Science saved me from pretending to love wine
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What I have an aversion to is people who want to talk endlessly about wine. Or people who pretend they'd actually bother with wine in the first place if it didn't give them a buzz. Or anyone who expects me to spend more than five bucks a bottle (ok I can go as high as ten if it's a restaurant).
Aside from the whole issue of genetic differences between people and their fungiform papillae, I think the one line that gets to the heart of why people get so obsessive about wine is "no other pursuit made him feel farther from the lower-middle-class neighborhoods of immigrant Brooklyn from which he had worked so hard to escape".
One thing about wine I really enjoy is that there are so many different tastes available, and that tastes may vary by year.
If you're still exploring your preferences, I'd recommend to stay below 30€/bottle (reseller price, not restaurant) and try a lot of different ones (not necessarily on the same evening thought).
> drinking and enjoying wine is not about some 'pretending to be wealthy' feeling.
I'm pretty sure that these two statements are contradictory. Wine tastes good, and it tastes good with other things, but in no way more special than say, other fruit juices or beverages.
Do you maximize the experience of a fine meal with a flight of six different orange juices? No, nobody ever does that. And yet there is certainly as much variation in citrus juice as there is in grape.
Wine is treated differently precisely for the kind of reasons that you have to explicitly disclaim "pretending to be wealthy" as a motivation.
I love orange juice, but I don't want it with my steak.
Although I typically go with my favourite drink of all -- plain water.
Certainly not wine.
If you want to try it out sometime.
No, wine is a bit special here. It's somehow similar to cheese - there is a whole universe of tastes and subtastes based on many factors. You can of course ignore it completely and treat these foods like eggs (or put any other uniformly tasting kind of food here). That's perfectly fine. Or you can discover that there are so many flavors of cheese, with some of them particularly appealing to you - and just let yourself enjoy these.
Of course there are snobs who make a show out of everything, but don't let that spoil the genuine joy of tasting some good wine (or any other food that may or may not be expensive at that moment).
Compare that to the varieties of grapes - there are certainly more strains of grapes in total (5k-10k), but if you restrict yourself to only wine grapes, they are of similar complexity, and the entire grape industry is based on Vitis Vinifera and Vitis Labrusca, whereas Citrus has at least 4 original species.
And Citrus reacts just as well as Vitis Vinifera to terroir, as well - Citrus grown in volcanic soil vs limestone soil vs california loam has a distinctly different composition and flavor.
You're going to have to face it, wine is special because humans have declared it special, not because it's not similar in complexity to dozens of other agricultural, natural, and fermented products :)
> Do you maximize the experience of a fine meal with a flight of six different orange juices
A lot of people usually prefer to not have sweetness in their meal (at least where I live). Conversely I understand that people loving sweetness and not sour or bitter taste are perplexed by wine.
> And yet there is certainly as much variation in citrus juice as there is in grape.
You are underplaying the effect of fermentation, like from milk to a strong blue cheese. But yes other fermented juices could be as interesting, for example I heard Americans were quite into hard cider ("apple wine") in the past
Well, other than the fact that, on top of its own particular taste characteristics, it's also a vehicle for a substance with is both a recreational drug and flavor enhancer, which certainly has an effect on experience when it is consumed that has nothing to do with social pretense.
But ignoring that is a pretty big oversight.
Those are thoughtfully developed mixes, so few if any just out of a bottle and typical pricing is half of a wine pairing (the wine pairing is normally the same as the tasting menu). I wouldn't personally swap a wine pairing for them -- if you think a full menu is too much, you can often get a half or share the wine menu between 2 people, even if the restaurant doesn't mention so. But it is an interesting alternative.
my favorite wine comes affordably in a box. there are better box wines than others, and not all wines are appropriate for specific settings.
I can only get buzzed so often and only to a certain amount (I'm over 30), so when I choose to drink I try to get the most out of it. Since money is not a bottleneck in how often I can get buzzed, I think less about it in that context.
The mix of the two in my stomach is not a pleasant feeling.
Now give me a good wine in the $15-20 range and it can be incredibly satisfying. There are also plenty of bad expensive wines. But as you dip below the $10 mark I have yet to find a wine that isn't much harsher and harder to drink.
I have never tasted a wine I liked. Ever. At best some were tolerable. The sweeter the better.
Dry wines taste absolutely disgusting. Like someone collected filth and put it in a bottle to trick people (the emperor has no clothes).
I once tried adding sugar to a dry wine to see if I could taste those flavor notes the bottle said they contained. It helped a bit, but not much.
Like a color blind person not believing color really exists, I have a hard time believing people that they actually like the stuff.
The reason why I like red wine is because I can select ones that are not sweet and I really enjoy non sweet drinks with food. Water is nice and what I usually drink but it is pretty neutral and does not add to the meal the same way wine can do.
However I'm not a fan of alcohol so I have been starting to drink non-alcoholic beers (I like lagers and I think those are fine as non-alcohol) but I have not found a good non-alcoholic red wine yet. I would love to though so if anyone has any recommendations please tell.
As someone who also can't stand dry wines but loves sweet wines, it depends on the beer. My favorite beers are sweet thick malty beers like doppelbock, milk stouts, wee heavy, etc.
There's a semi-local brewery here called 903 that has a Milk & Honey Stout and a Chocolate Milk Stout. Drinking those is like drinking a little bit of heaven.
It turns out that neuroscience has some intriguing things to say about the general concept of 'acquired taste'. For instance, the first time people heard Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring', they rioted. This Radiolab episode [1] discusses an interesting hypothesis that might explain the events of that night, and I strongly suspect the same factors are the reason for similar reactions to many different kinds of stimuli, possibly including your experience with wine.
Anyway, it's a great episode.
That's an extremely subjective statement.
My contribution: Blueberry wine is delicious.
I used to grudgingly tolerate sweet whites, but red always tasted like something I shouldn't be putting in my mouth and drinking.
Some people clearly enjoy wine, but how/why baffles me.
But there are some sweet wines that are utterly fantastic. I was at place a few weeks ago (Umbra Wines in Grapevine, TX) where I had a moscato d'asti that tasted like I was drinking liquid pixy stix. Ever since then, I keep thinking about going back so I could get a full glass instead of the mini-glass in the flight I had (it was the only wine in the flight I liked... the other two were dry, and I had to force them down, but the cost of the flight was worth it for the liquid pixy stix). Well, that and the mead they had there. The mead was also fantastically sweet.
But because of that latter part, it's really more like a liquid dessert.
I've tried cheap wines and a few stupidly expensive wines and I really disliked each one. It's just not a pleasant taste to me.
Same with champagne. Even expensive champagne is unpleasant.
The concept of wine or alcohol in general going well with certain foods is alien to me too. If I am eating and drinking alcohol at the same time, that warm fuzzy feeling in the head that you get from the alcohol makes my meal much less appealing to me, like it kills my appetite.
Alcohol and food is a case of one or the other to me. Never at the same time.
Even if you do know about wine this is what you should be doing. Drinking expensive wine because it's expensive is the wrong thing to do. The people who I know who really know wine are always in search of good wine that is also inexpensive.
It's funny to lump these together. Having lived in a couple of wine-producing countries now, I've found the wine culture is heavily centered around finding the best price for the best wine. Finding a half-way decent low-priced wine is considered just as much a skill as knowing which high-priced wines are actually worth the cost.
Are there? You may be missing that not everyone even notices this enormous variation in taste[1]. For my part, all wines taste like sting-y grape juice, and most beers taste like empty sting. This persists after numerous wine/beer connoisseurs have insisted that I just need to try one more of this special brand, or insisted that each wine in a particular flight has a very different taste.
For that matter, perhaps you're just imagining the flavor variation and have tuned yourself to give the socially-correct answer?
Furthermore, there may be an unrecognized disagreement in the basic ontology of "liking" something. I know people who will swear up and down that they "like alcohol", but it turns out they only like it when it's heavily diluted with other, universally enjoyable flavors (e.g. sugar). In my book, that's not what liking something looks like.
See also this reddit thread, with numerous posters agreeing that all alcohols taste gross to them:
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/2juncs/d...
[1] Important reading: "What universal human experiences are you missing out on without realizing it?" Punchline: people casually assume that all humans experience X, ground major beliefs on X, and turn out to be mistaken. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-ex...
Do these people actually exist or have you just heard about them on TV and over-match any time you hear some one talk about wine for more than 30 seconds?
You mean, "terroir".
I don't find any of this pretentious, and more general interesting conversation.
Most of us were drinking what was already opened, or even the beer in the cooler.. but one guy... one guy, had to talk about every bottle. Go through a glorious ceremony for each. Find the perfect glasses, and people to talk to about it. It got pretty annoying, to the point the wine loving host himself was like, great to meet you, but why don't you and I get together some other time, let's focus on (couple's name) instead.
There you have two kinds of wine fans, one I like, one I couldn't stand being around. My mother is a third kind, the one obsessed with finding the highest quality to cost ratio she can. I'm not sure how I feel about her :)
Don't be the dude who grabs a bottle of my good scotch and pours it on ice in a rocks glass. The bottle of Jameson was right next door for a reason.
For example, there's a group of wine selections that I've found to be pretty tasty (and often pretty affordable, with many in the $15-$25 range). I went into a busy wine store in an affluent neighborhood and asked the people in the wine department if they had any wines of that select, and they looked at me as if I was from the moon. They told me that's not the way wine is organized - they wanted me to give them a price point and tell them if it's red or white. That's how a lot of people approach wine: "I want to spend N dollars on a X color wine."
(I went to a smaller wine shop near a college, and they knew just who I was talking about)
People have said it's like talking about Vim vs Emacs, and it is somewhat, but it's like hearing people who have never used Vim or Emacs talk about Vim vs Emacs. Have you ever come across those conversations? Everyone is just repeating things they read and saying what they believe the common consensus is, and no one is thinking for themselves.
I find they go great with even heavy, spicy meals.
Apart from the fact than nobody should expect you to spend any money on anything... Just like everything else, wines differ, among others, in quality. If you spend 5 bucks on a bottle, chances are what you're drinking is really bad. It is possible to find decent wine in this range, but it's quite difficult.
I'm still in shock about wine prices in the US but SF in particular. ~18 months after I moved here. In Germany I could buy the same Californian wines for cheaper than here, not to speak of pretty good French, Italian, Spanish ones. It's less bad if you're outside of SF.
On the other hand, the average person is unlikely to be able to tell the difference between a $25 bottle of wine and a $2500 bottle of wine.
The last wine I drank was a Montepulciano d'Abruzzo; I can't remember the specific winemaker, but it was quite nice and was less than $9, despite being bought in another European country.
When you cook with wine you lose all the alcohol, which is the only constant between two bottles of wine. You're just left with the rest from which comes the taste.
There's no such thing as "cooking wine". Bad wine is bad wine. If you wouldn't drink it, don't cook with it.
That all being said, I personally think wine snobbery is basically bullshit and I think blind taste tests tend to support that view.
Still, a wine isn't bad because it's $5. Nor is it good because it's $30.
When I lived in the UK I'd often get by with the table wine from Tesco for under 5 pounds and honestly it was fine. I found quite a few decent bottles of Portugese and Chilean wine for under 10 pounds. Beaujolais wasn't more than 3-5 pounds.
This is a myth. Even after 2.5 hours of simmering/baking, 5% remains. Flambeing leaves 75%, and a 15 minute simmer still leaves nearly half.
You say that like its a bad thing.
Cooking with the wine is a great way for it to end up on the table surrounded by random glasses where "I don't want to trouble you", becomes "well, since its open anyway".
But if you are cooking with the wine, you already have the bottle open. Since an opened bottle of wine will rapidly deteriorate if you don't drink it within a fairly short time period (day or so), you may as well drink the remainder, thus put the open bottle on the table (where family/guests are gathered), and it will be consumed with relish.
Stuff like red wine sauces, whiskey glazed veggies, rum cakes, flambeed mushrooms, etc. that aren't cooked as long contain a very significant amount of alcohol.
I often find people have a kind of placebo effect when it comes to expensive commodities. It's expensive so it has to be better. In the meantime, professionals buy generics: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/07/25/334459041/when-...
That said, I can tell for a fact price often does not matter past a certain point -- it definitely isn't a good way to determine quality. I have had great bottles that sell for $15, and (not horrible but) not special ones that sell for $50 or $100. There are plenty of good $15 wines and plenty of bad ones. Same applies to the higher priced ones as well.
Often it's hit and miss, and you need to do your research! (Which isn't necessarily a bad thing)
Just don't buy a bottle based on how the bottle looks.
That's got to be one of the silliest, most insane things to actually care about.
I'm trying to popularize the term "enanists" for that sort of people.
I will gladly wolf down moscato, red moscato, moscato d'asti, kosher concord wine, gewürztraminer, port, etc., and I'm just not a fan of any wine that isn't sweet.
I had someone tell me to my face once that "the good wines aren't sweet". I honestly don't care. I like what I like, and if someone tries to tell me that I'm wrong for liking what I like, my opinion of them goes down.
I've noticed this in a lot of my friends also. The ones that have attempted cut out sugar have all experienced the same.
Of course she could just dislike wine, which is completely fine. But all of the other things mentioned lead me to believe this might be a part of it.
I've experience the effects of cutting sugar/salt as well. But no amount of additional exposure i tried has made me capable of handling alcohol or chili well. The desensitization would need to cover a gap that's far too large.
In my case my dad was into wood-working so my childhood memories include all sorts of solvents and other chemicals that had complex aromatics. So when I pick up a memory when I'm drinking wine, I know there's "something" going on at the molecular level, I just don't know what it is.
I don't think anyone knows in some cases, I mean the wine industry employs chemists, obviously, but no one can really put their finger on how wine develops and changes over time. That's why it's more of a craft than a science.
http://www.decanter.com/features/the-misunderstood-world-of-...
And the smell appeared to be in addition to all the other smells and tastes you might expect from red wine: so it tasted like a red wine, and smelled like a red wine, and it was actually quite nice... and it smelled of Star Wars figures as well, on top. That bit wasn't so nice, but it was so unusual that I could somehow separate it in my mind. Like I was drinking wine with a Star Ways toy under my nose, or something like that. It was a very strange experience.
Anyway, perhaps this is the same chemical, or one related.
After a couple of glasses the smell mostly dissipated.
A friend of mine told me about their personal experience which was that they felt that most wine tasted the same (with broad confines like all reds and all whites) but that after they gave up sugar, wine became a completely different beverage. They related that after two months without sugar in their diet not only did potatoes taste as sweet as candy had before they gave up sugar, wine opened up in astonishing ways.
It's on my list to replicate this experiment to see if an abundance of sugar in the diet masks many interesting flavors in wine.
Now such sweets are overpowering to me and the though of the taste alone is a bit revolting to my mind. (nevermind the calorie count of one slice of that carrot cake). But wines suddenly had some depth to them, and I could finally notice the difference between an okayish bottle of wine and what they used to water down for us at communion when I was a kid. Vegetables also just suddenly had a whole depth of flavor tied just to the vegetable itself, and Frozen or underripened vegetables stood out as very poor tasting to me.
By the definition, I am a supertaster. I know this because I once had a virus that made the papillae on my tongue swell and I couldn't eat anything for a week. My doctors all exclaimed how many "taste buds" I had and I must taste foods very strongly. I do - I rarely need seasonings - even salt and pepper - or heavy sauces. I eat pretty simple and enjoy (or despise) flavors.
But I love wine and many other strong/sour/acidic/fermented foods. Love dark chocolate. Lemons. Bitter green teas. I suppose I would love these as a medium or light taster too.
On the other hand, I hate coffee, sauerkraut, blue cheese and some other strong foods. I suppose I would hate these as a medium or light taster too. Just maybe not as fervently.
If anything, your experience seems opposite of what supertasters experience, which is that certain chemicals overpower and blot out the normal flavor that others experience, especially with alcohol.
[1] "The cause of this heightened [taste] response is unknown, although it is thought to be related to the presence of the TAS2R38 gene, the ability to taste PROP and PTC, and, at least in part, due to an increased number of fungiform papillae." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supertaster#Cause
The frustrating thing is that there is a very definite aspect of wine that makes me dislike it, but as far as I've been able to determine that same taste doesn't appear anywhere else, so I've never been able to describe to anyone what that is.
The science here makes me wonder, though, if someday someone will popularize a quantitative framework for people's differing tastes. Imagine an app where you take a picture of your tongue and it categorizing your taste-sensitivity on however many fronts, and recommends a restaurant. Or via a genetic test- 23andme could pay for some of its customers to take Dr Marks' taste-test-battery, and work out the correlations. People love to be categorized, and here's a way to do it that's directly impactful on their everyday lives (and in particular, on a social aspect of their lives.)
I also like wine.
The problem is, I find coffee absolutely horrendous (I get my stereotypical-hacker caffeine fix from energy drinks), so it's often hard to tell whether actual coffee has been added during brewing process (which is quite common for stouts), resulting in a horrible drink with an accurate description; or whether it's a lazy 'tasting note' which is completely unrelated to the actual, potentially nice, flavour of the drink.
As with many things (like academic papers) the meat is in the footnotes.
This isn't limited to wine drinking preference, people can pontificate about anything.
I'm sure a sea of articles in the same vein wouldn't begin to compare to the number of person-hours wasted on alcohols.
I do like cooking with lots of vinegar since it tastes sweet to me, but it seems like few people have similar taste (but I know of at least one relative who had a similar taste). What we eat regularly can also affect body odor and I'd guess this is a big part of why many people list smell as on of or the most important factors in attraction.
I've noticed that for me even mild dehydration makes my sense of taste briefly much more sensitive, to the point that there seem to be dozens of flavors in a glass of tap water that normally I wouldn't distinguish much of anything in. It only lasts about three sips and may be partially due to my chronic health issues that seem to sensitize me to many things, but it is interesting how strong of an effect it is.
That's too bad! These spices and foods are all among my favorites. I'm curious what flavors the author enjoys most given her taste receptor situation.
"I dislike—in some cases, hate, hate, hate!—many fruits, and had not eaten a peach or a banana since I was a child, though I had smelled them, with displeasure ..."
This wasn't addressed in the article, but are bitterness receptors involved with tasting fruits? Although it seems more likely the 23andMe test doesn't identify taste variations that involve those flavors. Or maybe those dislikes are just unrelated to biology.
When I met my now-fiancee, she was certainly what you would call a picky eater (not "only grilled cheese for dinner" picky, but in the general vicinity). As a self-styled "adventurous eater", I figured I'd try to get her to like more foods. It's worked, kind of. I think she's moved higher on her taste spectrum (towards more flavors) but still tastes things distinctly differently than me. She loves kale now, but most bitter greens and some veg are disgustingly bitter (as are tonic drinks). Puzzlingly to me, she's also become a cheese fanatic, devouring even the most aggressive raw-milk washed-rind cheese and hot blue cheeses that I personally find a bit much. And, to draw it back to the article, she's learned to enjoy wine. Whites are preferred over reds, but even then she has liked reds with softer tannins and bigger fruit tastes.
I also think a big part of the taste spectrum is that of texture. In my fiancee's experience many foods like steak or poached fish or soup in general may taste delicious, but the texture itself is off-putting enough to make the food unpalatable. Wine of course doesn't have this problem (except in a limited way of mouthfeel, body, tannin structure). All in all, taste seems to be immensely personal and complicated with a lot of different factors besides "brussels sprouts are too bitter".
It makes me wonder if there could be some analytical way to determine the salt/sugar/acid needed to add to a dish to make it taste comparatively similar between people from different parts of the tasting spectrum. Like color gamut calibration, but for food!
I'm also fairly sure that if they weren't labelled differently, I wouldn't be able to tell much difference between two red grapes or two whites. I'm a bit cynical about other's ability to do so as well, but politeness prevents me from expressing it. Sometimes it's good to have something to talk about, so you let the group's wine connoisseur go on about the provenance of whatever you're drinking.
Are you also cynical about other's ability to tell apart Dr Pepper from Coca Cola? Or Black tea from coffee? Because they're a lot more similar than many wine variations.
http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infamo...
Anyway, I just ordered PTC (PROP) strip from Amazon. It turns out it can be purchased for less than $10. I'm so curious to see where I stand, and if it turns out I am a super taster, I might need to change my diet.
Um, actually, not really:
"wine tasting"
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=wine+tasting&y...
"fine wine"
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fine+wine&year...
"wine collection / wine collector"
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=wine+collectio...
Not to mention wasabi, horseradish and other pungent foods.
Can I ask how you feel about garlic?
Re: garlic, I'm a fan.
And while we're at it, I know one person who hates watermelons.
I think strawberries are the closest I have to your watermelon.
Most lettuce is just super bland, but then I guess that’s why you have it with dressing and other foods.
(That is, the way we use the word "taste" figuratively is rather inappropriate.)
But their are also psychological elements to it, many of which are cultural. So you might like wine, or speed metal, or gangsta rap, or Tolkien, or caviar, or saunas, or any number of other things through a complex combination of genetics and the culture you've been exposed to.
If I like different music to you, I think very little of the difference is in the ears and almost all of it is in the mind.
One reason why I think this matters is that the brain is mutable, and it's very likely that I could learn to like a kind of music that I don't like at the moment. Maybe I could also learn to like a flavour that I dislike at the moment, but I probably couldn't learn to care much about a flavour that I can barely detect.
But the other thing to remember is that the brain is physical too, and can be subject to genetic differences. It's just that we probably understand how the tongue affects taste more than we can understand how the brain affects other preferences (including flavor)....because the brain is so ridiculously complicated and interconnected.
1. Drink what you like 2. You will always sound like a pretentious douchebag talking about wine
I find these to be universally true.
That's why so many flavors are added to it—to mask the bad taste of ethanol. Wanting to "get a buzz" is stupid. Go for a run.
That's what I think.
Hell, I've returned desserts because they contained liqueur. I can't stand it.
(The same can be said about coffee and tea, but those have arguably good reasons to acquire the taste; i.e. a cheap way to get caffeine.)
On the other hand, I often experience no obvious ill effects, particularly with limited consumption.
Obviously they have different effects, but the people using each of those various drugs find the effect desirable.
Also, what's the point of starting caffeine later in life? AFAIK studies show that people who use no caffeine are generally more energetic/alert than those who use it regularly; it only works in the short-term.
I also think there have been studies that show both wine and coffee can be good for your health, so there's that, too.
I think the current accepted truth about nicotine is that it doesn’t give anyone anything except nicotine addiction. Any perceived boost is simply making a nicotine addict not feel the cravings for a short while, i.e. just like a non-addict feels like all the time. Possibly, as you say, the same is true of caffeine, but as far as I know, this is not currently a generally accepted fact.
Drink one 8-12oz cup of it every morning, take a week off once a month, do not drink an entire pot no matter how much you'll be tempted to.