Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

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> At the release of Sideways, everyone and their brother knew the major wine varieties, and had opinions.

I think it's probably more accurate to say that everyone felt they were supposed to be familiar with the major wine varieties so all had picked up the terms and desperately clung to a few half-earned opinions because they didn't want to appear unsophisticated. But I think most people didn't actually have particularly strongly held or individually acquired wine preferences. (It's well known that even professionals can often not correctly identify what variety or even what color wine they're drinking.)

This is a social situation that's ripe for a radical opinion swing. Because everyone is trying to look like they know what everyone else knows but there's little "ground truth" (i.e. actual personal opinions) slowing down the change. So when a movie like Sideways comes out with a character who clearly cares deeply about wine and knows a lot and expresses a strong opinion. Well, I guess merlot's not cool anymore.

I agree with you to a point. Infrequent wine drinkers who want a casual option generally prefer a lighter, sweeter or more fruity wine. These people truly didn't like cabernet (too bitter for many), but they wanted to be "with it" and merlot was the hotness, so it became a go to. As the article I linked above mentioned, for these people pinot noir was always a better choice, but the hotness of merlot (at the time pinot was oft considered a dessert wine) made it socially less of a norm. Sideways, and people just generally discovering that there were other options, made it an easier social choice for many, and pinot noir was on fire.

As an aside, while I absolutely agree that most wine snobbiness is absolute horseshit (there is loads of it throughout the discussion in various other threads), that study on wine "experts" who couldn't tell the difference between red and wine is just terrible nonsense. It was some students who were recruited and smelled wines, given the visual cues of color.

> that study on wine "experts" who couldn't tell the difference between red and wine is just terrible nonsense. It was some students who were recruited and smelled wines, given the visual cues of color.

It's even less than that. The study showed that if people are primed to think they're drinking red wine, their responses reflect that. If the experiments wanted a controlled study on whether the subjects could tell red and white wine apart, they could have blindfolded them or told them the wines had all been dyed the same colour, and the students would have discriminated between them very accurately.

Anyway, like you I tend to discount the opinion of anyone who misinterprets this study's results in the way that the article does.

People should embrace being unsophisticated. I've gotten really good results by saying something like "Woah, I've never had orange wine before, I'm looking for something kinda dry."

> It's well known that even professionals can often not correctly identify what variety or even what color wine they're drinking.

This is demonstrably false, btw. Either those professionals you are referring to are completely untrained (just being in the wine business doesn’t mean you are an experienced taster) or it’s just complete bullshit.

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