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Comment by fiddlerwoaroof | Hacker News Reader

What I’ve found is that the difference between an $30 bottle of wine and a $8 bottle isn’t necessarily quality, it’s consistency: buying the same $8 bottle of wine 10 times can result in five great bottles and five so-so bottles, with a $30+ bottle, it’s more like 1% of the time you get a bad bottle. So, when I’m giving a present or planning a party, I tend to gravitate to the more expensive bottles because it makes the outcome more certain.

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Buying into the mid-range is fine. It's what I do with beer a tequila. Buying the $200 bottles is where I question the logic. Even the expert tasters struggle to differentiate between a good $20-30 bottle and a $400 bottle in double blind tests.

I don't drink Sanka or Coors, I just use good coffee beans and drink good local beer. I don't spend $200 on exotic coffee beans feral cats have shit out.

The only reason I put the $6 in parens for wine is because I don't drink wine and don't really know where the price point is for a solid mid-range wine is.

I don't drink coffee, and probably never will, but I remember listening to a podcast once where two coffee drinkers who derided the whole "eat coffee beans shit out by a civet" idea tried it and said it was the best coffee they had ever had. YMMV

Being an ordinary human, I will never know how trolls trolling trolls had a hand in bringing us this tale of Kopi Luwak.

* you

* the two Kopi Luwak drinkers

* the merchant who sold them the Kopi Luwak

* the modern day manufacturers and wholesalers of Kopi Luwak

* the genius who came up with Kopi Luwak

* the civet

How many are civet shit true believers? How many are trolls — some, none, all?

There is also a lot of unethical/ inhumane sourcing on civet coffee at this point.

With wine, lots of people claim to be able to taste the difference between an expensive wine and a cheap one, but as soon as you did a double-blind test, they couldn't tell them apart.

I would be extremely curious to see if the civet coffee was still there if there was double-blind taste test.

And sure enough, someone has done it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDXWgVr_z30

The civet coffee doesn't even come in second place out of 5. Obviously not scientific.

The explanation they provided(or perhaps this was for another kind of digested coffee bean from a kind of monkey??) was that it eliminated the bitterness that comes with drinking coffee.

buying the same $8 bottle of wine 10 times can result in five great bottles and five so-so bottles, with a $30+ bottle, it’s more like 1% of the time you get a bad bottle.

I don't know, in my experience it could equally go the other way. The $8 bottle is mass produced in huge processing plants run by engineers and where everything is monitored, blended and tweaked to taste exactly the same over 100k bottle runs. The $30 bottle could be one of perhaps 2000 bottles made by a farmer in his shed using natural fermentation and biodynamic processes and quality control consists of tasting a few bottles to see if they taste OK.

The $8 bottle will have a taste that has been designed by a panel of experts to match current wine drinking trends. The $30 bottle will be a quirky representation of that farmers harvest, conditions, winemaking quirks and whatever random fluctuations happened to take place during that particular vinification process.

This seems like a flawed approach. These days, $8 bottles are a mass-produced affairs, generally full of additives for body, color, 'legs', and other attributes. They're very consistent affairs, as consistent as Bic pens or Cheetos. They are not charmingly rustic bottles from small struggling vintners.

(Not sure where you live, but in major US cities $8 will get you only the most mass-market stuff - Frontera, Yellow Tail, etc.)

> generally full of additives for body, color, 'legs', and other attributes

Is this true? Here in New Zealand a NZ$10 (US$7) bottle will be just wine unless it is sparkling. The difference between cheap and expensive is that cheap wine is usually a blend of different wines to achieve some specific flavour profile which theoretically means a more generic flavour since it will average out the specific regional and micro-regional flavours.

Here in New Zealand a NZ$10 (US$7) bottle will be just wine unless it is sparkling.

Virtually no wine is 'just wine', especially at the lower price points. All winemakers add at least some additives and preservatives to help with the vinification process and to stabilize the wine. There are probably 30+ chemicals approved adding to wine and I can promise you that a NZ$10 of wine has several of them.

What we think of as "just wine" isn't "natural wine". Yes, all wine has additives - but it's not artificial flaviourings etc.

This just isn’t true: I’m in SoCal, and you can get a very good bottle of wine at Trader Joe’s for $8 (TJ store label), but there’s no guarantee that buying another bottle with the same label tastes as good.

But that is probably because "TJ store label" isn't a wine maker. They probably just buy whatever wine they can get for cheap and put their name on it. What you are experience isn't inconsistencies in the wine making process, but inconsistencies in TJ's wine procurement process.

So you buy the $8 wine and the $30 wine. Since it's almost certain all the wine from the same batch is going to be similar quality. If you get a good $8 bottle you go back the next day and buy a couple cases of the good/ cheap stuff. If the cheap stuff is not-so-good, drink the $30 wine and use the cheap stuff to cook with.

This way you are guaranteed good wine.

I've been drinking wine for a while, in the range from $4-$100 and even though I wanted to say that the expensive stuff was better, I cannot tell the difference at all. It all tastes like wine. Every now and then my wife will say that a bottle is "bad" and "vinegar-like" but I still can't tell. I just don't get it. The only thing I can tell is whether a wine is sweet or not - but that only has to do with fermentation not necessarily quality.

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