline one to trust any of the puffery one reads on a label: http://www.seriouseats.com/2015/09/best-whiskey-spirits-from...

I did happen across one brand recently that surprised me by having a genuinely authentic and interesting story. They are doing a sweet potato base blended with their rye cover crop: http://www.outsideonline.com/2040581/drink-your-sweet-potato...

> Nobody in the world is going to confuse Laphroiag with Glenlivet

Of course not. That's not what I'm saying. All I'm saying is that when I do blind tastings, sometimes the cheap stuff turns out to be my favorite, other times not. (And when it does, I'm happy!)

> vodka is a neutral spirit --- it's not supposed to be distinctive

And yet it is. If you don't believe me, try comparing Ciroc to Smirnov. You don't even have to do it blind. If you can tell the difference between Laphroaig and Glenlivet (a very low bar) you'll be able to tell the difference between those two.

> rum or gin

There is definitely more variation in flavor there. FWIW, my picks are Bacardi Black rum and New Amsterdam gin. If it's a special occasion I'll have a Hendricks cucumber gimlet :-)

to be fair vodka isn't meant to have different tastes. it's meant to taste as much like hand sanitizer as possible.

Yeah, the vodka situation has gone out of control.

Traditional Polish test of vodka quality: did it have any flavor? Did you go blind? Do you have a horrible hangover? If all three answers are no, 100/100.

So, responding a little late here, but if you like single malt Scotch whisky, take a look at John, Mark, and Robbo's. What they've done is basically what the wine blender in the article is doing, but targeting specific flavours. They use a blend of cheaper single malts to match the flavours of specific expensive single malts.

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