Comment by gspencley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gspencley | Hacker News Reader

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There have been a lot of blind wine tastings done and the results are always interesting. Sometimes cheap bottles score as high, or higher than vintages. Other times people can spot the cheap "carton" wine easily.

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.

I learned the secret in my mid-20s whilst brewing my own cider as a poor student.

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.

Next time I'm in the pen expect a call from me for that recipe

Obligatory Pruno link from Modern Drunkard magazine (some profanity) : https://drunkard.com/11-03-jailhouse-3/

haha, that was a great read

> 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 hadn't read that before, thanks for sharing it!

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

Sugar + yeast will result in alcohol. And yeast is literally everywhere. You can practically just open any fruit juice, let it sit for a while, and you'll have a pretty good chance of getting an alcoholic beverage at the end.

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.

Beer was probably "discovered" when mashed up grains started fermenting wildly. It's definitely not difficult to make alcohol if one desires!

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.

I remember the USSR during Gorbachev's anti-alcohol campaign - you could walk out onto the balcony of a large apartment building, and see hands waving at you from most other balconies. Not people's hands, mind you - it was rubber gloves, used as a one-way seal on top of large glass bottles used to brew fruit wine. The fruit itself varied depending on what people had access to and the season - I've seen apple, plum, cherry, blackcurrant etc.

There's an entire book (most likely more than one) dedicated to various method of making alcohol at home. My chemistry teacher in high school had one. Among the methods were fruits, vegetables, plastic bags, and some types of wood. Obviously, the resulting alcohol wouldn't taste like 20yo whiskey, and will probably kill you a bit faster, but the methods were solid.

The secret is that a lot of cheap wine is pretty darn good. I imagine there's somewhat of a correlation between price and quality, especially at the absolute bottom end of the pricing scale. But it's a very loose correlation.

This is a huge secret across so many different markets; it's insane. The one we may be most familiar with is computers, of course - even a bargain-basement computer today is an absolute beast compared to 10+ years ago. Entire classes of "cheap foods" have disappeared because we are so rich we can make everything "good" - meaning the bargain-basement stuff is now often higher-quality than midrange stuff of 20/50/100 years ago.

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.

> 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.

Fair enough, maybe not the originallest, but some of the now hamburger chains started out as hot dog chains, of which there's one? left IIRC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl%27s_Jr.#History

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_dog

Isn't present day Carl's Jr. just Hardee's by another name? Hardee's began as a burger joint as well.

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.

I think Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. were bought by the same company and then evolved towards each other.

Carl's Jr was 'transferred' to CKE (Carl Karcher Enterprises) which then acquired Hardees, and Hardees became Carl's Jr in everything but name (as far as I can tell). What was interesting is the absolute numbers: The "merger" created a chain of 3,828 restaurants – 3,152 Hardee's outlets in 40 states and 10 foreign countries and 676 Carl's Jr. outlets primarily in California.

Yeah, I was thinking of the ubiquity of "street food hot dogs" which are now basically gone (Costco still has hot dogs, however, and baseball stadiums are required to have hot dogs).

How much of that is health code enforcement rather than demand?

That’s just it - health code enforcement got better and now you can’t feed people sawdust and rat.

Lucky Dog in New Orleans would like a word.

> Isn’t present day Carl’s Jr. just Hardee’s by another name?

The corporate parent of Carl’s Jr. bought Hardee’s in 1997, but Carl’s stayed pretty much the same.

In antiquity it was more what we might call street food or fast casual.

What really defines fast food is mass production and uniformity.

The english wikipedia [1] agrees with you.

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”.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_food

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.

> In antiquity it was more what we might call street 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.

From this post I assumed they agreed with me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33705493

> 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.

White Castle essentially formalized a prior trend of burger vendors at sporting events, state fairs, etc. These were really simple cheap meaty snacks with little more than the patty and maybe some onions cooked on a griddle and slapped on whatever roll they could get from a local baker. In that sense the WC slider is still fairly true to the original thing.

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.

> But, I think it's a bit rich to call it the origin of fast food.

Particularly when we just got finished talking about fast food in antiquity. I suppose that explains why nobody said such a thing.

I made a specific response then expanded to a general point. What point does your comment make other than bickering?

Why would there be a point? If there was a point it would be presented to the real world where it would provide value, not a meaningless text box on a website made to provide entertainment. What is to be gained from looking for something that doesn't exist?

Above $60, you’re mostly paying for name, provenance, or prestige rather than taste.

Just because you don't know how to appreciate well-made things doesn't mean that they're strictly ostentatious.

How’d you get ‘strictly’ from ‘mostly’?

added it in after reading my comment but not re-reading the parent

"Ostentation - pretentious and vulgar display, especially of wealth and luxury"

To a person who can't tell the difference between cheap and expensive wine, expensive wine is "strictly ostentatious" by definition.

You can absolutely get a top quality wine for <$60. Even the fancy 18th century European wineries that sell $10,000 bottles of wine will tell you this.

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.

you can get great wine for under $60 but not top quality

> 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

> just because something is rare doesn't mean it's good

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.

I appears so that they talk about the sell price and not about how well it is made.

Well, kind of. You might still be paying for taste, but not necessarily for objective quality. As many people have pointed out in these comments, sometimes you are paying for interesting flavor profiles that are not as easily found in moderately priced wines.

That doesn't necessarily mean better, but you might be paying for scarcity in the flavor.

Fair enough, taste is ultimately objective.

My point is more-so that the more general consensus of quality has asymptotic diminishing returns after around that point.

It really depends a lot on the region. For example, price and quality don't correlate that much in Burgundy. It's easy to spend a few hundred dollars on a mediocre bottle.

Yep, there is correlation between my perceived quality and price, et the very cheap end of wine. It gets less pronounced the more expensive it gets so, and above certain threshold it is a lot of branding.

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.

VERY rarely I do a premium wine tasting in California wine country. And, yeah, I kinda get it. There are subtle differences in some of the high-end wines as opposed to midrange stuff. But I'm actually happy with even the better box wines (however crappy the low-end stuff is) and I'd much rather spend disposable income on a better bottle of whisky or a better cheese.

That better bottle of whiskey can get you into some of the same kind of trouble. :)

Also big brands usually deliver on consistency. Making the same (or very similar) wine year from year on the order or hundreds of thousands of bottles ... yeah, that takes some skill, and favorable location doesn't hurt either :) For example see the big wineries in New Zealand.

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 assume the big brands get part of the way there by mixing old and new wine, though.

> I assume the big brands get part of the way there by mixing old and new wine, though.

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.

Some of the cheap brands (Barefoot for one) don’t have a vintage. So I think they can do a solera-type system for their wines.

Not mixing between years, but you can mix between different vineyards of the same year. As long as the wine comes from the same region you can keep the branding. There are plenty of contract vineyards that sell to different wineries to enable these mixes.

Very true. I live in a wine region and an $8 bottle from the local booze shop can sometimes be found in restaurants on the other side of the world for $50+. Is not just that cheap wine is often as good as expensive wine, sometimes it’s exactly the same thing.

I once met a local winemaker from a tiny winery in a foreign country who was proud to say that their wine was being served a restaurant in the US. I asked them how much they thought the wine would be priced at given that it was their entry-level wine. The winemaker estimated $20-25. We looked it up--it was $60.

That is standard restaurant markup over retail: 200-300%. So a $20 wine you get a wineshop should be priced $60-80 in a restaurant.

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.

Absolutely true in South america. I've had a ton of different sub-$5 wines. In my experience, if you randomly buy 20 bottles of $5 wines, one is better than a $100 bottle, plus you also get some 5 great wines, 10 good ones and the rest works for cooking.

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.

> The best wine I've ever drank

Do you remember what this was called, or specifically where? If I'm ever there I'd love to find this!

Quinta dos Guimarães, from Santa Bárbara do Monte Verde. It's super hard to find and they might be defunct, it's been quite a few years.

thank you!

One of the big differences in this category (cheap wines) is consistently. You can genuinely find great wines, but there is much greater variance in the quality year to year, or within variety of the same winery. In other words, the following year might be a crap wine, good, or in-between.

Quantity has its own quality :)

...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.

I recently picked up exactly this, not caring much what I got since it was destined for a pot of mulled wine. I had some of it and was pretty surprised how delicious it was untainted by spices and honey and brandy

Not a lot, but quite a bit. Winemakers have told me that they can't sell everything cheaply, and not only for basic economic reasons : if it's too cheap, lots of people won't buy it!

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!

How do people react when you cry after taking a sip of wine?

Well, it happens very rarely (I don't cry unless whatever I'm having is extremely good). When it happens, people find it quite amusing, and it usually starts a conversation about the pleasures of life.

>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.

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.

Potentially that may have been the content of their discussion.

Can you elaborate on this? I'm sure there's more to it and it could be great to know what some of the specifics are, but it also seems like someone who likes to cook is going to need to be present for a good restaurant

Think of the distance between "I like playing video games" and "I want to work for an AAA developer".

"I like playing video games" would be analogous to "I like dining out."

"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.

As a video game player, developer (non-game), bar/restaurant owner, and a person who likes to cook:

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.

Watch a few episodes of Kitchen Nightmares and you’ll get the gist.

The restaurant industry is brutal, low margin, and cut-throat. There's long hours and extremely hard work, and customers who don't give a shit about you. If you have a successful restaurant, it's probably because you have a good location (modulo those Michelin-starred gems in out-of-the-way small towns). So the landlord will do their best to extract any surplus value you generated through your skill and ingenuity. I've never worked in the industry and I've still heard of all of this.

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.

> the landlord will do their best to extract any surplus value you generated through your skill and ingenuity

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.

A residential landlord can't charge you much more than market rate because you could just move. At some price point a mover is going to be cheaper. Often there's also various rent control laws.

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.

And you haven’t even covered the magical world of triple net leases yet

I don't actually know what that is. Like I said, I've never worked in the restaurant biz. Everything I've written is just from reading random shit online.

Triple net is a bog standard leasing agreement for commercial properties - it's nothing specific to restaurants. Basically, you pay the expenses on the building. Taxes, insurance, maintenance costs.

A SUPER common pattern with restaurants is someone moves in and develops a location, tries to make it work for a year or so, then tanks. Then a slightly more savvy restaurateur leases the location along with the previous tenants buildout for far less, makes minimal renovations, and then makes it a success.

Perhaps a quick skim of Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential might help. His position is that running a restaurant is very different from cooking for yourself and friends.

But obviously many people do set up and run restaurants.

Not always successfully.

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.

read "kitchen confidential"

It is fairly common for a chef to team up with an investor for this reason - let the chef do the food, and the other party do the business stuff. If you're both trying to do both or have a too-personal relationship where you can't say no, it can get messy. That's not to say it never happens or can't work, of course.

(Disclaimer: I've never ran a restaurant). A passionate and skilled cook is good, yes, but running a restaurant is about more than that:

* 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.

Indeed they’re different things, but they’re surely at least correlated. (A workaholic personality is probably more strongly correlated)

Agreed and you don't need to tell me that. I have experience in food service, my extended family has also owned multiple restaurants. I personally spent 15 years running my own business, though not hospitality so it's not quite apples and apples. While we haven't taken the plunge I am putting it mildly when I say "like to cook" and did not feel it necessary to go into my background and knowledge about what goes into the food service industry.

> The real question, in my opinion, is whether a high-priced bottle is "worth it" by as near-objective standards as possible.

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".

"Penn & Teller's Bullshit":

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=295904514122934

You seem very experienced at wine and food, so I hope you know this. I can taste a wine and like it just fine if I haven’t eaten or drink anything else. But if I eat anything, even just the tiniest bit, the wine to me just becomes sour and I can only taste the alcohol. This completely ruined wine for me. Is this common?

whoa that is weird. When I taste wine these days, I can ONLY taste vinegar. I'm not even sure why that is.

Some people have hypersensitivity to some particular taste. I'm oversensitive to bitterness, and basically can't drink beer at all, and only the sweetest wines (late harvest, icewine and similar) are actually enjoyable.

Have you had Covid lately? It can severely affect taste and smell.

Nah, this has been going on for about 15 years for me. I haven't tried wine recently because to me it tastes so bad.

Apparently any corona virus can wreck havoc with your taste. But it is all very unclear.

The phenomenon of one flavour "colouring" another is perfectly normal. So that in that sense it is "common." I've not heard too many people say that food will "ruin" wine for them, though.

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.

> subjective and can be influenced through suggestion. So the atmosphere, the price, the meal pairing can all affect...

Music is a massive factor [1]

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/effects-of-music-on-sales-20...

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