$2.70 supermarket wine wins gold medal at international wine contest
odditycentral.com
odditycentral.com
Wine making is not what it used to be. At one time the difference between good wine and great wine was huge. Now with automation and know how it's possible to have great tasting wine be inexpensive.
There's also the situation where winemakers sell their excess wine to bottlers so it's very possible that a great wine is sold cheaply simply because the wine maker needs to sell the excess inventory.
This situation where a very cheap wine wins a contest is not surprising. The big difference is that the flavor of a more expensive wine is more consistent than one you buy very cheaply.
Not to say there aren't differentiators between good and bad still, but the floor has risen so high compared to what it once was.
Not really. Cheap wines are made in laboratory like conditions by experts in food chemistry, with grapes sourced and blended from a wide area and 'enhanced' with all kinds of chemicals and additives to consistency and stability. They also use plastic corks or screw corks and aren't really aged, which removes another potential source on inconsistency. More expensive wines are often made with grapes from a single vineyard and made using traditional methods and with minimal additives. This means that the resulting wine is much more susceptible to fluctuations in things like local weather conditions and other 'random' events. In fact one of the 'fun' aspects of wine is tasting how wines from the same grapes, vineyard and wine maker made 1 year apart can end up tasting really different.
They do use them: sulfites for preservation, fining agents for clarity, yeast energizers, acids and bases. But the way you phrase it, it sounds like they're making pop-tarts or chewing gum. A lot of these additives are used even by fine winemakers. Even French winemakers, who have a whole host of rules they have to follow.
Still, I'm picking on your phraseology, but not disagreeing with your point. Modern winemaking is all about control, which produces consistently good but rarely great wines. More expensive wines are more expensive in part because they risk failure -- though few take enough risks to produce a truly undrinkable wine these days.
There's nothing wrong with those "good" wines, though I'm puzzled about the cheap supermarket wine winning a contest. Cheap supermarket wines are entirely drinkable but don't even try to have the qualities that win any genuine prizes. It doesn't take a sommelier to notice that; it tastes like every other wine. Contests usually reward what stands out.
Perhaps some fine winemaker sold off surplus stock. It happens; they have a good year and don't want to dilute the value of their prize brand.
These stories keep coming up about how wine judges are easily duped, and indeed, there is plenty of chicanery surrounding wine ratings. There is a lot of snobbery, and a lot of envy around that snobbery. But there's no reason to pay a lot for a wine unless you've gotten bored with ordinary table wine.
All winemakers are capable of designing wines to a broad set of possible tastes with remarkably latitude, but money gets you way more options.
Seems pretty solvable to replace t through P or A in a barrel-aged liquor
The aging process is somewhat accelerated by temperature, but it's not a simple relationship. This is one of the stated reasons that whiskey made in hot climates (e.g. Amrut in India, Kavalan in Taiwan) tend to be aged less.
For most spirits, a lot of long-age stuff is about the extraction of wood flavors from the barrel it's in, which I'm not sure anyone's found a great way to do with pressure.
I know there's some difference in temperature though - higher temp aging, either just in a warmer area, or more normally with rum, creates very different aging conditions than normal Bourbon/Scotch/Cognac aging that's traditionally made in more temperate climates. The complaint about a lot of southern US bourbon is that it ends up uncomfortably over-oaked for its age.
The first thing to know, unless you're getting gut rot shit made from petroleum, is that all of it gets you drunk, which is what you're after. Wine, beer and liquor are lifestyle items. If they sold you this stuff on it's actual pitch you'd just grab the bottle closest to checkout and leave. So they have to differentiate themselves with lore, stories, stereotypes, whatever. But at the end of the day, it's all booze. What's the difference between a Jack Daniels drinker and a belvedere vodka drinker? How they view themselves, the type of person they want to portray themselves as and the stories the ads for the bottles tell. People will rationalize that they like it after thefact, and make all kinds of excuses to avoid admitting to themselves that it's vanity and they want to be seen doing it. Made 100% sustainably by an ancient family recipe triple distilled in copper pots using geothermal heat from a volcano in Nicaragua, its all a bunch of bullshit. Just get what tastes good to you and forget about the noise.
I make wine, as a hobby. And I'll tell you, I'd rather drink my simple as hell fruit wine than any of that smoky shit the cute girl at the grocery store tries to sell me with samples. The entire wine tasting world is a sham, I don't mean most, all of it is a giant sham. And for those of you that do wine tastings and buy it, it's easier to fool someone than to convince them that they've been fooled. Just get what tastes good to you and forget about Tue noise.
(Yes, that’s a great straight line. Let it pass.)
Moreover, it’s obvious that different drinks taste different. My wife loves vodka, hates whiskey. I like whisky, not fond of vodka. We both adore Crabbie’s hard ginger ale, which is an objectively terrible beverage (“glucose wine”) made palatable with copious amounts of sugar and ginger. I’ve got a case of it in my living room. We’re not exactly high-brow.
Sure, there’s a lot of pretentiousness in the wine world. There’s still wines I enjoy, and wines I don’t. (And sugar monstrosities I’ll even admit drinking.) I’m not in it to get drunk. And that’s why I don’t buy your nihilism.
I like that your response to a comment that boils down to “Just buy what you like” is to (in so many words) accuse the GP of being a nihilist alcoholic. Please do go on about the “objectively terrible beverage” that you keep a case of in your living room though
I know vodka is different than whiskey. They even contain different volatiles, which changes the buzz considerably, and the wood esters and things in whiskey are bad for you and give you hangovers.
In some cases it takes on the form of a phrase like "world-weary nihilism".
lol
Most of us in the developed world have ready access to a variety of alcohol free drinks if the goal isn’t to get buzzed.
For the taste? If I could get my favorite wines, Scotches and beers without the alcohol- WHILE retaining the exact same flavor- which I admit is likely impossible, I'd never go back.
Dunno about the GP, but I stopped "getting drunk" in my 20s
I love wine, I love the taste. But I don’t really know why I love the way it tastes.
Sure, there may be some flavors of non-alcoholic drinks out there, but there's a lot more types and flavors of alcohol out there for which there is no non-alcoholic equivalent.
These days, if I'm drinking anything that is alcoholic in any way, it's because of the flavor. I've never liked the feeling of loss of control that comes with being drunk. My only problem with drinking alcohol is that if you drink too much of it because you like the flavor, then you end up getting drunk.
Non-alcoholic beers are OK when compared to mass produced beers (NA Guinness for example is not a million miles from regular Guinness, if drunk cold). None of them can stand up to genuinely great beers. Non-alcoholic wines are way way behind, and way inferior to even cheap wines. NA gin tastes very little like gin if you drink it straight, but can be used to make some very nice non-alcoholic mixed drinks. In fact the only space making serious progress on non-alcoholic drinks is the cocktail space and there are many bars out there where their NA cocktails can comfortably hold their own against their alcoholic counterpart.
In the same way I drink coffee for the taste, decaf even is often not the same.
That's not the same issue here.
And when it comes to soft drink, I can actually taste the difference between the caffeinated stuff and decaf. My mom ran that double-blind test on me when I was younger, where I was not exactly a willing participant. When I proved to her that I could actually taste the difference, she stopped trying to run double blind experiments on me.
I know this, and I still just paid thousands of dollars on a rock for my future wife's finger ;-).
Just kidding. But try to resell it, and you'll notice a discrepancy that you've not seen in hardly any other product outside of NFTs. Diamonds may be forever, but their resale value sure isn't.
Assuming a ring is important to you the only things you really need is a metal that's sufficiently soft so it'll be comfortable to wear 24/7, won't rust, and (optionally) some stones you think look cool. My engagement ring is alexandrite and moonstone because I thought the color changing was cool. The reaction I get from people who see it is this weird combination of "wow that's so pretty" and "for some reason I don't think I'm allowed to do that for myself."
A substantial amount of wine is consumed at lunchtime by workers who most definitely don't want to get drunk, because they are due back at work. Wine is also consumed at monasteries by monks who are forbidden drunkenness. This beverage is consumed in more contexts than just for the alcohol's effects.
I've heard the same for many historical wineries.
But Orval is doing this? Westmalle? Westvleteren?
when I got into whiskey-tasting, I noticed that really cheap stuff (<20€ per bottle) always tastes bad, and average priced whisky (~50€) usually tastes good, and even comes with a lot of variety. If you go beyond that (>200€), you'll get the stuff beyond the taste, like exclusivity.
But here is the thing: whisky drinkers don't hide, that higher price tags don't come from the taste. E.g. Stuff like single casks are explicitly about being exclusive.
For me the fun with whisky tasting comes from exploring the taste, and trying to put it into words. It's less about "tasting good" and more about "trying out a new sense".
Once every couple years this happens and somehow it invalidates all the nuance in the winemaking world. You premise of getting what taste good is the right approach. Everything else is noise is unnecessary.
There's a difference when a wineyard switches winemaster, or start using frappato to substitute for cab due to global warming. Or the 20/21 chianti classico is so different in profile than the rest of the previous years that's it's shaping up to what might be a golden vintage. or how 2020 from napa just isnt worth risking due to smoke taint. Or back in the 90s how mondavi and Michel Rolland almost ruined french wine due to everything being tailored chemi-made to be strong and oaky.
There're stories yes. There're also technicals. And experimentations. Just like every other sector from tech to fashion.
I think that's a hugely underrated point. Personally I really like devils cut beam as a cheap tasty option, and I much prefer it over a lot of the $100-200 options.
Go with what tastes good to you. Price is loosely correlated at best with "tasty".
Yes, price points can be ridiculous. A $60 bottle can be better than $1,000 bottle EASILY, because a lot of it is name recognition, rarity, etc. and these medals means almost nothing. Look for brand, region, winemaker, etc. and you can repeat with success.
Disclaimer: I'm fine with cheap wine (~$20/bottle) that's good, and I buy it often. Just like I don't eat at "Michelin Star" restaurants every day.
So yes junk wine is junk, but not all cheap wine is junk.
I do however expect for this particular instance, they spent a lot of time finding a particularly wonderful €3 wine - while the vast majority at this price probably are distinctly less good.
The article says the opposite:
> There were plenty of wines under €3 to choose from, but they decided to go with the cheapest and worst-tasting one they could find. a €2.50 bottle was selected and then disguised it as a premium product by naming it ‘Chateau Colombier’ and creating a more eye-catching label.
A big one is complexity. Wines with a complex flavour profile (ie lots of different flavours) are generally judged as better than wines with a simple flavour profile. Another is length of finish. How long does a pleasant flavour linger in the mouth after swallowing. You can also judge how close the wine is to how a wine of that type is 'supposed' to taste, and how well the wine maker managed to achieve what they where trying to achieve. You might not particularly like Chianti, but you can still judge if the wine you are drinking is a really well made Chianti.
It seems the people doing the “prank” intended to show that a lot of these contests are not legitimate and just an opportunity for the organizers to make some money.
It would be interesting to see whether a legitimate contest that did blind taste tests would fall for such a trick.
In a lot of alcohol tasting competitions (including Gilbert & Gaillard), the scale actually goes Double Gold, Gold, Silver, Bronze. A gold medal in itself doesn't actually mean what you might think it should (i.e., best in class), it's basically so you can sell stickers to put on bottles to fool buyers who don't know the specifics of how these competitions are scored. Broadly, I would interpret Double Gold as "might be good", Gold as "might not suck", and Silver/Bronze as "probably pretty bad since they're marketing their participation ribbons".
An example from the spirits world: the San Francisco Spirits Competition has a 119 page list of results with medals (https://www.sfspiritscomp.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/202...). There's maybe 1-2 Double Golds per page. GABF, the big beer festival, doesn't award Double Golds, but their categories are specific enough that they awarded 100 Gold medals last year.
G&G has this wine listed on their site 3 times. I'm not sure which one is accurate, but the scores are from 85-88. Here's what wine-searcher (a big shopping portal/aggregator for wine) says about the distribution of G&G's ratings:
"Gilbert & Gaillard's wine scores on Wine-Searcher: Score range: 85 – 100 points 50% fall between: 86 – 90 points Average score: 88.5 points"
So basically, they rated it as below average on a scale that inflates ratings to the point where almost everything is marketable.
Finally, according to G&G's rules, the wines are tasted blind. The article implies that they're not, but doesn't actually say it.
"Prior to tasting, they [the wine samples] are placed in identical packaging that conceals their shape and guarantees anonymity." https://vigneron.gilbertgaillard.com/ruleChallenge/reglement...
I know nothing about this specific competition, but there's no real need to try to influence a nonblind judge given how the deck is already stacked.
If you’re in Napa, check out the wine making thing. It’s lots of fun. https://www.conncreek.com/visit
It’s interesting that one group found it worst tasting, while another found it exceptional. Looks like both suck, and maybe the wine was not the best but not the worst either.
Just like the judges were duped into awarding this wine, the first group also thought this was worst tasting because it was the cheapest.
Bad wine clearly stands out as bad. Bad wine doesn’t mean “wine you don’t like”. It means “technically flawed wine such that even if you liked this wine you would be very unlikely to prefer it to others in its category”.
These competitions are pay-to-play so if they make it too hard to win, people will stop playing and they won't get paid.
OK so they got a famous and trusted sommelier to lie for their story. What does that prove?
Many industries have these "contests". Photography publications, for example, run contests that collect entry fees, and winners get featured in the publication. There are writing contests run the same way. It gives the publication content, and instead of paying artists they charge them money.
If I wasn't sure of the grape, sure I might not confidently say if it's red or white. Because other than visually that isn't really as big a deal as it naïvely seems? Wine doesn't taste 'red' or 'white' it has different flavours and some grapes are red and others are white, but that's really only a visual difference.
(Ok fine some flavours or textures are so much more common in one vs the other that it might allow a solid guess of the colour even if you had no idea of the grape - 'minerally' or 'bready'/'yeasty' tasting/smelling is probably white; very tannic is probably red. But I think my point stands, it's pretty meaningless, and certainty will come from identifying something more specific, and then knowing what colour that is, to satisfy the naïve hater that thinks that's the most important trait.)
And some are blends of both, but we'd call the result white or red according to what dominates. Champagne for example.
I'm not sure what sort of high-quality wine you drink, cause I drink cheap stuff, and I can 100% tell the difference between a pinot noir and pinot grigio.
Red vs. white isn't a coke vs pepsi thing, it's a coke vs mountain dew.
But it’s obviously true that different wines taste different. This is easy (and fun) to test at home.
It's a bad argument that relies on muddling the objective and the subjective. Yes, in a totally blind tasting, people can be surprised by what they think something is. But if I walk into a wine bar, and tell them I like red wines that are dry and have red fruit flavors, they can likely give me something I'll enjoy. If they tell me that there's a white wine that they think I'll like because of that explanation, then sweet, that sounds cool and different. It doesn't mean that hurr durr all wine is the same.
Bro, what? I hardly drink wine, and couldn't tell you whether a red wine is the finest red wine ever or the shittiest, and likewise for white wines, but I can absolutely tell you whether a wine is red or white. Don't know what the hell wines you're drinking.
The lack of tannins, malolactic fermentation, and often the lack of oak will make it pretty obvious they are different. It's like saying you can't taste the difference between a Guiness and a Bud, because you've never had them before? Maybe you don't know which is which with a blindfold on, but you can taste the difference.
My point is mostly about the $3-10 wines which have pretty simple notes. They have very particular styles and relatively restricted grape varietals due to cost, availability, and customer expectations. I'm sure for the right money a good winemaker could take the right white grape and make it taste like a cheap red without the color (lots of skin contact, malolactic fermentation, heavy oak, and some age. On the other spectrum, I'm sure you could screw up and make any wine/grape so terrible you couldn't tell what it came from.
There are also people who couldn't tell the difference between a pilsner and an ale, I suppose.
There are competitions all around the world where you can go and literally watch people doing this in real time. Anybody can learn to fairly reliably identify 5-6 of most common grapes in a blind tasting with a bit of practice.
That doesn't mean I can't distinguish two songs, or that I can't like one song and dislike another.
People may not be able to identify wine tastes very accurately, but that doesn't mean that "anyone telling you they can taste the difference, even between red and white wine, is lying". Obviously there are differences in taste between different wines, and that statement is so utterly bizarre and so obviously untrue it makes me wonder if you have ever tasted more than one bottle of wine.