Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better? | Hacker News Reader

Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better?

freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com

19 pointsc0riander27 comments

I usually find the best wines run between $7-$14.

In fact my current favorite wine runs about $8-9. http://www.penfolds.com.au/brand_penfolds/wines/koonunga-hil...

And I've found this gem for under $12. http://wine90.blogspot.com/2007/12/zaccagnini-montepulciano-...

I remember reading an article back in the late 80's or early 90's about wine chemistry. I think it was in Scientific American or Discover. Basically, the conclusion they came to was that the difference between a good wine and a mediocre one had to do with the esterification that occurred during aging and the amount of vanillin leeched from the wood barrel. They indicated that you could probably take an inexpensive wine and add a little bit of vanilla extract to it and it would taste like a better quality wine. (Wine producers are prohibited from doing this sort of thing themselves, but you can do it at home.) Of course, this isn't going to make a bottle of mad dog into a palatable table wine, but it could improve an inexpensive table wine.

And, like many things, it is still usually a matter of paying 500% for a 10% increase in quality.

Like others, I was pretty confused until I reached the part where they said to buy the $20 bottle instead of the $50 bottle. I think what they're really tracking here is that high end wines are (usually) over priced.

I'm not an expert at all, but I also think certain varieties tend to be much more represented in the high end offerings. Cabernets is the one that comes to mind off the top of my head. I personally won't buy a cab at any price, and I think that dislike is often shared by my generation and those younger to me, but older generations tend to be much more prone to buying them. I wonder if age is a factor (and hence buying power) in which wines people will tend to rank highly.

Who doesn't like cabs? What do you drink with a nice steak?

usually a shiraz/syrah or a malbec

You'll grow into them, and they don't have to be expensive.

There's a correlation, but it's a weak one. Bad wines are almost always very cheap, but the range between decent and great is too subjective to expect a strong correlation.

And note that's the range between "decent" and "cheap" within a specific bracket of varietal and region. Anyone who drinks wine regularly can pick out a high-end Burgundy Pinot from a collection of mid-range California reds.

And here the analysis starts to break down, because if you're looking for the characteristics of a great Burgundy, you probably can't source them from California for $20 a bottle; you can get "cheap" French imports in that price range, but the price gap between "acceptable" and "good" is wider. In short: you're not going to get what you don't pay for.

(I'm using Burgundy as an example only because a restaurant blew my mind with one a couple years ago; someone more wine-literate can substitute better examples --- for instance, the same "much larger gap in price between decent and good" may exist for California Bordeaux-style "Meritage" wines).

And should this surprise anyone? Does anyone here think there's low price/quality correlation in beer?

> And should this surprise anyone? Does anyone here think there's low price/quality correlation in beer?

Perhaps...there's some superb regular day drinkers that run under $2/bottle...and some of the more expensive specialty beers can cost upwards of $8/pint and taste like sewage.

(of course the really cheap beer is pretty universally bad)

Nobody here is going to claim that you can't tell a barrel-aged Belgian-style ale from a bottle of Newcastle.

There's lot of very drinkable wine at a $20 price point, but a $20 bottle is unlikely to surprise you with its complexity.

>but a $20 bottle is unlikely to surprise you with its complexity

Disagree. I've had 20 dollar wine that I feel is more complex and much better than 60 dollar bottles. Now, there may be better 60 dollar bottles but that doesn't mean the best 20 dollar isn't better than the worst 100 dollar bottle.

There is clearly a lot of overpriced wine. That's not as entertaining a conclusion as the one this post is trying to advance.

Just so long as none of you americans try and tell us that Bud is beer, not "beer flavoured substitute"

some of the more expensive specialty beers can cost upwards of $8/pint and taste like sewage

Ah, but it requires special effort to produce a drinkable sort of sewage-tasting-beer and a particular period of training to learn to enjoy the unique sewage taste... of Orval, Flemish Sour Ale or lambic "natural" beer. And don't even mention the engine-oil taste of the great imperial stouts...

Well, at least my training myself to like $8 beer was less costly than someone else training themselves to like $50 wine...

> engine-oil taste of the great imperial stouts

That's precisely the taste I'm looking for in a good stout...that or old burned steak and rye bread.

> Anyone who drinks wine regularly can pick out a high-end Burgundy Pinot from a collection of mid-range California reds.

Well, I drink wine quite regularly and I wouldn't be so confident, but I have very little experience with high end Burgundy. Put some Oregon pinots in front of me though and I can make some reasonable guesses.

Still, I had one from a small producer Thanksgiving weekend that tasted nothing like a typical Oregon pinot, and in fact reminded me of a Burgundy I had a couple years back.

You'd know even without knowing varietals. I can tell merlot from cabernet, but I'm mostly wine-illiterate; but the glass of pinot we got with our wine pairings at Alinea was unlike any wine I've ever had in my life; I recognized instantly that it was something special.

And that's the only point I'm making: there are special wines out there, and many of them are not cheap, and if you want their particular kind of special, you're going to have to pay.

The grandparent commenter made this point more clearly than I have. You can get crappy expensive wine, but for the most part, you won't get what you don't pay for.

Actually the paper linked to the article found negative correlation... "on average, individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine. In fact, they enjoy more expensive wines slightly less." (http://www.wine-economics.org/workingpapers/AAWE_WP16.pdf)

I love three buck chuck.

http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/02/24/fine-wine/

That's really surprising that the experiment subjects could not tell that the white wine dyed red was not really red wine. I can't stand white wine and I like reds quite a bit, to me they taste very different.

My favorite wines these days:

- 2007 Xiloca Garnacha (~$15) http://www.winechateau.com/vsku1564105_MURET-XILOCA-GARNACHA...

- 2007 Lucky Star Zinfandel (~$18, can't find a good source online)

I had a difficult time swallowing this article. Then I realized that, because my wine budget caps at $20/bottle, I am living in a very different world.

Hopefully nobody will try to tell me a $5 bottle tastes worse than a $20 bottle purely because of the price- otherwise, my taste buds must be seriously screwed up.

Heck I buy Franzia in a 5 liter box for $12. Tastes fine to me.

Yes.

Price is a function of supply and demand, not of quality.

Agree, but the relative pricing of various substitutable goods is a function of the things which are interpreted by the consumer as "quality". W.r.t. this article, we care about this relative ranking.

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