Comment by poulsbohemian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by poulsbohemian | Hacker News Reader

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I live in wine country. Used to have winemakers in the school PTA, so I got to know some of these folks... I'd completely agree with your professor. I'm not a "serious" wine drinker, but with a couple pointers you can pretty quickly start telling the difference in quality. One of our favorite "party tricks" is to set a budget ($10, $15, $20, etc) and buy a handful of bottles - turns out there's a lot of very enjoyable wines at those price points. Very important to understand varietals - some wines are meant to drink young, others will absolutely change over time for better or worse. Also, often at higher price points you are paying for scarcity - if only a few thousands bottles are being made, they gotta sell at $50+ / bottle to even begin to come close to profitable.

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.

I had the privilege to get a behind the scenes tour of a winery once because a friend’s family were the owners. They had some pretty sophisticated lab equipment. You could drop in a sample and it could tell you all sorts of things about its chemical makeup (magic to me because I never took much Chemistry). I asked them what sample attribute had the highest correlation with sales and without even hesitating they told me it was sugar content. They said their best selling wine was also their sweetest. They even said it was a pretty strong correlation that held all the way down the line from sweet, citrusy varietals to tannin-rich, cottony varietals. I think I was even told they could sometimes observe the effect from year to year if one vintage crop happened to be a little more or less sweet than the last year.

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.

> I asked them what sample attribute had the highest correlation with sales and without even hesitating they told me it was sugar content.

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.

"Chateau Scam 2014: Italy’s Weird World of Wine Fraud" https://www.thedailybeast.com/chateau-scam-2014-italys-weird...

So that’s why it happened. I’d heard about the event but not the reason so I always assumed it had been some sort of contamination, or related to wine preservation. But no it was straight up devs bypass?

Adding sugar to wine is considered a great offense, and is not only illegal in France, but a disagrace. Still, some winemaker wake up in the middle of the night to do it in secret because it's hard to get a sweet taste or more alcohol naturally. Therefor, the anti-freeze workaround is not surprising.

> Adding sugar to wine is considered a great offense, and is not only illegal in France, but a disagrace.

That's not true. Adding sugar is even part of some AOP. It's used to regulate the amount alcohol in the finish product.

It was a simplification on my part. If you want to be precise, then chaptalisation (the process of regulating alcohol quantity using sugar) is illegal in south of France vineyards, forbidden everywhwere when mixed with acidification processes, and allowed but under very strict conditions otherwise in "septentrionales" vineyards (which I have no idea how to translate in English).

> and allowed but under very strict conditions otherwise in "septentrionales" vineyards (which I have no idea how to translate in English).

Northern / northerly?

> a sweet test ... chemical tests

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.

Should have coded your brain in Rust, then you wouldn't have these sort of unsafe concurrent memory-access problems

Dude, my brain is already rusty enough.

Freudian slip or parapraxis?

Which directly reflects the quality of the wine drinking public. I like the French approach better: educate your customers' tastes. In Russia they also drink sweet wines because most people there view wine as a juice that one puts in their vodka. The rich substitute the wine with very expensive champagne.

Hm.

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?

Maybe they're referring to fortified wine, which is made in parts of Eastern Europe?

The comment I replied to doesn't sound too informed.

Fortified wine culture sounds more like Portugal to me, even though they definitely make it almost everywhere.

EDIT: typo

> drink sweet wines because most people there view wine as a juice that one puts in their vodka.

I haven't seen anyone mixing wine and vodka there, it's just not a thing.

The Russian preference for sweet wine might be due to Stalin, actually:

> 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-...

> but with a couple pointers you can pretty quickly start telling the difference in quality

Interesting, for most other things I can taste, nobody has to teach me to identify quality. Either it tastes better or it doesn't.

Drink enough wine and you will start to lean towards "critically acclaimed" wines by yourself after a while. What's "enough" varies from individual to individual.

My note above, enough relates more to frequency than volume. Exposure to one serving (a serving is not a full glass!) two or three times a week matters more than five or six servings once or twice a month.

If you drink enough wine, and that means frequency, not quantity, you will eventually develop your own taste for what you enjoy. At the same time, you will also learn to judge good from bad. Will you be able to judge the individual grape or region? Probably not, but good from bad, yes. To the point that you will occasionally dump a bottle down the drain after taking the second or third sip. Not the first, because sometimes your first sip will be a lie, but by the second or third, you will decide, this bottle is not working, and you'll just dump it down the drain. Make sure to note the grape/vintner/vintage so you don't buy it again.

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.

This seem to be along the same as what I've found with coffee. I've talked to a lot of specialty roasters, and they personally fly around the world to meet with farmers and work together towards growing certain profiles.

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