Is Wine Fake? (2022)

There are definitely wine snobs and wine anti-snobs out there. But in my experience, most people just set their wine price range based on household income (or the income level they want you to believe they have).

If you go into any half-decent wine shop, you'll get good recommendations if your price range is $10-15 or $100-150 (or more, I suppose). The people that work at these places are definitely not snobs.

What an article about nothing.

Sommeliers always do blind tastings. Taste and texture descriptors are extremely well understood. Expert winemakers can tell you a lot about the qualities of grapes, climate, and process through blind taste.

This meme that wine is fake really needs to stop. You have no reason to care even one iota about subtleties of expensive wine, but you really don’t need much training to tell good wine from bad wine.

I like wine, i’ll drink, but short of it being terrible, i’ve never been able to form a preference for any one type, i certainly couldn’t tell a quality difference between a bottle that costs 15 and one that costs 150

I was expecting a rant on "not" windows emulating. Sadly it is about bad grape juice.

I live in (WA) wine country... I've heard so many stories over the years about ways to adulterate wine. The key is, drink what you like, don't get hung up on price tag or varietal. If at all possible, find the off-the-beaten-path wineries where you can get to know the owners / winemakers. Half the fun is getting the behind-the-scenes story and appreciating one season to the next. It's easy to forget that wine is fundamentally an agricultural product delivered through an industrial process. When you get down and dirty with the winemaker, the grape pickers, the cellar rats, etc it's a different perspective than the $500 bottle at the Michelin-starred restaurant.

If you put a man in a room with a hundred identical photographs of Jan-Michael Vincent and left him there for a year you’d come back to a complex ranking system of which Jan is the best.

I made wine last year, a really fun process. I'm not particularly into wine, but my wife is and I live in a wine country so we thought we'd give it a try.

We used some grapes from the garden and a load we bought, our process was rustic to say the least.

We had two batches, one got shut off early after catching a nasty mold, but the other came out nicely.

My nicotine-scarred tastebuds could easily differentiate between the two, but I honestly couldn't tell the difference between the good one and store-bought stuff.

Related:

Is wine fake? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33698094 - Nov 2022 (542 comments)

I always felt getting into wine wasn't a good idea. I do like craft beer though.

I'm from Argentina where wine is relatively cheap and I think many can distinguish a Malbec from a Cauvernet Sauvignon, but it's really difficult to distinguish in the same varietal

As an outsider on the periphery of this 'debate' I'll offer an answer and it's somewhat complex.

There's so much BS and crap talked about wine that anyone who has a keen interest in it but only limited experience is likely to be easily led astray by the many self-styled experts who've little factual knowledge but who pontificate with erudite prose about the subject.

OK, you correctly ask, what authority entitles me to make such a presumptuous comment—what right do I have to single myself out from those just mentioned? None really—other than having made a few observations over the years as well as having tasted a few better-than-average wines.

At the risk of sounding a pretentious bastard, as bona fides I have to provide you with a known reference. Years ago I had the opportunity to taste the '45 Bordeaux First Growths—and as some would know, they were a bit better than average.

There was a time when I was in a rather elite group of wine tasters (or more correctly I was on the periphery thereof as I never felt fully part of it). Anyway, that gave me access to many wines I otherwise would never have tasted as even then many of them were worth hundreds of dollars a bottle.

That necessary intro over, my observations are:

1. There are very few truly excellent wines, they are wines that one never forgets. I could name about a dozen at most that I've tasted. One that immediately comes to mind is the '45 Haut Brion. Wines like this can never be adequately described but only remembered.

2. Wines of that caliber end up being menace for people like me because they set such a high standard that they ruin one's palate for life—everything tastes so-so after that. Unless you have a millionaire's budget forget them completely.

3. The next tier down are also excellent but still so rare and very expensive that many 'connoisseurs' will never have tasted them: Grange Hermitage, Stags Leap Cabernet, current Bordeaux First Growths, the top Burgundies—Échezeaux, etc. $1,000 is often the stating price! (Note: I can't afford these, my experience of them goes back decades when they were about 1/20th the price.)

4. The 'experts' who comment on wines for a living broadly come in two classes: those who are good and the pretenders. The good ones can be truly excellent, Hugh Johnson for instance but they're almost like hen's teeth. I've only ever known one, Len Evans https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Len_Evans_(wine), and he was brilliant, it was through him that I tasted some of the wines in my first category.

The pretenders are many and some are famous—excellent self-publicists and wine book writers. They have enough experience and knowhow and enough lingo to fool 90% of readers, but you'll usually find they just echo views of true experts like Johnson.

Let me illustrate, quite some years ago I was at an exclusive black-tie tasting of newly released top 1st, 2nd and 3rd Growth Bordeaux with an engineer colleague of mine and a winemaker friend. It was a group of about 25 of the local wine-tasting establishment and was hosted by a very well known wine writer with books to his name. And we were definitely the outsiders huddled at the far end of the table.

In short, it was a blind tasting and the aim was to pick the top most expensive wine in a lineup of about a dozen wines—a Château Lafite Rothschild. Reputations were at stake so they ummed and aahed and pontificated and the vast majority including the host failed to get the Lafite—but my engineering colleague and I did. Suffice to say, little was said but it was obvious what they were thinking 'who are those bastards at the end of the table?'.

Let me say clearly neither of us are experts—we simply didn't have wide enough experience as even back then first growth Bordeauxs were expensive. Nevertheless, in our minds the top wine was clear, there was little doubt as Lafite has a wonderful characteristic lilac-like nose to it, so it stood out like the proverbial.

This was a salient experience, whilst the Lafite was obvious to us inexperienced tasters it should have been blindingly so to these so-called experts.

Unfortunately, there's too many people who make a living out of peddling BS about wine, they fool enough people most of the time to develop a reputation as experts and it's this that causes most of the confusion.

There's plenty of reasonable-to-good wine about and it'd be best just to provide consumers with a minimal amount of information and let them decide for themselves, it'd lead to a lot less confusion.