Hacker News Reader

Comment by nkozyra | Hacker News Reader

It looks a bit like Pinot Noir was already on a pretty clear upswing, could this not just be a correlation with trends in wine in general - dryer, less sweet/bodied reds?

It would be interesting to see a comparison to whites - are Chardonnays and Pinot Gris also on an upward trend?

View on HN

It's more plausible to me that the movie was a product of its times rather than the cause of the trend. Maybe there was more interest in wine during that time, and more discussion about the different types. It would explain why a movie centered around wine was developed and became a box office success.

Sideways is about wine roughly as much as Fight Club is about grown men fighting each other in a club.

The book Sideways by Rex Pickett was released in 2004, and obviously written before that.

Presumably the rant against Merlot is in the book, so perhaps it is less likely to just be a product of the times.

Pretty much any red wine you’d be drinking is 100% dry—there’s no residual sugar left in the bottle after fermentation. If by “sweet” you mean “fruity” the Cab v. Pinot comparison kind of rules that out, since American Merlot sits about halfway between Pinot and Cab in terms of being fruit-forward, as well as with any other descriptors that might classify as “body”, such as alcohol and tannin.

That's not true. A lot of low-end (by which I mean "inexpensive", not "low quality") and some mid-range cabs and Zinfandels are made with a little bit of residual sugar. JAM and Barefoot cabernet are two examples.

I did say “pretty much any red wine you’d be drinking,” which rules out Barefoot (hopefully).

I used to run a wine tasting group. We once did a blind tasting of cabs which included a silver oak on the high end. All twelve of us picked barefoot as our first or second choice and all twelve ranked the silver oak dead last. Granted this was a long time ago but I still like a glass of bf now and then.

Rombauer also makes their reds with a little bit of sugar and I think they are excellent.

I’ll agree with you that Silver Oak rates dead last. But “cheap” wines with residual sugar often outperform other wines in taste tests because the sugar throws the test. It’s hard to compete against the brain’s response to glucose!

Sure, but so what? If it tastes good, what difference does it make why it tastes good?

Most popular wine in the U.S. is barefoot, followed by sutter home.

most popular beer is probably budlight or similar. doesn't make it good

Here's a master of wine blind tasting many inexpensive wines. He seemed to think Barefoot Cabernet Sauvignon was fine. Hated yellow tail though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK_hx5A54EU&t=5m18s

> Hated yellow tail though.

Not enough sugar ;-)

Well I knew I'd be lobbing a softball attempting to describe wine in any way on a forum full of people spending weekends in Napa, so ...

OK, let's generalize my comment to "common attributes" of wines like Pinot Noir.

There's plenty of reds with sugar in them. Your typical Italian will have something around 4–7 g per liter in it. First four Italian reds I checked on Alko's (Finnish booze monopoly) website, priced 14–37 €: 2, 12, 11, 3 g/l.

There is still going to be residual sugar. You are going to start killing your yeast from the alcohol concentration in the wine before you run out of sugar. Some red wine is extremely sweet almost like juice.

There are yeasts that can survive in ~20% alcohol solutions. Most red wines are in the 10-15% range, while there might be some residual sugar, the wine is considered “dry” and there won’t be much or any perceived sweetness.

Sweet reds do exist, but almost all of them are fortified to stop fermentation early and leave sugar in the bottle, or just cheap wines with sugar added to appeal to simpler palates.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com