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Comment by TulliusCicero | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

How does this jive with the studies showing that, if anything, regular people have a slight preference for cheaper wines?

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I don't have much of a wine palate, but I do have a crazy obsession with chocolate. What I notice with the chocolate is that people tend to prefer the cheaper, usually milk, chocolate because they don't actually like intense chocolate flavors. The stuff added to supermarket grade chocolates tends to dull and blend the flavors, hiding what I think is crazy good complexity of flavors (raisin, cherry, tobacco, leather, of course cacao, and more) but what others describe as "bitter", "burned", or "tastes like dirt". I completely understand why people like the cheap chocolate, it tastes good and goes down smooth. But it just doesn't excite with complexity the way more specialty chocolate can. I've always wondered if maybe that's the same with expensive vs consumer wines, but in that instance I'm the one on the other side of the coin who likes the cheap stuff.

One of the side benefits of keto is that I learned to appreciate dark chocolate.

Single origin chocolate is amazing, and completely different than even the high quality mass market chocolate.

Perhaps regular people, many of whom don't drink much wine, prefer simple, unchallenging flavors that can often be found in cheap wine. Theres nothing wrong with this, but I don't think it necessarily means that wine "quality" doesn't exist.

I find cheap wines to be excessively sweet, and it wouldn’t surprise me if regular people just like the taste of sugar in their food.

Regular people also likely prefer junk food to healthy food. The former is laden with sugar, fat, and salt and is engineered to appeal to the vast majority of people. It doesn’t mean that junk food is quality food.

And bad junk food. Try making a high quality chocolate truffle with really nice dark chocolate and put it on the plate with snickers bars. You’ll have all the good stuff left at the end.

During prohibition in the U.S., people developed a taste for shitty wine (or to be more objective about it, dangerously low quality wine).

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. :)

> people who drop an ice cube into their red wine

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 guess that hinges on what you mean by "quality". I suspect that by definition, "quality" means that experts like it. So experts prefer expensive wines more often than "regular people".

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...

Most people prefer the stuff they're accustomed to, and they probably buy $20 wines much more often than expensive wines.

"Quality" is a loose term, preference is totally subjective. Most people mix those things up, but there aren't equal. You don't automatically like the "better" wine, or better food. But the trend is the more people know about X (where X = wine in this case), they like "better" X. Where "better" and "quality" has to be defined first.

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.

[0] https://www.wsetglobal.com/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect

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