Comment by rabbadabba_00 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rabbadabba_00 | Hacker News Reader

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This isn't meant to be elitist or condescending in any way, but whenever I hear this comment it makes me sad. It makes me sad because it means the commenter has never had a truly good bottle of wine.

Most wine isn't that good actually. There is wide range of price / marketing / effort where the chances of getting a really enjoyable bottle of wine is more luck than anything.

But if you go towards the top of the market, there is a profound difference in quality.

If you ever want to know the truth, go buy a bottle of JL Chave Hermitage (the Syrah). There are some truly legendary vintages of this wine but in my experience you can pick any vintage and be blown away.

You can probably find it for as low as $2XX. I don't want to dox myself here, otherwise I'd offer to pick up the bill if the experience didn't change your mind.

Taste that wine and you'll know. It's an expensive habit and I rarely indulge myself, but "fine wine" is a real, if very rare, thing.

> But if you go towards the top of the market, there is a profound difference in quality.

Define "quality".

Wine taste, like most food, is both very subjective and very personalized.

I dislike most wines. Price doesn't matter. However, there are specific wines that I like very very much--if you put a right-bank wine in front of me, I'm probably going to like it--price also doesn't seem to matter unless it's very cheap.

What I would suggest to the original poster is that if you don't like a lot of wines, find a high-end wine tasting and go--the goal is simply to try to decrease your probability of encountering an actually bad wine. Try the different wines, and try to isolate which ones you like more and which ones you like less even if you dislike them all. Then you can go talk to the sommelier/buyer and give him some parameters in which to help you search.

Otherwise, "Find me a wine I like" is much like "My computer is broken. Fix it."--if you don't give someone any information to work with, they can't do anything to help you.

Here’s a nice summary of some studies:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-ta...

There is a big difference between being consistent with "This wine has a 92 rating and notes of <foo>, <bar>, <baz>" and "I don't like wines from syrah grapes."

What's a "92 rating" even supposed mean? From food: What good is a "92 rating" on a Peking Duck dish, for example, if you don't like duck?

The big problem is that "wine rating" has no relevance to me, the buyer, as to whether or not I'm going to like a wine. It took me years to figure out what the commonality was between wines I liked. If the wine industry figure out how to fix that, they'd probably sell a lot more wine.

Or, maybe they wouldn't, lots of areas already seem to produce wines that lots of people like for very reasonable prices.

Wine, at least to me and more with some grapes then others, tastes much better if stored for a few years in barrels. This is expensive and drives up the price a bit. But it is not the only thing that fine up the price so just because the price is higher doesn't mean it will be better.

OP didn't say there's no difference between wines or violins. Of course there is, but at some point those differences stop being noticeable to most and eventually to everyone. Research shows that at some point the story you are being told or tell yourself makes more of a difference than the product.

And while I am not a wine aficionado, I say this as someone who spends substantial amounts of money on up-market chocolates, port etc. which are not exceptions to this either.

Or event a decent 20-30 euros bottle of St Joseph or a Côte-Rotie. No need to go into three figues.

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