Is wine fake?
asteriskmag.com
asteriskmag.com
He was of the opinion that generally speaking the quality of a typical wine increases monotonically with price up until around the $40 range with the big steps around the $5, $10, and $20 price points. But above $50 or so, you're no longer paying for higher quality, per se. It's more that you are paying for a unique flavor profile and reliability. But unless you're seeking out that particular flavor profile, you can get a bottle that is just as good for $30-40 (and occasionally even cheaper). And above a few hundred dollars it's all just fads, speculation, and hype. (He liked to say that the people who buy those wines have "more money than sense.") They're good wines, but you can get a bottle that is just as good for a fraction of the price.
I've always enjoyed "more dollars than cents" for the dual meaning if you know the phrase is supposed to be "sense".
I cannot wait for the current trend of brettanomyces contaminated "natural" wines to die.
I too am not a fan of natural wines largely because of the additional flavours, but normal sulphite-laden wine can come with a dose of bret and it's different - I particularly enjoy it in some Cote Rotie producers, where it comes out as a hint of smokey bacon.
I would agree that brett can be a contaminant in wine, if that is not what you are going for, but much like how brett has long been the backbone of some trappist and all lambic Belgian beers, there is a case to be made for it in wine - even in fine wines.
If the popularity of brett in beers is anything to go by, you're going to be disappointed. And I hope you are - as much as I love a purely sach ferment, there's lots to love about other yeast and bacteria taking part in the fermentation process, too.
See: beauty products, wine, art
There are people who can discern quality reliably... but those people are an extremely small portion of the total market.
Consequently, things that are not quality (chiefly, marketing and price) start to become dominant features.
I'm always amused when I hear this, because I live in Ontario. Our alcohol laws are set up to heavily favour local wines.
Of course Ontario reds are consistently both more expensive and worse than foreign wines.
Higher price doesn't mean higher quality here.
If you buy any California wine, for instance, it was picked by a migrant worker. Times haven't changed much since Grapes of Wrath, other than it's typically Latino workers rather than Dust Bowl refugees.
(I grow about a 1/2 acre of grapes here in Ontario)
Part of the reason is just the retail environment, which is a whole cluster of a topic here, but I won't get into that...
Because of... history and culture, Ontario "VQA" wine regulations demand that growers grow almost exclusively various European vinifera varieties (the famous cab sauv, cab franc, pinot noir, etc.) . There's a list of permitted grape varieties, and most new generation hybrids (like e.g. the ones bred by Bruce Reisch's breeding program at Cornell just a couple hours from the Ontario border, or from Minnesota) are not on it, while a whole laundry list of pure vitis vinifera varietals that can barely grow here are.
If you're not growing one of the permitted varieties, you can't even put the word "Ontario" on your wine label. Nor a bunch of other protected words like "Niagara escarpment" or "Lake Ontario" or whatever.
These European varieties are not well adapted to the northeastern/midwestern/great-lakes region here. They are magnets for disease, and wimps in the cold. They are difficult to grow, and about 1/5 winters, they are frozen to the ground to the point where they often need replanting.
So costs to grow are very high. There's spraying and cold protection costs, but also the extra labour involved in managing cold damage, etc. And there's per-tonne price recommendations per grape varieties, and the permitted vitis vinifera varieties naturally cost more to purchase from growers than cheaper hybrids ; but cheaper hybrids of any quality would struggle to get a VQA label, and in any case the LCBO (our monopoly provincial liquor retailer) won't stock them apart from a few mediocre Baco Noirs.
On top of that the regulatory environment prevents producers who have under 5 acres planted from selling wine. But most townships go further and have even stricter regulations on top (10-20 acres, only allowed to grow in X part of the region, etc.)
These regulations are framed as if they're about protecting consumers, but they're really about protecting entrenched winery industry interests here, as well as cultivating a certain "kind" of wine industry which differs markedly from what you will find immediately across the border in the Finger Lakes in New York. And it's also a reaction to the kind of (beyond crappy) wine industry that existed here until the 70s. It's rules written by the baby boomer victors of a battle to make better quality wines here in the 70s and 80s.
The wine industry here is definitely more "snobby" than in NY and other northeastern areas, and it's mostly appealing to a certain conservative baby boomer demographic. The owners are mostly retired lawyers etc. running the wineries. They seem to think/wish they live in Bordeaux or Tuscany and have tacky faux-chateauxs and it's a whole lifestyle thing ... for you to daytrip from Toronto to bask in.
Like much of Canadian "high" culture, it's an inauthentic imitation of European culture, because of our colonial inferiority complex. If we made it, it can't be good, unless it's a complete imitation.
FWIW, there are very excellent vinifera wines made here. In a hot year, earthy delicious Cabernets are entirely possible. And in almost every year, an absolutely fantastic Riesling is possible. My family has roots in the Rhineland, and I've tasted hundreds of Rieslings from both there and here, and Ontario is right up there. And a quality (but $$) Ontario Cab from a good year is more like a Bordeaux than a typical new world Cab; earthy and more low key, not a fruit bomb. More to my tastes.
Anyways, yes, there's protectionism to some degree, but in reality Ontario wine is expensive because it's just really expensive to grow that kind of wine here.
In general you find this kind of thing a lot in Canada. Regulatory capture is all over the place here. Domestic wine is expensive here for the same reasons data plans are. Canadians tolerate monopolistic bullshit way more than they should.
My NY family puts as much pride in the local apples and the summer sweet corn as the regional wine.
The Niagara area in Ontario is a few growing degrees warmer than the Finger Lakes (despite being further north) and Lake Ontario provides more of a protective lake effect on temperatures than the Finger Lakes themselves.
On the other hand, you get better snow cover for insulation in the winters.
In other respects, similar areas.
The battle about vinifera and its place here in Ontario is really kind of the story of Konstantin Frank vs Phillip Wagner in the Finger Lakes. Except here in Ontario, Frank "won" while in the Finger Lakes there was a compromise drawn. Bruce Reisch gets to make excellent new grapes and the local wineries grow them.
Up here, the products of Helen Fischer's grape breeding program doesn't get to contribute to the local winery industry. It's strictly all about -- what vinifera varieties sell well? Grow that and market the crap out of it.
Ontario wineries can get approval to open retail stores, but the product they sell can be at most a 50% foreign blend.
So you always have more retail locations and a wider selection with Ontario wines.
You do occasionally get cheap wines that hit above their weight, but that's unusual.
More common, you get wineries hitting below their weight for a number of reason the winemakers aren't very good, there are issues with vinyard, it's a bad harvest, or the winemaker just wants bigger profits and is trying to convince people their wine is better than it is.
As an example of vinyard issues, I know a man whose vinyard produces very poor wine because his soil is rich in serpentine, which makes the wine smell funny. Even doing everything "right" his wine is not going to taste as a good as that made identically by someone with better soil.
This does not mean that wines at that price point must be good. I know someone who made the mistake of buying in a vinyard that was extremely rich in serpentine
Alcohol here is as expensive as in Hawaii (maybe a bit more), OTOH LCBO employs people and there's something to say about more expensive alcohol may prevent alcoholism/accidents etc.
With that said... I've had some terrible bottles of $100+ wine from well regarded wineries.
It's not just seeking out a particular flavor profile. If you want to experience something novel for your mouth and you've been drinking only $20 bottles for years, you will never encounter anything new. But if you try $100 bottles, you're much more likely to accidentally discover something new (whether you like it or not is subjective)
Continuously searching for new experiences is an expensive hobby.
You would get the same effect with $5 bottles, wouldn't you?
Why not describe your experience with the good stuff. We lack decent language to describe taste but we have loads of language for experience and feelings.
Lots of people here are pontificating (me too) about wine but so often the discussion ends up with bottle price and not what is actually important.
Once you get to $50 and above, they are trying to show you something unique, perhaps an expression or a particular flavor they like or an expression of the local terroir.
Maybe 50 years ago you couldn't get a cheap good wine without doing it one of five ways but modern logistics allow winemakers to make good wine cheaply with a wide variety of different products and twists.
The problem is that it’s just highly inconsistent for a variety of reasons, including the fact that even if you trust the label you have no idea if that 20 year old bottle was left in the sun for awhile, and so on. Plus there’s personal taste, etc.
So you can spend a lot and get something underwhelming. In short, it’s complicated.
With that said, having gone for a full day tasting at Mouton Rothschild, and a couple other similar spots like Caymus, Y’quem, etc, I can say with complete confidence that there’s a level of quality thats simply not going to be reached with $50 bottles.
Similar to how a pack of cigarettes costs $15 in NYC and $6 in Raleigh, NC.
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_price_rankings...
Even in Raleigh, there are taxes on tobacco.
Eventually, more often than not the temperature control and matching wine with what you eat matters more than anything.
For wines in a top US region, you wind up paying a ton of money for the mortgage on the land, too.
And I could buy British gin in Hong Kong cheaper than in UK
Eg £4 https://www.aldi.co.uk/kooliburra-australian-chardonnay/p/04...
https://www.decanter.com/learn/tax-wine-much-pay-uk-ask-deca...
You can find proper wine at 4-5€ at the producer, 3.5€ is probably the strict absolute minimum where you can find honest wine direct from producer. Any thing below is just fermented garbage, the grappes that otherwise would spoil the wine, it just happen to have sugar to be fermented, I don't know how the hell how they are pre-processed, just stay away from it.
"The natural advantages which one country has over another, in producing particular commodities, are sometimes so great, that it is acknowledged by all the world to be in vain to struggle with them. By means of glasses, hot-beds, and hot-walls, very good grapes can be raised in Scotland, and very good wine, too, can be made of them, at about thirty times the expense for which at least equally good can be brought from foreign countries."
-- Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
(Making good recommendations may well be more profitable than making bad recommendations, because if they make bad recommendations you'll stop coming back. But they absolutely are trying to sell you something).
Works out to about $20 a bottle in California.
If what you’re saying is true, then an acre in the Napa valley is more than twice as expensive as its counterpart in the Champagne region. Which is weird, I’d expect the Champagne acre to still make you a lot more money
Identifying a specific wine is easy, even non experts can learn to do it.
What experts have shown to fail is telling good wines from bad wines, cheapo wines from expensive wines, and so on, in blind tests.
There they are not asked to identify a label and vintage they already known and are familiar with (because they drank it before), but to detect quality.
No, they are asked to detect price.
(...) some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific. The first experiment took place in 2005. The last was in Sacramento earlier this month. Hodgson's findings have stunned the wine industry. Over the years he has shown again and again that even trained, professional palates are terrible at judging wine. "The results are disturbing," says Hodgson from the Fieldbrook Winery in Humboldt County, described by its owner as a rural paradise. "Only about 10% of judges are consistent and those judges who were consistent one year were ordinary the next year.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-econ...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-econ...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-econ...
Heck, they can't even distinguish wine with artificial coloring from actual red wine:
How does this jive with the studies showing that, if anything, regular people have a slight preference for cheaper wines?
Typically, if you go down the path of wine education, you first learn a definition of what makes a wine good. WSET [0] e.g. mentions balance, complexity, faults, finish etc as part of what makes a wine "good" (by their definition). If you want to be certified by WSET (Level 3), you have to pass a tasting exam, where you have to examine wines according to their scheme.
Regular people aren't trained in wine or sensory evaluation, thus "quality" means less to them and cheaper wines are often easier to drink, or people are more familiar with them so they like them more (see "mere-exposure effect" [1]).
tl;dr: Liking a wine != the wine is "good". But mixing up those two things make no sense.
Single origin chocolate is amazing, and completely different than even the high quality mass market chocolate.
I.e., the stuff that someone would make relatively quickly, hidden out in some bathtub hidden from the authorities, with very little quality control.
When prohibition lifted, that was the taste American wine-drinkers had for wine. It was a low brow, low quality, sweet-tasting alcoholic beverage, probably with a weird after taste.
That association apparently stalled the development of high quality vineyards in California. So it's certainly within the realm of possibility that this prohibition era impact continues to exert some influence. I still see a lot of people preferring rather sweet wines, for example.
And while I can't say for sure, something tells me the people who drop an ice cube into their red wine fit into all this somehow. :)
I don't know if this is still the custom; but when I was a kid in France, families would serve wine to their children. They'd serve it half-and-half with water. So children would presumably grow up with an appreciation of watered wine.
I'm "regular people". I drink a lot of wine, nearly always a £5.00 Australian red. I've very rarely drunk an expensive wine that impressed me. Someone served me some amazing Burgundy, back in the late 80s...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader
A retail shop will put TVs on sale for 50% off but only keep 5 in stock. They advertise it everywhere, 100 people show up looking for cheap TVs, find it's out-of-stock and buy one of the expensive ones that are only 5-10% off.
A loss leader might be Costco hot dogs or cheap razor handle for which replacement cartridges are the true profit centre
[0]: https://portal.ct.gov/DCP/Common-Elements/Consumer-Facts-and... https://consumered.georgia.gov/ask-ed/2015-09-08/do-stores-h... http://www.ossh.com/firearms/caag.state.ca.us/consumers/gene...
20 years ago, Computers were perennially loss leaders at a best buy I worked at. We sold you $2000 computer at a small loss, hoping you'd buy printer paper and cartridges and cables and warsanty.printers are still notorious loss leaders of course.
A diner choosing a wine will most likely eschew the lowest price option, and obviously the highest price option will be out of most people’s reach, but customers will “spring” for the mid priced option.
I guess what I'm asking is if there's some special storage requirements which can't be met at home?
But yes, with care a hobbyist can do better than how some retail wine is kept.
Edit: The main points are 1) cool (~55F/13C), 2) dark, 3) not too dry (70% humidity is usually recommended. This is to protect the cork), and 4) store on its side, also to protect the cork from drying out. Five years is a long time.
Most retail wines are made to drink now though. If it's on the shelf it's ready.
Unfortunately, simply digging a hole in your back yard only gets it to the average temperature of your area which may be quite different to that hypothetical wine cellar in France.
In the end keeping even a fairly large room at whatever temperature and humidity level you desire isn’t that difficult, assuming you have the space and budget.
The whole idea of "sealing" wine in a bottle is to keep it and not actually change it. It's a preservation method. However, the bottle is not really completely sealed and the small air gap at the top is not empty either. The cork might allow a tiny amount of air transfer too. The remains of the wine creation process might also leave some reactive components.
When you store wine it seems that a cellar type environment with its stale and earthy air helps - hmmm I wonder why!
Challenge your tastes or whatevs. For example you might find that a really cheap bottle of white chilled to about 5C and fizzed in a Soda Stream makes quite a decent Champagne analogue.
A regular household fridge costs something like $100/year to run. My fridge has 20 cubic feet of volume, which is something like 500 liters. This suggests we can fit at least 100 bottles into it. This gives us $1/year as upper bound for storage costs per bottle. This is upper bound, because air conditioning costs go down with volume, due to square-cube law.
Point is, if the price premium was driven mostly by storage costs, it would be significantly lower than it actually is.
Also factor in temperature and humidity controlled storage (a kitchen fridge will not do), insurance against disasters, backup power generation, and so on. If you think aged wines are overpriced, it is easy to cut out the middleman and age it yourself — so my guess is that the market is reasonably efficient.
This is right, I forgot about this: at 5% interest rates, 5 years of storage is actually 25% of the original price, which is probably substantial factor.
> Also factor in temperature and humidity controlled storage (a kitchen fridge will not do),
My kitchen fridge example was only meant to provide an estimate for the cost. Controlling humidity upwards is not expensive at all, it’s even cheaper in fact than controlling temperature.
> insurance against disasters, backup power generation, and so on.
These are extremely cheap at scale. You don’t really need backup power generation, the wine won’t spoil from few hours or even days of inappropriate temperature.
> If you think aged wines are overpriced, it is easy to cut out the middleman and age it yourself — so my guess is that the market is reasonably efficient.
My point was rather that the mere cost of storage is not the main part of the premium. Capital cost is probably significantly higher, but what is probably even higher still is speculation premium: not all wine vintages are appreciating equally, and if you just buy random wines, they will likely won’t appreciate all equally over time.
There are some fridge-like "wine cellar" contraptions that work well (keep optimal air quality / temperature).
Or a basement does the trick if the humidity is right (needs to be high but not too high)
I remember when I was a kid, my parents had a room in the basement for storing wine that was entirely airtight, with an AC-like device that controlled the air. That’s probably extremely overkill if you aren’t a wine buff (& storing huge quantities of it) though
for industrial climate control on wines? if you remove the improved drinkability that comes with age, and the scarcity and desireability of well-known chateaux it absolutely does.
There are companies that specialise in storing wine portfolios and you'd be amazed at how much they charge, wine in bottles takes up a lot of room and is really heavy.
One of the fun things is that you don't really know exactly the optimum amount of time to cellar a new vintage. So there are online forums where people will buy a case and open one bottle a year and report their results on how the quality changes over time.
This is a hidden benefit of belonging to a wine club. Often you can talk to the wine maker and/or they are opening enough bottles regularly that they can give you a sense of when it's time to drink. After you've been through a few years of the syrah or the cab sav, you get a sense for yourself too because you start to get the pulse of what the winemaker is making.
This is actually the first year in a long time that I have a batch aging -- using wild grapes growing on my property. The first wine I ever made (from a kit), unbeknownst to me, needed to be aged to taste good. Once I learned that, I did the same test: every few months I'd open a bottle and taste it. After a year, most of the "tarry" flavors were gone, after 3 it was getting good. At five I really liked it. Unfortunately, no bottles survived to the 10-year mark, but I did learn to make wines that matured a lot faster!
For most people you really don't need to go above $20 for a wine that's world class in terms of quality. At the higher price points most of what you're buying into is the story and exclusivity. There are things you can taste but as you say, it's arguable if these are actually virtues beyond those two features, and it's doubtful if it outweighs the cost unless you have a lot of disposable income.
I'm sure there are people that can identify different tastes. I question whether or not those tastes are a sign of objective quality, or just something they've been conditioned to think of as good.
An interesting test would be of people who have never tasted wine before, and have no sense of what a "good wine" is supposed to taste like. But in my experience, most people who aren't used to alcohol will simply find all wine distasteful.
You can actually see this in action when you see different cultures interact. For instance, the baijiu has a similar position in Chinese society as wine does in the West. There's an enormous price range, and a complex range of flavors and aromas. But almost every Westerner I've met found the taste abhorrent when they first tried it (though a small few eventually were able to develop a taste for it).
So though people in different cultures can acclimate themselves to what is currently considered to be good in their culture, I don't think that's the same thing as a certain taste being objectively good.
So yes I am pretty sure that some wine is objectively better than sulfuric acid but the rest is just a matter of individual taste. It does not matter that the tester can distinguish between 2 buttles of the same wine and tell the year it's been produced.
The thing about champagne is it produced using the traditional method [1]. As long as other sparkling wines are also made using the same method, they can be quite good. My favorite non-champagne sparkling wines are Crémants[2]. Much cheaper than champagne, but as good or better depending on your personal tastes
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_method [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkling_wine#Cr.C3.A9mant
(Interestingly enough though, two of my buddies also never had a taste for them, until in their late 20s they literally decided to "get into it". Boggles my mind if you're not caffeine addicted in your impressionable teens, why you'd actively TRY to develop the taste in your adulthood... But they did, With entirely predictable results :)
My reasoning was: other people like these, I think they taste gross, but I'm always telling people they can learn to like things, and if I did learn to like them, I'd expand my range of possible pleasures.
I did end up liking them. Not love them, but enough to appreciate them.
I really doubt that there is anything in the world that is enjoyed by a large group of people that I couldn't eventually get myself to like. And then: how wonderful! More things you like.
In the end, culture and personal tastes. There is a lot to be said for fitting in.
Same goes with beer or wine, quality goes up with price but in the end, it's all a matter of personal preference.
Considered what you wrote, your palate is looking for sugary stuff, and this wouldn't work for coffee, chocolate, beer or wine.
Sugar kills everything.
Nevertheless, the effect of sugar is more complex. For example, I do not like cocoa alone or in too high concentration, as too bitter. Sugar is pleasant, but when alone I do not care about it, I prefer most food with no sugar at all.
On the other hand, I find addictive the combinations of sugar with certain flavors, e.g. sugar + cocoa or sugar + vanilla. So, at least for me, the combination of sugar and cocoa has a very different effect than each component alone.
If you take the drink outside of its reference culture and try to measure how “good” different examples are, you’re going to get nonsense out.
Food and drink don’t exist in a vacuum. To the extent that you live and participate in the culture of wine (I do not), you may find value in spending for a “better” product. On the other hand, I will happily pay a premium for beers with tasting notes like “barnyard” and “wet horse blanket” or rums tasting of “petrol” and “rotten bananas.”
Yup.
"De gustibus non est disputandum"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_gustibus_non_est_disputan...
But it's fun to dispute about, anyway :)
I think my professor meant "objective" in the sense that someone with a trained palate will agree with others who have a trained palate. I.e., they're not just saying, "well this tastes good to me." Experts are generally consistent between each other about what tastes good and what tastes bad.
Of course this doesn't necessarily mean that these preferences are objective in a God-given sense. And from what I could tell it does seem that different subcommunities have their own preferences. Californian wine tasters seem to prefer bigger and bolder flavors than French wine tasters, who like subtler flavors.
I mean, that’s kinda a different question right? Like it’s not “objectively good” as in “you’re objectively wrong if you don’t like it.” It’s “objectively good” as in “there are objective standards that have been agreed upon by a large group of people.”
This is certainly true for whiskeys. One of the ways to objectively tell better whiskeys from worse ones, is to learn how to detect acetone! The less that's in there, the better!
Sounds like crypto.
You can't walk into a grocery store and buy a tree-ripened banana no matter how much money you're willing to pay. This is sort of the proper way to think about high-end wines, as a vehicle that enables one to do something like this, but obviously with grapes.
A violin (1) can be played to produce two notes at once and a third note will be heard. Since around 1715 that extra, third note was noted and then thought to be an artifact of our ears or something. Recently someone got all scientific and studied the effect. It turns out all or most violins produce the third note but the oldest instruments produce a louder third note. More study needed.
There is a really dodgy analogy here but I can't help conflate a violin's "vintage" with a vin's (err ... wine's) vintage.
Sound and music is phenomenally complicated but quite well understood compared to taste although there is a lot of research and results coming up there. My point is that I don't think that the (say) £/$100 bottle of wine is quite in the same league as the mad cables, especially the digital ones that cost silly money. A £100,000 Strad is capable of making a different noise to your common or garden £10,000 violin.
For example, you note people capable of identifying a source and year for a wine because that's how we classify the stuff, along with some really awful attempts to put taste into words and of course you note the silly cable buyer equivalent. However, there are way more factors involved.
I also think the whole tasting thing needs a massive overhaul. Notes of peach and cut grass and all that bollocks is a bit unimaginative and frankly daft. I've never "drunk" grass, let alone cut grass - yes I understand that smell and taste are quite often synonymous but there is way more to it than that. I have eaten peaches but there is also a huge variety of flavours there that a wine buff overlooks - there is no such thing as a canonical "peach".
I'm not sure how it would work but perhaps we need a taste language that is not completely dependent on other tastes and smells. We might also need an analogy for volume too - mild and punchy are simply rubbish as a scale! I know that industry is churning out a vast number of clever flavours and smells but I think that the language is being left behind.
(1) https://www.newscientist.com/article/2344992-phantom-notes-p...
If you get to know winemakers, there are a lot of games that go on to doctor grapes. The chemistry and know-how are commendable. You also start to realize there are wine makers who are making wines they like, but that may not hold mass-market appeal. I had a private tasting with a guy who spent years in Napa and now does custom white-label work. I thought his stuff was absolute garbage - not at all to my tastes - but he's in demand because he knows how to do all the magic to pull out certain attributes that some wine drinkers may enjoy.
And that's the real key - drink what you like, at a price point you feel comfortable spending, and it's totally ok if you bought it because it had a cute label. The company you keep matters just as much as the quality of what's in the bottle.
Now, for the record, I take the same approach you and GP mentioned here. I happen to prefer pretty dry wines too, but I’ve gotta admit knowing this shook me a little.
This was the cause of a big scandal back in the 1980s when it was discovered that some Austrian winemakers were adding antifreeze to their wines. The wines are tested for their sugar content, but diethylene glycol has a sweet test and wouldn't be detected on standard chemical tests for sugar. Unscrupulous winemakers began adding the chemical to their wines to make them taste sweeter and boost sales.
That's not true. Adding sugar is even part of some AOP. It's used to regulate the amount alcohol in the finish product.
Northern / northerly?
Assuming this isn’t just an autocorrect issue, is there a word for this phenomenon of writing an incorrect but similar word that’s also on your mind? It happens to me with annoying frequency.
I haven't seen anyone mixing wine and vodka there, it's just not a thing.
Russia and Balkans and the austro-hungarian region preferring sweeter wines is a centuries old culture and a wine making tradition. The same goes for Georgian wines.
Vodka with wine... is that even a joke?
Fortified wine culture sounds more like Portugal to me, even though they definitely make it almost everywhere.
EDIT: typo
> The production of Soviet champagne prioritized quantity over quality. Grape growers uprooted acres of indigenous vines from Moldova to Tajikistan and replaced them with durable, high-yield varieties that catered to Stalin’s sweet tooth.
> The result was Sovetskoye Shampanskoye, a cheap, syrup-sweet sparkling wine for the ordinary Soviet worker.
https://www.singaporewinevault.com/busting-the-myths-around-...
Interesting, for most other things I can taste, nobody has to teach me to identify quality. Either it tastes better or it doesn't.
It is important to buy different bottles of the same grape to see how it varies across vintners and regions. It is also important to buy different grapes, because you may be surprised over time what vintages you settle on as your tastes develop.
https://auction.bestofpanama.org/en/lots/auction/auction-202...
More seriously coffee can be as expensive as wine, and frankly speaking, for good reason. The difference between farms, fermentation process, roasting skills for a se varietal /region produces large differences, like for wine.
I hear these things, but nobody will tell me what I should drink if I want a cheaper 2010 Mouton Rothschild.
Or a cheaper Krug, people will recommend $50 Champagnes but generally not ones that actually pursue a similar style.
Having said that, I'll also mention, the way the editors struggled for new adjectives did sometimes make me laugh:
"a vast, hearty body, notes of blue and a hint of graphite steel"
"a radiance similar to the sun at dawn, a strong body, notes of orange"
My wife and I love to cook, have discussed opening our own restaurant, have eaten at lots of very expensive "haute cuisine" restaurants and have tasted lots of wines.
Part of the "problem" is that taste is subjective and can be influenced through suggestion. So the atmosphere, the price, the meal pairing can all affect a person's appreciation of the glass.
I remember an episode of Penn & Teller's Bullshit where they had a "water sommelier" at a restaurant who would upsell customers on speciality bottles of water and they were all filled with the same tap water from the same garden hose at the back of the restaurant. The results were fascinating. Subjects swore they tasted different from one another.
The real question, in my opinion, is whether a high-priced bottle is "worth it" by as near-objective standards as possible. In other words, given two bottles of different prices, all else being equal, would the average person prefer the taste of one over the other?
That varies widely from one wine to another. My wife and I have enjoyed a good vintage but we are also perfectly content with a $15 bottle from a local vineyard here in Ontario, which is our "go to." I'm equally partial to a $15 Rothschild Merlot or Pinot Noir and I wonder if the truly exceptional wines that I've tasted at restaurants were more about the environment, the food pairing, the company and the occasion than they were about the flavour in isolation.
Hot dogs are a decent example, they're all now "meat" and many are "pure beef" when they used to be the disastrous remains of who knows what. And even they are being destroyed by just how cheap hamburger is - the original fast food was hot dogs and that's almost entirely gone now.
Curious about this history. According to Wikipedia, fast food was common during antiquity, while the hotdog wasn't invented until the 1400s. White Castle seems to be recognized as the origin of modern day fast food and it opened as a hamburger joint.
According to research from the University of Guelph, hotdogs are comparatively uncommon in fast food because hotdogs are harder to cook consistently and have a shorter window of enjoyability which makes them less suited to fast food than hamburgers.
The corporate parent of Carl’s Jr. bought Hardee’s in 1997, but Carl’s stayed pretty much the same.
What really defines fast food is mass production and uniformity.
Interestingly, I always assumed that “fast food” meant the type of food; so a hamburger, even if not made from mass produced ingredients, would always be a “fast food”.
In context, though, the original commenter considered things like street hotdog vendors to be fast food. That is not unlike the kind of delivery you would find in antiquity, even if the actual food product differed.
> What really defines fast food is mass production and uniformity.
Technically, what really defines a term is how it is used in a certain context and how it works towards reaching a shared understanding, which was achieved with the original use of fast food found in this thread. You are right that the definition that emerged here does not align with definitions found in other contexts, but those other contexts are irrelevant to this particular context.
> It’s a weird thing - people in the USA know what you mean by fast food and somehow McDonald’s under a heat lamp counts (rarer now but still found) but burgers at the gas station under a heat lamp don’t count.
But, I think it's a bit rich to call it the origin of fast food. Modern fast food in terms of what we think of as technology and business model is a bit broader than that. And just "food you get fast" is obviously far older. The original "fast food" in that sense was getting bread from a baker.
Particularly when we just got finished talking about fast food in antiquity. I suppose that explains why nobody said such a thing.
To a person who can't tell the difference between cheap and expensive wine, expensive wine is "strictly ostentatious" by definition.
Scarcity is the number one factor that determines the price of an expensive wine. A good quality wine from a recent vintage will cost less than an equally desirable wine from an older vintage, simply because people haven't drank most of it yet.
> Scarcity is the number one factor that determines the price of an expensive wine.
just because something is rare doesn't mean it's good; a random rock on a beach is one of a kind but you couldn't sell it for a penny
> good quality wine from a recent vintage will cost less than an equally desirable wine from an older vintage, simply because people haven't drank most of it yet.
no, if it's less expensive it's because there is work involved in cellaring a wine and that adds value
That is precisely what I am saying. Rare (and because of that, expensive) doesn’t make a wine good.
> no, if it's less expensive it's because there is work involved in cellaring a wine and that adds value
Yes, for wines that are hundreds of dollars, but that doesn’t necessarily add any quality. For wines that are thousands of dollars, they’re just scarce.
That doesn't necessarily mean better, but you might be paying for scarcity in the flavor.
My point is more-so that the more general consensus of quality has asymptotic diminishing returns after around that point.
So, I think the biggest problem with all those blind wine tastings is that they equate price with quality. Because those two are, as goes for everything in life, only ever so loosely related.
But usually if you want something that's exceptional you have to spend a lot on throwing away the unexceptional parts. Not every year will be good, and even if the weather was good there's still no guarantee the wine will be amazing. Yet the costs are there. That's why there's a very hefty premium on brands that only deliver the top-top-top quality. (Obviously they sell the grapes/wine that did not make it under a different brand, but sssh.)
I don't think they can - wine is usually sold by vintage year. "Origin" is usually weaker (e.g., 50% of grapes must be from the declared origin) and my understanding is that is where you can "adjust" year-to-year.
One secret is that most nicer restaurants allow you to bring your own wine, provided you pay a "corkage" fee of usually $10-40. So if the wine is say, $30 retail + $20 corkage, you are better off than paying $90-120 for the same bottle at the restaurant.
The best wine I've ever drank cost less than $3 and was produced in a tropical (21 South), 800m altitude region of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Never assume wine is bad because it's cheap or from somewhere.
Do you remember what this was called, or specifically where? If I'm ever there I'd love to find this!
...except Franzia, which sucks.
For those among us who have recently been laid off - Bota Box Nighthawk Black is a decent/drinkable red if you're on a budget.
As to the matter of price, most of my wine tasting friends (including some with proper wine collections) are perfectly ok paying 5-10 euros for a bottle, as long as they like the wine - some of them have even made it a specialty to find good and cheap wine.
At the other end, I was once served wine without knowing what it was at a friend's place. I took a sip, then something happened in my head, and I started crying (I cry when food is really good) . I still remember that particular bottle, and the, well, infinite landscape that had suddenly opened in my mind (I know it sounds utterly ridiculous , but this is how it felt). No other wine has had the same effect on me, and it turns out the bottle was worth about 400 euros!
Please don’t make the mistake of thinking “I like to cook” means “I would like to run a restaraunt”. They’re two completely different things.
"I like making video games" would be analogous "I like to cook."
Of course "I like making video games" might not mean "I want to work for an AAA developer", but the reasons why would probably be different than those you wouldn't want to make a commercial indie title / open your own restaurant.
I think the distance between them is about the same, as the GP noted. It's not analogous, but they didn't make that claim.
I have only cooked less than 1% of the time the restaurant has been open. Also "enjoying cooking" has nothing to do with enjoying a commercial kitchen. Pretty sure literally at all.
I feel compelled to put out quality food, but I do not enjoy it at all when I'm not cooking at home.
Professional cooks have a completely different working style to skilled amateurs. They move faster and more precisely, and are able to juggle far more things at a time. It's a massive step up.
Plus the skillset involved in cooking well is orthogonal to what's needed to run a successful restaurant. Your major costs are labor, rent, and raw materials, and you need a certain personality to drive those down. Customers tend to be price-sensitive (again, apart from those high-end places) so you don't have as much power on the revenue side.
I love cooking. I'm never working in the food business.
It sounds like you're describing landlord behavior where they don't simply arrive at a target rent and happily collect it, but attempt to actively monitor revenue of businesses renting from them and then ride the line between capturing that in rent increases below the line where it's worth it to the tenant not to move and unacceptable extortion.
If so, that's both interesting and kinda terrifying. I've never considered that rental prices might be set as much by specific tenant income as market conditions, and now I'm wondering if I should never tell any prospective landlord what my real income is beyond minimum requirements.
Commercial landlords, especially of restaurants, have way more pricing power because the tenants can't just move. Their customers expect them to be there, or there's a ton of existing foot traffic - location, location, location. And usually tenants put their own money into renovating the space for their needs.
But obviously many people do set up and run restaurants.
But... quoted industry failure rates are insanely variable - from 17% to 60% in the first year, depending who you ask. The variability possibly says something interest in itself.
Clearly a restaurant is literally a food production line. It has to run smoothly and efficiently across a wide range of circumstances and load factors. And it has to handle shortages and customers who may be overly demanding, drunk/high/irrational, or actively hostile, while keeping staff morale high.
I'd guess that being able to make something nice at home seems like a good start, but isn't necessarily the most relevant qualification from a business POV.
* How do you train and employ an effective wait staff?
* How do you design a good menu that's practical to cook a lot of?
* Where do you source your ingredients from? How do you get the quantities you need (and no more)? You might need to cook dozens or hundreds of a certain dish in a day.
* You need to buy or lease a building suitable for a kitchen and dining room. The location is extremely important & will cost you a lot of money.
* Do you choose to embrace delivery apps?
* Can you handle lunch & dinner rush?
* How do you price your menu in order to remain financially solvent, given everything above? (and likely many factors I'm not taking into account)
Some of these things change depending on the nature of the food (e.g. pizza to go vs sit-down fine dining), but it comes with all the problems of a small business.
Take some decent apple juice without preservatives. Add a bit of yeast; baking yeast for bread at the supermarket will do just fine. Observe basic sanitation principles. Add some sugar, perhaps 150 g per litre of juice. Leave the concoction in a cool, dry place for a few months. A one-way seal for the CO2 release is preferable (a balloon works) but is not strictly required; leave the cap on loose. Carefully pour off the result into a new vessel. Let this settle for another month.
A very palatable drink results at about 4 - 5% alcohol by volume. People figured this out thousands of years ago. And they did not have plastic bottles, germ theory, or infinite hot water on tap. It's trivial to make an alcoholic beverage. The rest is finesse. And posturing.
> I expelled all my breath and sucked down another glass. Vinegary, yeasty, with a rusty shank of an aftertaste. I was feeling a slight buzz, but I didn’t think I could stomach another glass. It was booze all right, but two glasses was my non-incarcerated limit.
I had expected your link to be the classic Steve, Don't Eat It! Prison wine story. So here is the obligatory link to that: http://www.thesneeze.com/2005/steve-dont-eat-it-vol-8.php
We go to great lengths to keep our fruit juices from fermenting. In fact, non-fermented juice is a relatively recent invention in human history.
I do think something can be said to effort put in vs what you get however - I've enjoyed some very good beer that took a little bit more work than letting some grain lying around ferment. Of course, on the other hand, plenty of beers are brewed in Belgium using essentially that method, so it all comes down to one's taste I suppose.
Wine "pairing" is a whole thing. Certain wines go better with certain foods. A good sommelier is expected to be an expert in wine pairings and will recommend wines based on your food order.
The principle is what chefs think of as "balancing" flavours. There are 5 recognized basic flavours: salt, sweet, acidity (sourness), bitterness and "umami" (savoury).
When learning to cook creatively aspiring chefs will think about balancing these flavours, as each will affect your perception of the other. Salt will "neutralize" / "tame" bitterness, sweetness will do the same for acidity / sourness and vice versa.
If what you find is that your wines taste sour after eating a food, then you are probably sensitive to sweetness and / or sourness. Most people can experience what you are describing by eating a bite of something really sweet, like cheesecake, and then tasting a dry wine. It will taste VERY sour as a result because your taste buds have just been desensitized to sweetness based on the really sweet food that you just ate, so the sweetness in the wine will not be perceived, leaving only the acidity.
It just sounds like in your case this phenomenon has been dialed up to 11.
Music is a massive factor [1]
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/effects-of-music-on-sales-20...
This really resonates with me. In day-to-day life "worth it" depends a lot on the person, and especially their financial standing.
I like to try to think of an unbiased "worth it" as plotting cost vs value of everything in the category on a scatter plot. Things that are "worth it" are above the average curve (and the curve is going up at higher prices).
Basically "this option provides more value than most other options of same or lower cost".
For instance, in Costa Rica, one year, many wine drinkers prised this wine as exceptionally good, specially consideringn it was very very inexpensive and not even packaged in a glass bottle.
https://vino.cr/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/CLOS-DE-PIRQUE-CA...
I can't remember the exact number, but it cost between $5 and $10. That was over 10 years ago
I'm so stealing that
French adjective
Translated definitions: Carefree, careless, reckless
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/05/80/42/058042c06780bbc0fa3a...
Maria's husband Tom writes the tasting notes for each variety, such as...
Rwanda Dry Process Macuba
"Berry notes, floral impression, ripe blackberry, blueberry, fruited acidity, darker roasts tie in delicious bittersweet undertones, like strawberries dipped in chocolate sauce."
Yemen Al Qafr Hawari
"Sweet, somewhat rustic, notes of pistachio cookie, malted chocolate, ginger powder, sesame candies, corn syrup, tobacco leaf. Super chocolatey dark roasts."
I swear (even though I know I'm wrong) that he just makes this stuff up.
I think almost anyone could tell the difference between different coffees side by side. I just don't think people are super focused on the coffee flavor when they drink their regular brew.
Where you have to be careful is when boiling the water yourself for a chemex or aeropress brew. Done right, those are better. But I can't be bothered most days.
Assumes they're roasted nicely, otherwise it's comparing ashtrays with pencil shavings.
here's james hoffmann's guide to cupping coffee at home: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSEgP4VNynQ
I don't know if this in particular is made up or not. But tasting notes, especially of the marketing kind, can be a collection of notes from different preparation methods, consumption temperatures, and, most likely, from being drank next to other coffees that taste different and might bring out each other's individual accents.
Cocoa, chocolate, brown sugar, Graham cracker... These are all notes that I want my morning latte to taste like.
Berries, lemon, floral, citrus, melon... These are all flavors I can do in a cold afternoon coffee, but otherwise taste really sour to be.
But it's just two categories for me. I couldn't distinguish any of those flavors individually.
basically, some essential oils of one smell at a time.
Looking at more extensive smell kits, there is a huge jump in price if you get a "master wine aroma kit". They can have many many scents.
It might just be putting names to smells, but I also wonder if you can actually develop or enhance your sense of smell (and therefore the aromatic parts of taste)?
Frankly, "notes of blue and a hint of graphite steel" sounds too remote from normal experiences to be consciously made up - I mean, who's going to relate to that anyway?
(An exception is some Ethiopian beans which have an unmistakable blueberry aroma and taste that they are famous for.)
I've stopped worrying too much about "advancing" past that level. Now I just buy the coffee, read the notes, enjoy experiencing the sensations that have been placed in my head. Is it "connoisseurship"? Is it a placebo? Who cares, it's fun!
Unfortunately, some roaster embelish those notes to drive up sales, since it's the only to differentiate between coffees, especially if you're not familiar with that particular farm/region.
Or, you can just ignore them and have fun :)) Coffee can be a rabbit whole where you can spend lots of money to get certain microlots or improving your water profile.
Fun tidbit - The difference in aroma, appearance, flavor, and experience of a $9 eighth of cannabis versus a $900 eighth of cannabis would likely be noticeable even to an amateur.
You don’t necessarily need to be a Ganjier[0] to tell.
Efforts to homogenize it and remove labeling do serve to remove brand bias which is why it is standard now at cannabis cups - but still the quality shines through - literally sometimes.
But when it gets down to reviews and describing experiences we are all limited by the English language.
Some quotes from my own reviews:
“The insides almost looked like the outside of a banana slug. That kind of yellow.”[1]
“Beyond the citrus notes, the smell is definitely honeydew to me, not cantaloupe.”[2]
[0] https://ganjier.com [1] https://thehighestcritic.com/reviews/cultivar-review-pleazur... [2] https://thehighestcritic.com/reviews/strain-review-melonade-...
Even participated in a session called “tasting on the right side of your brain” all about identifying and interrogating those more abstract impression.
As poetic as they are - they carry insight and information both about the taster and the liquid that - without interrogation even the taster maybe unaware of.
bad - wine that actually has gone bad (skunked, turned to vinegar or some other faul)
low-quality - jug wine (high sugar and/or extremely high acidity and/or strong ethanol flavor)
average/meh - the wine is drinkable and nothing stands out
good wine - the wine hits all the key traits of its varietal
Those super-sensitive can get more fine grained, and anyone who doesn't hate wine will have a 5th "great" category based on their personal preferences. But those are replicable consistently across the population.
The average/good distinction is trainable for the average person with some practice.
Also while price doesn’t predict which category you are, it’s hard to find a very cheap good wine. You have to either know your stuff, or buy something more expensive
Well that spoils the next tastings. You can remember what the expensive wines taste like and score them higher in the future.
Dancing about architecture
1. When the author talks about Coke vs. Pepsi, he comes to the conclusion that the reason people prefer Pepsi in blind taste tests but Coke in unblinded ones is "Think of it as the brain combining two sources of input to make a final taste perception: the actual taste of the two sodas and a preconceived notion (probably based on great marketing) that Coke should taste better." I've read elsewhere, though, that the reason for this difference is actually because of the difference between "sip tests" vs. "drinking tests". Pepsi is objectively sweeter than Coke, so if you're just taking a few quick sips (as most taste tests are set up), you may prefer the sweeter taste of Pepsi because it stands out more, but if you're drinking a whole bunch, the sweeter taste of Pepsi can feel cloying.
2. The article includes this quote, "the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less." I wonder if this could be due to Berkon's paradox, a statistical paradox that was on the HN front page yesterday, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33677781. After all, I'm guessing most truly bad wines may not be rated at all.
This is not about drinking or sipping though. This is about people prefer Pepsi in blind tests and Coke in unblinded tests.
So this explanation would only make sense if the blind tests are also using sipping and the unblinded tests are using drinking.
I argue that this doesn't make sense as an explanation, as blind vs unblinded testing is orthogonal to sipping vs drinking.
So, if this is the explanation, they'd have to set the testsa very particular way, for seemingly no reason (expept, perhaps, such manipulation of results).
Yeah that’s what they’re doing.
The blind tests are using small, sipping quantities.
People purchasing soft drinks for at home generally are drinking them.
The article draws a distinction between blind taste-test ("Pepsi Challenge") behavior and consumers' purchasing habits/general preferences.
If there were 6 subjects, does it mean “5-6 of them changed their answer depending on the experiment” or “2 consistently preferred coke, 2 consistently preferred pepsi, and 2 don’t really care but bring the vote to a 4/6 majority based on confounding factors”
But at some point, I realized that every time a restaurant told me they only had Pepsi, instead of being annoyed, I was actually happy. Only then did I realize that I actually prefer Pepsi, and have been drinking Pepsi ever since. (I have quite a sweet tooth, so the fact that Pepsi is much sweeter means it tastes much better.)
I literally had to learn this about myself by observing my gut reaction to being told a restaurant only had Pepsi, because Coke being obviously better was so ingrained in me.
1. Old wines cost more because you have to pay for the storage.
2. Low-production wines that have an affluent following cost more because supply and demand.
And that's it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with you if you if you prefer a Gallo Rhine Wine in a box to a Romanee Conti.
That said, there is definitely a skill and an art to being a Sommelier, and that is the ability to take someone's description of what they like and match it to what's on their wine list. There is no such thing as a "good wine" independent of any particular person's tastes (except if you have a wine that has, say, turned to vinegar) but there is definitely such a thing as a good sommelier.
Champagne region produces some astonishing volume of sparkling wine, like hundreds of millions of bottles per year. Any given bottle of sparkling from Champagne costs approx. 2 times more than cremant of the same quality.
Absolutely, I worked in a wine store for years and it was always awesome having a customer come back and buy more bottles of something I recommended.
> What there is not, however, is any kind of absolute standard for what constitutes a "good" wine. Different people like different things.
This is me with Eastern U.S. wines. I understand that conventional wisdom poo-poos Vitis labrusca (even though it saved European wine!) but I do love foxy wines from that region.
"That's the good stuff," he said, then added confidentially: "...doesn't give you the shakes."
My dad bought the box and many more over the years. Never got the shakes. Quality is relative!
And loss. A bottle of wine is not a lug nut, it does not sit nigh imputrescible.
It's like people buying a vintage car. It's worth a lot more than the sum of its parts. Because there might only be a handful left to buy. And it might have been owned by interesting people. It goes to the highest bidder. Same with a original paintings by some of the old masters. You might not be able to tell them apart from a good forgery or replica. But they are one of a kind and that drives their value. Scarcity.
Wine snobs of course are just that, people pretending to taste subtle differences that would probably fail a blind test. But there are undeniably wines that are very tasty and wines that are very much a bit bland and underwhelming (or hangover inducing). And there's a wide variety of different wine with very different flavor profiles that are pretty easy to tell apart. So, with some training identifying the difference between those is not that hard. There are grape varieties, yeast varieties, different aging and blending methods, soils, climates, etc. A good sommelier will be able to tell those apart. And a regular drinker will also taste the difference. And a wealthy drinker will seek out the rare experiences that are there to be had in the form of overly expensive bottles that provide just that.
I'm perfectly happy to drink cheap wine and I do so regularly. The mass produced stuff tends to be stable in quality and perfectly drinkable. I live in Germany and I noticed my local supermarket has Rumanian wine from only a single vendor (red, white, and rose). Affordable price and I figured they would not bother stocking it if it was really bad. So, I've tried them and while it's not amazing, it's very drinkable. There are also some local German wines that seem popular and are very drinkable. When in doubt, go for the bottles that are nearly out of stock. Trust your fellow drinkers to know a good bar-gain.
I do enjoy the occasional expensive bottle where you take a sip and notice that "hey this is some really tasty stuff". Not sure if I would pay 40 euro for it but I do enjoy it when I get served some. And I'll spend a bit more when I have dinner guests.
I know of a single maker that only puts out wines that I consider good or at least okay: Heitz.
Heitz is pricey though, and a $6 bottle of Barefoot or Charles Shaw two buck chuck can be just as good or better than a huge assortment of $50 or $300 bottles of swill. In my experience.
I wouldn’t go that far… there are many wines that everyone agrees are foul. La Villageoise for example? There’s a reason it’s 2E/L
6USD is what, 5.80E a bottle? That’s already a lot more comfortable
With that said, there are unbounded arrays of cheap and expensive selections that all taste like shit (again, in my opinion - others likely perceive them differently).
I've met plenty of people who happily drink something I consider 100% not palatable or suitable for human consumption.
The article says it isn't. And I agree. Go buy a two-buck chuck at Trader Joe's, and a $50 Chateauneuf de Pape from 2018. One is an acrid, acidic fruit punch, the other is a balanced soft tannin delight. I guarantee your palette can tell the difference, or your money back. :)
I thought the smiley face on my comment was a dead giveaway.
https://www.amazon.com/Pok-Som-Drinking-Vinegar-5x4-Oz/dp/B0...
Fight me. :)
As someone who has blind tasted many wines…
- I can see not being able to tell a difference between $50 bottles and $300 bottles, and even preferring the less expensive option. Some of the tastes can be very subtle, and sometimes the more expensive wines need to be cellared before they really start to shine.
- I honestly don’t think I have ever had a $50 plus bottle of wine that I would not have preferred over Barefoot, which has approximately zero taste markers of a wine made to taste good.
- There are inexpensive wines (sub-$8) that can hold their own versus $20-30 bottles, but that almost always involves generous use of oak chips and an audience that doesn’t mind the imbalanced flavor profile. Most people don’t mind the imbalance, especially since the wines are usually inexpensive, high alcohol, and taste better than wine at a similar price point.
- Folks who can’t differentiate wine taste may be “non-tasters”. I dislike this term of art, but it’s folks who have fewer taste buds per unit area of their tongue. Tell-tale signs are people who salt everything and/or use hot sauce to an extreme level.
- For folks on a budget who want to drink decent wine, Trader Joe’s Reserve wines ~$10 a bottle) punch way above their weight. These are basically $20-30 retail bottles of wine that needed to be cleared at the winery cellars quickly to make space for a new vintage. “Shiners” is the term of art for these bottles pre-labeling.
I can’t believe that. I’ve never had barefoot and probably never will but there’s a lot of totally undrinkable, maybe even semi-poisonous, expensive wine. It’s not even rare. If you buy from a good merchant this is less of a problem but still, expensive wines go bad, and some were never good to begin with.
“A lot”? Really? Change your wine merchant if that’s the case.
That said, sure, I mean, if you want to include flawed wines like ones with brett, ones that haven’t been stored properly (e.g., in the sun), wines way past the their peak, etc., then one will certainly run into some bad wines at any price point.
That’s sort of a given, imho, and is in no way a reflection of the quality of the wine.
That certainly doesn’t in general make the high end wine “fake” or not worth a higher price (at least to some point), which is the point of the linked article.
Very old red wine (e.g. 30+ years), if it's not fortified or a dessert wine, is also not particularly pleasant. I've had some very famous Bordeaux from some celebrated 70s vintage, a sip from Hedonism Wines in London, and it was very much not worth it; more than anything else, it reminded me of clothes in an old person's closet.
On the other hand, the same day I had a sip of something sweet from the 19th century - like 1898 or something - from Crimea, and it wasn't bad. It wasn't great, but it wasn't bad or undrinkable either. Might have been related to these batches - https://quillandpad.com/2020/07/21/the-massandra-collection-...
[EDIT] As for Californian wine in that range, it seems to have a problem with marketing-over-substance. I expect trying to compete in that range on quality is... frustrating.
Yeah. There seems to be a lot of variability below $20. That said, it’ll you do the math, it’s tough to make a wine with a good and distinct character below $20 for reds and $15 for whites (I’ve seen it, but it’s relatively rare).
Also, totally agree with your edit. California wines have a lot of challenges with marketing over substance across the whole range or price points.
But for 'crap' 'ok' and 'good' and 'good+' categories I think it's actually fairly straight forward.
> What is the name of that wine?
Sorry, I just don't remember after all this time. Although IIRC the label's picture had a peasant sort of character who appeared to be holding a glass at arm's length (or at least that's how we interpreted it)
Also, it's typical of young people to mix cheap wine with Coca-Cola, and have parties with that.
> There can be objectively bad pizza — burnt, cold, mushy — but there isn’t really any objective best pizza. Fancier and more complicated pizzas can be more expensive, not because they’re better, but because they’re more interesting. Maybe wine is the same way.
There may be some nonsense in wine tasting, but it is definitely possible to develop a body of knowledge and experience that allows one to identify wines based on only your senses. It's important to note that the CMS only includes traditionally produced wines in the blind tasting - no curveballs (pinot grigio grown in Alaska or whatever).
I've no doubt a sommelier can tell differences between wines.
What I do suspect is that you can enjoy moderately priced wines just as well as many more expensive ones.
I regret not asking how many people had, in fact, noticed and inquired.
I recognize the irony of including HFCS among the "natural" sweeteners. Isn't that just 10,000 spoons (of sugar)?
I feel sorry for people with such insensitive taste buds.
I can understand not having a preference, but being unable to tell the difference at all? I wonder what other flavors they're missing out on in other foods.
At the other end, yes, there are some sommeliers with very sensitive tastebuds that are ridiculously good at identifying wines.
But I would wager that at least 90% are faking it, or it's all in their head, and the blind taste tests expose them. It's like audiophiles and their need for HDMI cables that cost 4 digits.
Get a bunch of friends to each bring a bottle. Maybe give a criteria, like a price range, so people don't feel obliged to impress with the price tag.
All bottles are delivered to the kitchen at the beginning of the night, where the host puts each in a numbered paper bag. Each attendee gets a score sheet.
Start serving, either by pouring or just putting a few bottles on the table at a time. It's a normal party, apart from each person giving each numbered wine a score, and conversation about the wine being an icebreaker.
At the end of the night total up the scores and reveal the bottles, generally to some hilarity.
It's fun to throw in a few wildcards. As the host, I threw in a couple of extra bottles: one well above the price range and another the cheapest I could find. (Found out after the event that an attendee also decanted a box into a bottle. All in the spirit!). I also poured all the left over bits from each bottle (not glasses!) into a bottle and served that up towards the end of the night.
The cheap wildcard came second. The dregs came middle of the pack and the expensive bottle came below the dregs. It was a fun night and the guessing game really got people talking about what they liked and disliked, but they couldn't be pompous about it, unless they wanted to risk a ribbing at the end of the night.
It also works with beers or homebrew.
Pour everyone a serving of each (different color cups works best), and tell them that one bottle costs less than $10, one costs $95.
The group will taste and discuss and usually reach a consensus on which wine is the better wine. Ask if anyone disagrees.
Then, you reveal that both bottles were filled with the same boxed wine. It's really funny.
I've done this 3 times, and never had anyone suggest that they were the same wine before the reveal.
I used to be a big wine skeptic. It seemed pretentious, overpriced, and boring. The people who liked it were the kind of people I disliked. Most of the places in the town I grew up in all had the same "big reds" at ridiculous prices. Wine was the thing that cost $12 that you paid $60 for at the local steakhouse to look important.
Then, I moved to a lesser-known wine-producing state and started actually trying wine. It took some time--and there were more than a few encounters with snobs and commercial puffery that made me want to rethink it--but it soon opened up into a huge world that I had no idea about before. It was far more fascinating and enduring than previous interests in whiskey or craft beer.
It's a pity that wine gets such a pretentious reputation. It's a fascinating blend of chemistry, geology, geography, and culture that at its heart is an agricultural enterprise.
Started my first company shortly thereafter, probably that incident is as responsible as anything else for my entrepreneurial path.
I'm missing something. What made this a big faux pax?
Having said that, I've seen some incredible stuff. There was a tasting were a friend brought a bottle with him, it was a blind tasting and everyone was supposed to write down what their bottles were. So my friend presented his bottle concealed in aluminum paper as we used to do, and he wrote down the bottle + vintage.
At the end of the night, notes were exchanged, and there was a very very strong taster in the group. It was burgundy night, and he nailed 4/5 wines (6 in total, but the one you brought didn't count), producer, wine, and vintage. My friend told him "you didn't guess the vintage of the one I brought", I don't remember but I think my friend thought that it was a 2008 and this guy said like 2009. When they revealed the bottles, the bottle was indeed a 2009 from the same producer. My friend had taken a different bottle from his cellar and he didn't realize :^). Some folks know what they're drinking very well indeed (5/5
People find ways to turn anything into a game. And status, striving, gaming – they enter into anything. But for me, I generally just keep a list of favorites. Reds often give me a headache, so a good red, to me, is one that does not. But I've grown to really like Rosé, and it doesn't have to be summer.
Anyway, there's definitely good wine and bad wine. I think personally a good story contributes a lot more to the value of wine than its rating. But 'value' can be very subjective.
Also, in wine, the price to value ratio is anything but linear. In most European countries, once you've made it past the 8 euro mark, you can get some great wines that get a lot better up to about 30 euro a bottle. After that,paying an additional 100 only gets you a marginally better wine, if at all.
Overall though, the best advice is to drink whatever you enjoy.
I do think people overfit on the colour piece though; you could definitely find some reds and whites which, if tasted without seeing the colour and at the same temperature, would be challenging to tell apart, more-so than differentiating between country/grape/region. I'm not sure what this really proves, apart from being counterintuitive.
That said, there is a lot of bullshit in market of people who buy and sell expensive wine (more so than the professional tasters and vineyards, who are usually genuine enthusiasts). Lots of cheaper wines may be more enjoyable, and wine flavour profiles are often full of weird signalling about what constitutes quality, i.e. "tasting note x is considered desirable/refined/distinguished, ergo it tastes better", which is nonsense and snobbery. Without any bias you might think expensive and old bordeaux tastes like an old boot, but if you've been trained that those specific flavour profiles are distinguished and desirable ('hints of leather and earth').
Not sure repeating the bushfires that created those releases is a long term strategy though…
(1) lots of subtle and subjective judgement calls
(2) humans yearning to show off their wealth / sophistication / status
...which is NOT fake or widely-faked?
Hello fellow spaces over tabs person
I might say "Cars and yachts are not so widely faked, but are both status symbols", but then you might say "ah, but those are less subjective. A yacht objectively does not sink, and a car objectively needs less maintenance or goes faster or has better ride quality"
I might say "having a subjectively defined set of books on your bookshelf is a sign of sophistication and status, and is not widely faked", but you might say "ah, but the books are objective, having 1984 and K&R C are objectively a sign of programmer status"
I might say "owning a 'nice house' in a big city is a status symbol, 'nice' is very subjective, but it's not widely faked", to which you will point out reality is fake and I cannot even prove houses are real in the first place.
(2a) Is there a demographic that willingly/consciously/unconsciously wants to be deceived (2b) What are the classes of things which they normally want to be deceived by?
Connection between wine connoisseurs and notion of high-status is generally accepted and the connection between status, self esteem and serotonin is well established [1-3]. There is one interesting study (which unfortunately i cant access) on rationality (or rather suppression of) during blind wine testing [4] which i presume iterates this point in context of wine
Solomon et al expounded Terror Management Theory[5] based on Becker's Denial of Death[6] which suggests one experimental measure for ascertaining degree of irrational attachment (or degree of irrationality); given a threat or reminder of death, humans will strongly assert whatever symbolic attachment (eg religion, race, choice of text editor, wine vs non wine loving, wine choice, truffle choice) they have and discriminate anyone who belongs to the 'other' due to the serotonin triggering nature of asserting the value of your attachment/identity. What i do want to see is a social/fMRI study of technological workers and 'fashion' ie irrational/subjective choices made in supposedly rational/objective domains (choice of text editors etc), related [7]
[1] Sylwester, Robert. "Serotonin, students, and self-esteem." The Education Digest 63.2 (1997): 16. [2] Breuning, Loretta Graziano. Habits of a happy brain: retrain your brain to boost your serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, & endorphin levels. Simon and Schuster, 2015. [3] Pyszczynski, Tom, et al. "Why do people need self-esteem? A theoretical and empirical review." Psychological bulletin 130.3 (2004): 435. [4] Caltagirone, C., et al. "Rational versus emotional behavioral responses in wine tasting: a transcranial magnetic stimulation experiment." American association of wine economists annual conference. 2011. [5] Greenberg, Jeff, Tom Pyszczynski, and Sheldon Solomon. "The causes and consequences of a need for self-esteem: A terror management theory." Public self and private self. Springer, New York, NY, 1986. 189-212. [6] Becker, Ernest. The denial of death. Simon and Schuster, 1997. [7] Breuning, Loretta. "The neurochemistry of science bias." Groupthink in Science. Springer, Cham, 2020. 3-14.
Bonus: want to drink a top quality italian wine spending just 30 euros? Buy a couple of bottles of Passorosso by Franchetti. Etna Red, Sicily. Drink it together with some top quality French pinot noir and tell me if it's not on par.
What muddies the water is that wine has an association with aristocracy that has never been had with Coke and Pepsi, or pizza with pineapple vs no pineapple.
Sure, wine is more complex than many other tastes, but so is beer, and beer has mostly been considered a blue collar affair, historically speaking.
Everyone is right and wrong at the same time. All wine is good and all wine sucks. Any given bottle will be a hit or miss, regardless of price. With price, you may be getting a more rare varietal, but that doesn't mean your friends will appreciate it.
A given wine needs to target its audience. Are your friends adventurous? Then you might actually consider sharing that bottle of Sagrantino, as they may appreciate the experience even if they don't like it that much. But if their tastes are generally more... conventional, then just go with that $9 Cabernet Sauvingnon from Trader Joes that can't offend anybody. Do you have wine snob friends who you want to make jealous? Then the $300 bottle of whatever is right for you, as you'll not only be able to gloat but perhaps spend less as you have an excuse not to crack it open until it "peaks" some time in the next century.
Of course, people can be against luxury goods but the point is they're not getting it. People pay for brand and prestige, including some wine affiocionados (though not me). That's perfectly normal for luxury markets.
By the way, beer is way less complex than wine. It's not even remotely comparable, primarily because beers are "designed" by professional brewers for specific target markets. You can't do that as easily with wine, it depends more on the grapes, weather, and location.
It comes in many shapes and forms. Coffee snobs. People that buy a Rolex. Or have a 100K audio setup to match their supernatural hearing.
It doesn't have to make objective sense, as long as it makes sense in your head.
Personally, I think red blends are often better than single wine varietals. They're often perceived as cheaper, but from a taste perspective, I find they're usually more balanced in flavors and more complex as a result.
I believe that one of the "debunkings" about the Pepsi Challenge was that people preferred the initial swig of Pepsi but preferred Coke if the question was asked after more consumption, after the beverage had warmed up, etc. Effectively, you could set up the situation to get people to choose one or the other quite easily.
Saying all that, I am mostly buying wines in $20-$30 price range, because most of the times I can't tell difference between good $20 and good $50 wine in blind tasting. I strongly beleive that $100+ wines are nothing but a marketing, except really old (30+ years) vintages. Those are just pricing for their rarity, not their taste, and mostly used as an expensive presents.
There are also things like favorite regions (mine is Tuscany and South Italy), vintages (2006 and 2010 in Italy were mostly golden, 2016 is very promising) and innumerable hacks like buying wine across the road from that prestigious chateaus and terroirs, or tasting non-Champagne sparkling from France - same quality for half the price. It's funny and tasty game, I like it.
I suspect that very bad wine is very evident but good wines are very hard to identify by taste since they are very similar in taste. The only difference is the bottle and the price.
Wine is like any other consumer product. People pay for the brand and the utility. But brand is the big price differentiator.
Spanish kids, from one of the top 3 premier wine-producing countries of the world: *laughing at my pretension* "Just try it!"
Me: "That's... delicious!"
Wine + Coca-Cola. Try it. Recommended by Spanish kids.
A lot of fine wine is priced on geographic prestige / scarcity. For example, there are many hectares of land that can produce Chablis (much of it perfectly fine to you and me), but only 1% of the wine producing estates of the region have Grand Cru status. This status is a combination of competency of the wine producer + geography of the estate (more so geography). The chablis grand cru producing estates sit at the top of the appelation, and all the environmental variables (“terroir”) of this micro area and the expression of these in the final product contribute to the wine being considered more distinctive.
> Based on the theory of predictive coding, our brains first figure out what sensory stimuli should be, then see if there’s any way they can shoehorn actual stimuli to the the expected pattern. If they can’t, then the brain will just register the the real sensation, but as long as it’s pretty close they’ll just return the the prediction. For example, did you notice that the word “the” was duplicated three times in this paragraph? Your brain was expecting to read a single word “the,” just as it always has before, and when you’re reading quickly, the mild deviation from expected stimuli wasn’t enough to raise any alarms.
I believe Vsauce had a video on this topic one. I’ll edit the content if I find it.
I’ve tasted wines 10x or 20x the price, and they really are no better. They likely cost exactly the same to make, but their price is impacted by demand.
In general, I think most people can tell a $10 bottle from a $30 bottle. I suspect very very few could reliably pick a $300 bottle from a $30 bottle.
Anyhow:
Our philosophy is "It doesn't matter what the experts can taste. What matters is what you can taste."
So for wine, it's easy for you & your friends or relatives to put out three glasses, two the same and one different, and see if the taster can pick out the outlier. If they can't, why should they care which one WineSpectator says is better?
This also goes for other food and drinks. It's the same with coffee. You can taste really cheap and awful coffee, but if anyone can tell me they can reliably differentiate between decent beans and one of those fancy "it was fermented and digested by a monkey" specialty brands I'm scpetical.
It was very nice, and I said something like, “my limited experience with champagne probably doesn’t give me the proper appreciation for this.”
He said “Nonsense. If it tastes good to you, then it’s a good champagne, period.”
That’s kind of been my motto for food and drink ever since. Regardless of price, some things are just going to please you more than others, so enjoy them.
> (Do wines ever have 6-carbon carboxylic acids, or 10-carbon alkanes — i.e., goats, armpits or jet fuel? I am not a wine chemist and cannot answer this question. But one of the experts interviewed on Somm mentioned that a common tasting note is cat urine, but that in polite company you’re supposed to refer to it by the code phrase “blackcurrant bud.” Maybe one of those things wine experts say is code for “smells like a goat,” I don’t know.)
Friends of mine have held two professionally run wine tastings over the years, and they were great fun, and very educational. The wines were all decanted, you could not see what they were, and it was interesting to see that every wine scored on a bell curve with the group. The scores were anonymous, so you didn't have to worry about how you felt about any given wine.
My favorite part is that in each of the two tasting sessions, the highest price bottle scored well, but not at the top. In each, the top white and the top red were both roughly $30 dollar bottles. Also in each, a couple roughly $10 bottles scored really well.
The other thing that I learned, and apply regularly, is that at the $20 price point, you are generally buying a good tasting bottle of wine. $16 to $24 seems to be a really safe range for my tastes
My friends and I like wine and, at that point in my life, we went wine tasting pretty regularly. One weekend we all instantly loved one of the wines.
We found out they were trying to clear out old inventory, and were selling it for $8 each. We bought the rest of their supply (about 2 cases) and split it among the 4 of us.
I hate buying wine in the US generally because the markup is so high. A 5 euro bottle in the EU could easily cost $20 in the US.
This is the formula developed by Orley Ashenfelter to predict the quality of wine, as described in the book Super Crunchers by Ian Ayres. It is the Moneyball of wine and he claims it does just as well as experts.
No, it means the original studies were right to have a sample large enough to account for one person who's taking a position they wouldn't normally take on that particular day! But what it doesn't do is invalidate the findings of the larger study.
PS: I got to the end of the article thinking the author hadn't made a very convincing case, then I saw that it was Scott Alexander, and my first reaction was "oh, he's smarter than me, I probably didn't read it carefully enough." So, I guess I'm like the lady at the Judgment of Paris who asked for her scorecard back.
However, I have friends that are very much into it, and will happily spend sick amounts of money on bottles of what to me, is just spoiled grape juice.
Isn't taste just a signal interpreted by the brain?
I am sure you all have seen those experiments with a fake hand next to the person's but they are blocked from seeing their real hand, they start feeling touch and pain on the fake hand! Can taste also be visually and mentally affected by sight or some other knowledge?
Sometimes, when you spend more money, you get a better product, but it might not fit your ass (technically your sit bones, but I digress). Because human physiology differs greatly between people, you really do have to try a bunch of bike saddles to find the correct one that works for you . This can be a time-consuming and expensive process. In in an attempt to narrow down the correct answer, you might look up some reviews online. But in the end, it really comes down to what you like and there are no shortcuts.
Wines at wine tastings are hardly a random selection. They should look at supermarket wines.
In my experience paying more (over £8) definitely increases the chance of getting a nice bottle, but it doesn't guarantee it. But that effect is only true up to maybe £15 at the most. Above that you're throwing money away.
Well, red wine is red because it's colored by the skin of the grapes.
I guess the critique is that the tasters were inconsistent, they used [very] different language for the wine(s).
Which is definitely interesting. But not that surprising :)
> "jammy"
I had no idea what they meant by jammy, but according to google it's very fruity wine, low acidity, low in tannin. Ah!
And even I, who have no expertise at all, no real interest even, can mostly tell if a wine is from France or Italy for example, and most of the time if it's cheap or not.
They also sell cava for less than 5 euros a bottle. It makes a roast chicken on Sunday appear somewhat more festive. The first time a colleague in the UK told me about fruity or orange taste in wine I was completely perplexed as to what he meant.
Some are better than others, depending on many factors, and this is not up for debate.
Of course, there is also a lot of bullshit at the higher end of the price spectrum.
My conclusion is that wine prices are certainly fake. Maybe there are good and bad wines, but you can certainly get a top notch bottle of wine for a dollar.
You can get a good story from a bottle of wine - particularly around the vintage. Things like weather conditions in the years leading up to the pick and then right at the pick, volume of grapes and maturation method.
I can usually tell the difference between a $10 bottle of wine and a $30 (CDN). If I couldn't, I would buy the $10 wine by the case. I would unlikely be able to tell a $30 cab from a $100 cab and would probably prefer the $30 one.
I don't think I am unusual or extraordinary in this sense.
This baffles me. I struggle to believe so many people could fail to tell the difference between red wine and white wine.
Maybe it’s just because I don’t particularly like red wines, but they taste totally distinct and not remotely comparable.
People talk about wine like it is magic or high art. That there is something deeper to understand. There really isn’t.
During the winemaking process there are many variables that cannot be codified from season to season because of variation in the grapes, such as increasing or decreasing acidity (and how), fermentation temperature, adjusting tannins, and probably more.
Granted, wines aren't so different to reliably reproduce physical and mental effects, but maybe it's a new angle for marketing :)
Also fresh tennis ball.
Better off buying that $12-$15 bottle or getting the kirkland costco $8-10 bottles. Never had a bad one from those and they taste decent.
I suppose wine snobs also enjoy wine for their own irrational reasons, and that's ok with me.
Santé !
What if, we thought, we each bought a glass, and made sure that was our only purchase at the bar, and put that on our room account. We could fudge the dates, and put an extra day stay. My colleague said he knew the payroll woman and this probably would work.
First problem though, we had no idea what Armagnac tasted like, how could we tell if it was good if we had never tried it before? At this time the bartender came by and asked what we wanted. We thought, lets order a 'good' one and pay cash, then we order the fancy one for the room. So we asked him for a 'good one'. He poured us one and showed us the bottle, then left.
We looked into the book for it, and found it was $40 a glass. Well whisky was around $4, and Jack was like $5, for comparison. That was fairly pricey at the time for our own cash, we weren't that well paid, but we did say a good one. We smelled and tasted it. It smelled good, and it was so smooth. We savored it.
The bartender came back, asked, "How is it?". We said, "Its really good, but... $40 a glass? I know we said a good one but ...". Bartender stood back, "I would never do that to you sirs!". Punched the drink into the computer, it was $4, same as well drinks.
Honestly, the next sip I took was harsh, and had a bad aftertaste. It completely changed just knowing it was the same price as the cheapest swill you could get. Now the bartender could have given us a discount, but what it meant for us was that the $350 one was a waste of effort. We would have no idea if it was good or not.
People must stop citing Wikipedia as a source. This example is particularly egregious, since Wikipedia uses the same sources that the article itself does, so of course it "agrees".
This is me. Every time I decide to splurge on a bottle of wine I don't like it. Sticking with my 3 liter boxes of costco cabernet.
Is this just a filter bubble thing? Is it "new" to many people even though it isn't to me?
Or do we just like to feel snobby about knowing the truth?
If you just care about the bottom line, yeah there isn't anything shocking. Wine is real.
If you want to learn about some of the details, then this has substance. I certainly wasn't familiar with the studies mentioned and their data. Did you know that 11/13 experts could identify the varietal and country of origin for a French Gamay?
IMHO, the content is vastly better than articles and threads with people squabbling about the latest thing Elon said on twitter.
https://enofylzwineblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Madei...
Why you need this water?
More interesting to me is whether with enough experience I (or most people) can develop into one of those people - ie whether it is more akin to learning to read or learning to dunk.
taste is not your sensoric input on your tongue
taste is a combination of this with smell and visual (eg. color), but also mood, expectation, environment, time, stresslevel, atmosphere, temperature, viscosity and people around.
with this in mind, the exact same thing can taste like 100 times differently without changing the chemical side.
Some commentators claim that certain housing experts have "preferences" (or "things they like"), but several studies that concealed the exteriors of housing from participants showed that university undergrads unblindfolded for fifteen seconds could not judge whether they were inside of a townhouse or a single family home!
TLDR - wine is not fake. Some people like different things and are willing to pay for it. Article is pretty fair but underemphasizes diversity of preferences. Don't buy expensive wine or an expensive house just because it has a fancy label unless you know it has some feature that you care about. If it does and you can afford it, then sure, go have fun.
It is a showoff sport. Insane wine prices are there for rich people who have too much money to spend, or people who are in desperate need of validation. We all know someone in a McMansion with premium beige textured walls and a few Lexus who has a "wine cellar" that they can't stop talking about. The market is mostly for them.
I say "mostly" because like TFA says, some people really can tell the difference, but I feel bad that they have to pay so much more due to the idiot tax.
My "system" for picking wines has two approaches: - Buy Trader Joe's Reserve in a variety I enjoy - Visit local wine shop, tell them my budget and what I'm eating for dinner, and buy whatever they suggest
Both approaches yield pretty good results for not much money.
I'll leave "risking" the $5 bottles from Safeway to somebody else. The $10-$30 bottles I get are consistently good enough, and often better than good enough.
1. If you doubt high end wine exists (e.g., it's all BS above $20 or whatever people say) and you have the means, find a bottle of Jean-Louis Chave Hermitage (the Syrah) of any vintage. Enjoy it at your favorite Italian / French restaurant. If they know wine they'll be happy you brought it. The Chave is far from cheap but it's affordable for what I call superwines (get it, like supercars?) and it really is something you'll never forget.
There is a quality with great red wine that in indescribable -- I've never even met a wine person who can describe it -- but it's undeniable when you experience it. I've experienced it with great wines like that Chave and occasionally with (lucky) midrange wines.
2. The rest of an enjoyable relationship with wine is mostly avoiding bad ones. But you develop strategies for this over time. It's very easy to get a red wine that's harsh or a white wine that's too sweet. These won't be fun to drink and will pair poorly with food if you're eating. Some tips:
- If you need a white to drink or eat with, favor Sauvignon Blanc -- it's not too sweet, it usually hasn't been oaked to death and apparently pretty hard to screw up. Get Marlborough if you want something fruity and anything French if you want something more laid back.
- If you're eating red meat favor Napa Cab. It's really hard to go wrong here.
- If you're in France or Italy just get anything. That close to the source + a strong wine culture you'll rarely be disappointed. This is a good time to try new wines.
- If you need a Champagne, it's Billecart-Salmon without question. It's one of the smaller Champagne houses who isn't caught up in prestige-pricing, glamour Champagne fashion BS. Affordable and excellent.
Things to avoid:
- Bordeaux -- now, I drink this a lot but I have experience. If you really need to (it's sounds cool) favor the left bank wines. They're generally higher value. I say avoid because the market is full of crappy, low cost Bordeaux that just takes advantage of the label.
- Burgundy -- just say no. Burgundy is arguably the best red. But not the bottle you're going to buy. You have to really know what you're doing here or be willing to spend a lot. I've gotten lucky once with a cheap bottle of Burgundy and when I say cheap that is relative.
- Pinot in general. Burgundy can rarely pull it off, no one else can either.
- Chardonnay -- tends to be too oaky or too sweet.
- Pretty much any other white, for the same reason.
- Sparkling wine. See Champagne above. Prosecco is too sweet and pretty much everything else is a crapshoot.
Wash:
- Italian reds are my favorite and they can be equally good and affordable but it's a bit of a crapshoot. Look for things that are 100% Nebbiolo, Sangiovese or 'Super Tuscans' which are basically the same blend as Bordeaux (but usually better at the same price). For the most part, avoid the other stuff.
- Montrachet -- arguably the best white (Chardonnay) that can be had but they're pricy and still hit and miss.
A few things I've gleaned from them over the years:
1) People definitely come to a wine tasting and think they have to sound smart. There's always someone who thinks they need to say "something-something oaky" to "fit in" because it's something they saw on TV. The point is not to sound like what you think a smart person sounds like, the point is to find a wine you like. Hard to get around it, but that's what a lot of articles like this are basically pointing out. It's not wrong, but it's also kind of missing the point.
2) People have different fundamental taste profiles – just like some people just like Coke instead of Pepsi, and a €100 Pepsi will taste "bad" to someone who's expecting a €100 Coke. But if you like Pepsi – and there is a real reason that bottle of pepsi costs €100 (e.g. materials, aging, process, etc.) – you're really going to like that €100 Pepsi.
3) As a consequence of 1), there are definitely wines that are more "marketing driven," and tap into that insecurity. I know a few people who have been offered thousands of dollars to steam off the label of empty bottles of wine they kept in their cellar for sentimental reasons, so that those labels could be re-glued to a bottle of whatever, so that they could then be trotted out to pump some dude's ego. It's a shame, but that's people.
4) @Antognini is pretty on target here. For the same vintage, if you open it up right away, you can get a very tasty "house" bottle of wine for €15, but you should taste a very significant difference in the €40-€50 of wine from the same maker. The difference is more likely to show up when you cellar it. The €15 bottle might last for about 3-5 years before losing its taste. The €40 will gain complexity and flavor for 10-15 years. A more expensive bottle from a reputable maker should/might/maybe/is supposed to signal that it's been made to last even longer, like 40-50 years.
5) Plug: A few years ago, I adapted a DOS app the aforementioned professors in my undergrad used in their blind tastings for iOS. You can see results of their tastings going back to the early 90s at http://liquidasset.com, and the app is at https://apps.apple.com/us/app/winetaster-3/id1491063699
Sorry I couldn't help myself!
According to the article, this result comes from a study that used inexperienced undergrads, and those who have passed more rigorous training protocols perform better.
We see countless time color has effect on taste, scent has an effect on taste, mood has an effect on taste, expectations have an effect on taste.
Taste therefore isn't this static thing that we seem to think of it as.
A hypothesis to explain this: We've evolved a detailed sense of taste to help us distinguish harmful food (spoiled, inedible, etc.) from safe food. That would suggest that our sense of taste is most heavily calibrated to detect bad flavors since those are the actionable danger signals that tell us to spit something out.
Part of something tasting good is simply the absence of off-putting bad flavors. Then, once those are out of the way, you can have more interesting but subtle nuances that elevate it to something much better.
I suspect that it's easier to reach agreement on bad wine (or bad food of any category) because it's likely bad because of the presence of one or more wrong notes that most of us are sensitive to and dislike.
Once you've eliminated all of those, you have a wine that's good but perhaps undifferentiated. To go beyond that, though, you quickly enter the realm of personal preference. Because any flavor component that doesn't signal danger is equally as valid as any other and it may be mostly up to memory associations or other mostly arbitrary preferences.