Is Wine Bullshit?
priceonomics.com
priceonomics.com
One thing I know, though, is that I am getting sick and tired of the "tinted the white wine red and fooled them all" anecdote as it has very little substance.
Any wine, white or red, can express a huge range of flavor and texture, etc., and there is absolutely no reason to suspect a "red" wine is actually a white wine. You'll note that the study does not indicate the testers thought it was a great red wine, or any particular red wine - just that they did not question it was red. That's not nearly the indictment it's made out to be. In fact, it's not an indictment at all.
Assigning too much value, or "enjoyment" to price ? Fair critique. Describing wines with bizarre descriptors like "asphalt" ? Fair critique. Dubious claims of "terroir" ? Fair critique.
But the "fooled them with white wine" test is meaningless.
For example, if I was told I was drinking milk from a glass but it was actually filled with beer, I would probably not take more than the first drink even though I really like beer. This example is a bit far but I'm just saying expectation means a lot.
I had a similar mishap once with orange juice. It caused me to vomit, even though the orange juice was perfectly fine. I don't even like milk.
Unless you have specific reasons to suspect foul play, your probability would be very very near 1 (certainty). Now, overcoming this near-certainty with our poorest senses of all, taste and smell, is quite difficult.
The point is that the quality of the wine does not seem to be objective, and neither are the descriptors used (oaky flavour, etc.)
I mean, it is subjective in the same sense that the sky being blue is a subjective thing. In other words, a philosophical debate over qualia.
But if you ever had a wine-tasting dinner with a large company of people, with a ranked progression of wines, you would not doubt that certain qualities of wine are absolutely shared amongst almost everyone who drinks them.
I'm fairly confident I couldn't tell a merlot from a cabernet, blind, from a glass. But that doesn't mean one wine doesn't taste nicer than another, or goes better with a particular dish. And that's what I was alluding to.
> They described the red in language typical of reds and the white in language typical of whites.
But since you have not tested this hypothesis at all, and have no evidence to back up your claims (like they do), I'm not sure why you think your opinion of bullshit is relevant.
Look at the setup of their experiment. They made people say stuff about the wine they were drinking. Unsurprisingly, they found people used "red" words for wine dyed red and "white" words for un-dyed wine. This is not a surprising result. The effect is called "priming" and it has been known for a long time.
It doesn't say anything about being able to taste the difference between red wine and white wine. If you do a blind folded taste test, I can guarantee you you can tell the difference. And if you happen to know red wine tends to be less acidic and more astringent than white wine, I can also guarantee you will be able to pick out which is which.
"But that didn’t stop the experts from describing the “red” wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert said that it was “jammy,” while another enjoyed its “crushed red fruit."
It's often used to describe this particular flavour in yogourts or other things like that, in France. I can imagine the exact taste just fine.
The studies that conclude that tasters are no good at differentiating wine seem to presuppose that price is a good indication of quality to begin with, and when an expert picks a cheaper wine over a more expensive one they fail to consider the possibility that the problem is with that assumption rather than the expert's tasting ability.
Edit: TFA (which I didn't R :) makes the point that there seems to be little correlation between price/qual. But it's worth emphasising this point anyway, I think.
Somehow, the results were transformed into, "Wine experts cannot tell the difference between red and white wine!" but that's not a thesis supported by the original paper. What we can conclude is that French undergrads sometimes use similar words to describe both red wines and red-tinted white wines... and that's about it.
[1]: http://www.stanford.edu/class/linguist62n/morrot01colorofodo...
The paper implies that they sampled "experts", when they really just sampled "students" or "disciples". Quite the difference.
(Besides, it's dramatic how scientific research keeps oversampling university undergraduates to such a large extent, purely out of practicality.)
Whenever I drink, that's the ratio I'm targeting as well :)
Generally all the 'dark cherry'/'tobacco'/'plum' etc. flavors are kind of meaningless to me. I rarely detect anything I think I can pick out, I just tend to decide if I like the taste or not. Usually the nicer the wine smells, the better it tastes, sometimes its 'fruit forward' (sweet), sometimes it's 'tannic' (bitter acid) and sometimes it just burns (alcohol content).
What I believe is bullshit is the people trying to describe flavors in a wine and extrapolate quality from that. If you like a wine, buy it, if you don't, don't. I enjoy some cheaper wines (Chariot Red at Trader Joe's is a fine value for about $5 imho), but my own tasting notes do indicate some $60 bottles of Pinot Noir taste way better to me than average. However, there are also some $60 and $150 bottles I don't think are very good.
As for wines tasting alike, if you can't taste a difference between grape varieties, I guess stick to Charles Shaw and enjoy. I wouldn't be surprised that the experts have a hard time with multiple tastings, as the wine taste changes with exposure to oxygen, on top of the tiring palate.
One thing I have noticed about wine though is that even with a bottle of wine that I really like, the next bottle I get of the same vintage might be terrible. What the article does not mention is how important environmental conditions are for storing wine and how a case of wine can sometimes get ruined in shipping, sitting on a store shelf or not allowed to breathe properly.
Because of the amount of variation in wine quality I have adopted the habit of just buying $6 - $15 bottles and when I find something I like, I stick with it until I stop liking it. If it's a special occasion, I will put my faith in a nicer brand that I have tried and liked before that I believe will pair well with whatever food is being served but for the most part, buying expensive wines is too much of a gamble for me. Especially considering that my wine palate is not much more complex than your 3-star system.
I confess to having not RTFM'd, but when I made my first (and to date, only) batch of Barolo and tasted it way too early, my comment to a friend was "I don't think it should taste like asphalt." His reply was a link to the review of an expensive Barolo that contained the phrase "has notes of tar."
Red wines are red because when they ferment the juice, they leave the grape peels in the barrel. The peel's color is what give a wine that dark red color hue. (Try squeezing the juice out of red grapes. You'll find that the outcome doesn't have the same color as red wine!)
Now, peels have things called "tannins" which give fruit peels their bitter flavor.
If you've ever had tea which was steeped for a very long time, and is thus very bitter, you are tasting tannins.
Which is an interesting point - we would all easily tell the difference between strongly-brewed tea and mild tea. Or coffee. And we might have a preference for one versus the other.
The taste of wine - being that it is "brewed" in grape skins - is affected in an identical way! But we never ask "is tea bullshit?" because we can all very well tell the difference between certain flavors of tea.
This is why the "red food coloring" part gets to me. A red wine that was lightly steeped is likely to taste similar to a white wine! There's not enough information to know.
This is not to say that marketing, color, price, etc are not huge factors in the enjoyment of wine.
But at the end of the day, the taste of wine is affected by the same things that would affect any other fruit or leaf-based food, so the idea that wine is any more bullshit than eggs, maple syrup, or tea doesn't really coincide with our personal experiences.
I'm a fan of Scotch whiskey, and I think Johnny Walker Blue Label is usually worth the price. Would it be worth it to someone who doesn't already enjoy Scotch? Absolutely not; it'd taste like turpentine, and turpentine is cheap.
I'm also a fan of very dark beer. Is Young's Double Chocolate Stout bullshit? Sure as hell not to me, but my girlfriend would probably tell you it's awful shit, so clearly to her it is.
So much of so many things is subjective. This is one of them, and it's one of those times where your opinion, my opinion, and everyone else's opinion is worth exactly dick (and yet they're all worth exactly the same amount of dick). If you like it as much as the person who priced it, then yeah, perhaps it's worth it to you; if not, then yeah, it's bullshit. To you. Just don't try to declare that particular amount as an objective measurement. :)
Yes, but even subjective judgements are invalid if they're not based on objective differences.
If you reliably prefer white wines in blind tastings and I reliably prefer reds, that's valid. But if we both claim a preference but can't actually identify which is which, our preferences themselves are invalid.
Or at least, we've learned that our true preference is "I like the experience of tasting a wine that I have seen is X color."
Perhaps the truth is sometimes "I enjoy consuming something that I have been told is expensive." It would at least be enlightening to know that about ourselves.
I disagree here... subjectivity is intrinsically at odds with objectivity. They may sometimes work together (mostly in "I agree with you about this opinion for this reason that both of us can clearly observe"), but calling something subjective "invalid" is calling an opinion invalid. It can't be unless you've decided to have an opinion about a fact (e.g. "I have decided that this spoon, which is clearly silver, is actually copper").
Maybe I wasn't clear? Suppose your opinion is "wines which are red (objective) are tastier (subjective)." If you cannot even identify red wines by taste, you clearly, provably, do not prefer the taste of red wines.
There may be something else about the visual experience, social prestige, etc that you like about drinking red wine, but as far as taste, you are fooling yourself. Your opinion about the taste is invalid in the sense that it isn't about what you claim it is.
What's more interesting is determining which domains are highly correlated (human beauty in current western culture), and which are poorly so (blind wine taste). And that assessment can be backed by much more than uninformed personal opinion.
There's a sort of masochism in many of us that results in things that are slightly painful -- e.g. consuming capsaicin -- being pleasurable. Many people are also drawn to abnormalities in human and other physiques and other statistical oddities in nature for various reasons.
Then there are people who perceive the world differently (e.g. the colorblind, the blind, the deaf) who perceive the same things very differently and will thus have differently-formed subjective experiences of the same things as 'standard' humans.
Yes, subjective ratings can correlate. However, that does not mean they're any closer to objective, or any closer to validity or invalidity.
Pure subjectivity means nobody else agrees. Pure objectivity means everybody else agrees.
Not one single beer enthusiast is going to confuse a Rochefort with a Dogfish Head IPA. Doesn't matter what bottle it comes in, or if you are blindfolded or what. Same thing with Laphroaig and Dewers. There are simply different drinks.
Now it is entirely possible, probable even, that marketing, labeling and price has an effect on which beers or scotches you identify as good, but that's different from treating things that are indistinguishable as distinguishable.
Every culture has rules about how you wave your banner and show people how into that culture you are. With wine culture, it seems a lot of that is through price and rarity. With beer, that sometimes comes into play, but it's equally likely to be with IBU, darkness, or local expertise.
I'm not a fan of the hops-gamesmanship that goes on, but I do like that beer culture celebrates variety and small breweries as much as it does "famous", exclusive beers. For every Rochefort, there are ten Abitas, Lagunitases, etc. that are just as well loved.
Their generic bottles (e.g. 'Australian Red'/'Spanish White' or something like that) are pretty good for the price. Most are under £5.
A friend of mine makes wine, here in SF bay. My wife and I splurge the $30 on his blended white, because we so rarely find white wines that excite us like his does. Are we overpaying? As an occasional treat, it is nice to know you will get something we will really like, rather than being so "clever" as to save money and not get a truly enjoyable glass with our meal.
That's true in the US, but not necessarily worldwide.
A winery is a brand, they build a strong brand by consistently producing good tasting wine (also: advertising, PR, etc). So, when you pay top dollar you should have an increased likelihood of enjoying the wine just bought. It doesn't mean you will though.
On the flip side, cheap wines may actually taste great. They just haven't built up a reputation for that yet, maybe if they do things right their price per bottle will triple over the next 3 years. You never know.
I think this explains most of the price disparity within a certain range... let's say between $0-$150 / bottle. Anything priced above that range, is probably more driven by something else. Could be more advertising, "collectors" bidding the price up, limited production, etc. - for the most part it's "irrational" (for lack of a better word) and has nothing to do with taste.
Just looking at the difference between left and right bank prices and a complete lack if difference in quality is telling.
Also that the 5 first growth producers are rated as such for historical reasons and no-one gets into the exclusive club - and yet Premier Cru is used as an indication of quality in wine.
Quality in wine was real back when the idea of hygiene in producing wine and the knowledge of wine making was not shared and access to labs was limited. No longer and so unless you're screwing up a well known process, you're going to get it pretty darn right.
So wine quality is bullshit, but is wine bullshit? I don't think so. Lets put it this way: If you fly first-class, there's something a little more than the bigger seats and better food that you enjoy. It's the idea of flying first class.
And so while a bottle from most decent chateaux on the right bank may be of equal quality to the left bank (left bank is where all the major chateaux are based) and yet much cheaper, you're still going to really enjoy the idea that you're drinking a bottle of 1990 Margaux as several connoisseurs jealously watch your every sip and explain how you're drinking one of the best vintages of one of the 5 best chateaux in the world.
So when the journalists in 2013 trot it out and claim it is an award winning wine for $2, that shows instantly the journalist knows absolutely nothing about the wine market.
Since this happens in the opening paragraph in this article, it saves a lot of time reading.
Lots of people like some accessible, simple tasty wine. Some keep drinking it, others develop a taste for some other wine based on their initial like of the first wine. Some of that group then develop another taste based on the second (which was based on the first), and so on. The point is that by getting one wine a couple times, you tire of it, and it also prepares you palette/preferences to really like something that has some continuities and some contrasts with it. It seems like the audience narrows as you go through each step, partially because you probably won't appreciate the Nth wine until you have gone through the others, in order more or less. As you go along this chain, you are more willing to pay higher and higher the further you go.
Some other chains I could think of like this (minus the "paying more as you go" where it doesn't really apply): Music genres, Coffee (almost any food really), Fetish porn, Text editors, so many more...
What is this concept called?
- Look for a screw-cap bottle of wine priced about $14-18. This price point gets you a bottle that is likely worth the extra few bucks over the bottom-tier pricing ($2-$12 range) and which is able to avoid having to use a cork to appear sophisticated. Screw-tops are associated with cheap wine, so any wine that has one and still commands a market price above bargain basement ($2-$10) is likely decent.
- Also, European countries heavily subsidize the wine industry, so it's possible to get great wine for around €8. In America those might end up costing $15-$20 but they are still a better value than most $30-$40 American wine (which is overpriced b/c of the super expensive real estate it is grown on and lack of subsidy).
If you boycott expensive wine, should you also avoid sushi and seafood restaurants because you know that cheap fish can be just as enjoyable?
Inexpensive fish might be just as enjoyable, but what about one of the most common varieties of cheap fish- that is to say, week-old fish? Is it just as enjoyable?
Oh, and last thought- how can people be tricked into thinking a white is a red? I can see the "floral hints" and "buttery accents" being easy to confuse, but the reds I like are extremely dry, and every white I've ever had is sweet and sticky, sometimes even saccharine. Are there whites and reds that blur this boundary?
What do you mean by harsher drinks? I can (and do, fondly) drink whiskey straight but I can't get into the taste of red wine.
As for not enjoying the taste, my tongue is not yours, but is your issue simply with the flavor? Or do you find it too bitter/alcoholic? If it was the former, that's a matter of taste. If it was the latter, I would indeed be surprised given your affection for whiskey.
I don't know why the article makes such a big deal about mistaking a red for a white. For example, I could very easily mistake a red lambrusco for a white champagne - they taste pretty similar.
A connoisseur is someone who can say "I don't like it, but it's good."
This is what's meant by good taste. If you develop your taste in a particular subject, you can easily make the good/bad objective distinction, without letting like/dislike mislead you.
Do you mean something along the lines of "precise"? Like, "I don't like this, but it is exactly as its maker intended it to be."? I wouldn't describe such things as "good".
This is a trend I've noticed particularly on Reddit, but it's probably growing elsewhere too. As if everything is purely subjective, and we cannot talk about objective quality at all.
It's a childish view being literally unable to look beyond "I like it", and it's anti-intellectual bullshit, a total rejection of the value of expertise and experience.
This. Well said. Worth repeating.
What I've struggled with in this thread is how to explain such value to those holding the view. "I can't" just doesn't cut it for me; I deeply want to share the pleasures of fine wines, coffee, sushi, steak, etc. ... but it's strange to face a perspective that denies something, and does so in a way which seems to beg me to beat it into them.
"Good" is the language of opinion, and is inherently a subjective matter. If you want to speak about qualities like "it is exactly as its maker intended it to be" or critical acclaim, then there is less presuming language that you can use to do that.
I think that the failure to realize this accounts for a large part of why people talk of 'wine "snobs"' or 'movie "snobs"'.
Would you object to somebody saying "The Godfather Part II was not that good" on the grounds that it was critically acclaimed? I think surely not.
Think of dog shows. Regardless of how you think your dog looks best, the judges are still looking for a defined perfection that may not be to their choosing.
The problem enters when people start adopting the language of subjectivity and opinion to describe these things. That is when people start calling them "snobs".
I believe connoisseurs also equate liking things with them being good, they're just less naive about it and don't necessarily proclaim universal goodness. I mean, did Roger Ebert ever give 4 stars to a movie he didn't like?
Often. He frequently made clear on the point that he gave high ratings to movies which achieved what they set out to do, and did so with skill ... even if he didn't particularly "like" it.
No, I don't remember a suitable example off hand. ...though the closest I do recall is The Human Centipede: he refused to give it an N-star rating at all, because it earned 4 stars for its quality for achieving what it set out to do, and zero stars because it was so hideously offensive nobody should see it; unable to reconcile the two, he just didn't.
ETA: That's summarizing what I recall him writing about it, which includes material beyond the official review thereof.
> I am required to award stars to movies I review. This time, I refuse to do it. The star rating system is unsuited to this film. Is the movie good? Is it bad? Does it matter? It is what it is and occupies a world where the stars don't shine.
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-human-centipede-2010
I haven't read most of Ebert's reviews, but I would be quite surprised to read a 4-star review in which he clearly expresses that he didn't like the movie. Maybe Ebert is not typical of connoisseurs? He did say that giving 4 stars to Superman is not the same as giving 4 stars to Ben Hur (or something similar), but he still liked both of them.
I assume you're a connoisseur of something. Pick two things that you dislike, one that is good, one that is bad. Do you dislike them equally?
Take for example sushi. Yes I'm sure there are plenty of sushi restaurants that substitute cheaper fish when they think their customers won't notice. But these aren't going to be particularly good sushi restaurants to begin with, I'd wager. If you go into a really good sushi restaurant, and order Omakase (where you sit at the bar and the sushi chef serves you whatever he wants to), you're going to get the best fish the restaurant has, and you're really going to taste the difference.
Wine, sushi, coffee, steak ... all certainly revel in their subjective "I like it" properties, but also have discernible properties which few have sampled & studied enough to have reliable understanding and meaningful opinions on. The better wines I've had usually correspond to higher prices. Omakase (thanks for the tip) is served by someone who knows why, objectively, it will taste better. Few people have had really good coffee (let me roast & brew you a cup), so they don't know that such flavors can even exist, why they occur, and don't consider making anything of it when experienced unexpected (beyond a momentary "hey, that's good"). Steakhouse offerings can be indistinguishable from what comes off the backyard grill ... or can be moments of enlightenment (my word that one at Stoney River 6 years ago was incredible, and the one that preceded it at the same sitting was worth sending back for replacement).
The problem with such popular "$5 and $500 wines are indistinguishable" pronouncements is they rally people around ignorance. While, sure, poor expensive wines and cheap good ones exist, most people don't understand what they're tasting enough to develop an appreciation thereof. There are objective differences, and once those are understood your whole perspective on "good" changes.
Uh, yeah. Sure. I'll just head to my local grocer and grab whatever cheap salmon they've got sitting out, take it home, and make nigiri out of it.
You'll be paying my medical bills, right?
Still here three decades later.
Not everything is going to kill you.
Edit: Even if so, I don't really care. Your attitude is the same one people use to justify all sorts of uselessly stupid things right up until it hurts them or someone they love, then suddenly they're not so tough.
I've been around a bit and the whole extreme food hygiene thing is pretty much irrelevant in most of the world.
This is not "survivor bias". That's an arrogant term used to deride people.
For reference, I also tend to eat mushrooms and plants I find (I know what I'm doing in that department).
Your local grocer's counter is a disappointment since they've basically taken all of the lovely seafood that was individually quick-frozen at the source and thawed it out for god knows how long. That shrimp sitting behind plexiglass stinking the place up? It came to them in a bag frozen just like the bag sitting in the freezer case just to the left. It will be cheaper and higher quality if you buy the bag of individually quick-frozen (IQF) shrimp.
If you live on a coast and go to a local fish monger then you can get better results. But even your fancy grocers are thawing pre-frozen shrimp unnecessarily.
It saddens me that they have not penetrated the market as expected. I am still hopeful they will find another feature to make their site reap the well deserved rewards.
Each episode is a blind taste teste of a single wine with 4 experts who are asked to guess the varietal, country, region, year and price. They don't always get it right, but they're significantly more accurate than you would expect if wine was a hoax.
Some consumers will say yes, it's bullshit! They will buy the cheapest bottle that tastes decent enough to drink on a regular basis. Both the budget of the average consumer and their lack of interest in becoming experts on a drink will create an expanded market of low-priced wines.
Then there will be those that say, no, it's definitely not bullshit! Their higher income combined with the belief that there's intrinsic undefinable value to wines produced a certain way will create a separate market for high-end wines. The higher prices they pay offsets the smaller market.
Wine is both bullshit and not bullshit at the same time, and it can stay that way forever because of the two separate motivations of its consumers and the two subtly distinct markets. Regardless of any other factors people are not going to stop drinking wine anytime soon (especially considering putting a different label on will change how it's observed)
I'd wager there's a whole array of products like this, for example designer clothes vs bargain clothes. At the end of the day you just need to keep from being naked.
Also, you can only put so much stock into what other people or studies say. Ultimately, you have to take the dive and try things out for yourself. What I mean is, by 2 buck chuck, and test it against $10 wines, and $10 wines against $100 wines, etc... I've done this many times not just with wines, but coffees, cheeses, tomatoes, etc... After all this, I've concluded that the price difference isn't worth it, and whatever differences there are is very subjective to me.
Real definition: the difference between good wines and bad wines is the complexity of the flavor. Crap wines usually have a very narrow and uncomplicated flavor profile, wines that are more likely to be enjoyed have more complex profiles. What makes it confusing is that different kinds of wines have radically different flavor profiles: a Pinot Noir has a "lighter flavor" than a Cabernet Sauvignon. The $2 a gallon wines at the local gas station are unlikely to have a complex flavor profile, and that's why people call them "crap".
Also, contrary to popular belief, wine blends aren't necessarily a sign of a bad wine, due to local soil conditions (which provide different nutrient ratios and can change the flavor profile quite a bit) some varieties of grapes grow fine, but don't produce the desired complex flavor profile. Vintners blends wines from several sources like a recipe to "build up" the flavor profile they wish for.
To learn to drink wine, simply try lots of them, try them by themselves and with different foods. Some are better paired with certain foods (the food diminishes or accents certain parts of the wine's flavor), or by themselves. Don't spend lots of money on wine, the "sweet" spot to me for good wines tends to be between $7-$14 per 750ml at the store (the exact same wines will be about 3x that at a restaurant). Costco seems to be about the cheapest place to buy good wines, a $10 wine there is consistently $12-15 elsewhere. If you go to a winery, expect to pay around $20-30 for a bottle. Find what you like and TADA! You've found a good wine.
There are essentially two kinds of wineries, ones that grow their own grapes, and ones that buy grapes from other farms and ferment the wine themselves. Most wineries will also buy wines from other local wineries for their blends. There's nothing wrong with it and it's just how winemaking works.
Wine drinking is an acquired taste, many wines might be harsh or unpleasant on first sip, and by the bottom of the glass sublime. The taste might change a bit as you work your way through a bottle. When you read that wine has "hints of spice and plums" or whatever, it's just a way of describing the profile to you and what you might be able to expect. "Plum" might describe a deep fruity flavor (not sweet), "tobacco" describes some of the bitter tannins that come from the skins.
Wines also change flavor as they sit in storage. Some wines don't develop their full flavor profile until a couple years after they're bottled. Some wines are intended to be enjoyed almost immediately (Nouveaus).
Try wines from different places, the normal French styles are popular, but there are some incredibly good local varieties that aren't well known outside of their home countries (and are usually very cheap). Spain and Italy in particular have a rich and complex wine culture easily as great as France. Many popular varieties are also grown in places outside of France. California for example grows lots of traditional French varieties. Areas not necessarily known for good wine might actually mean that they don't have the right kind of soil or climate to grow these popular varieties. Virginia, for example, is too wet to grow really good Cabernets, but there are almost entirely unknown grapes bred just for Virginia that are excellent.
Wine glasses are intended for your nose rather than your tongue. They're designed as recognition that about half of our flavor comes from our noses, so different shapes of the glass are intended to help deliver vaporizing parts of the wine to your nose to help build up the flavor profile.
Wine drinking is not snobby, in places with a very long wine drinking history, wine is the normal table drink. It's nothing unusual to sit down in a reasonably priced family restaurant, order a plate of the local whatever and get a 500ml carafe of house wine as part of the order instead of water. It probably won't be great wine (might even be cut with a bit of water), but it'll go fine with the meal. In history, wine was the "safe" alternative to water, priests, construction workers, delivery men, soldiers, etc. all drank wine as part of their normal day-to-day.
Think nothing of sitting outside on your porch with a bottle of Merlot and a red plastic solo cup if you enjoy it.
A few of my personal favorites (all between $9-14 at Costco):
http://www.wine.com/v6/Penfolds-Koonunga-Hill-Shiraz-Caberne...
http://www.wine.com/v6/Santa-Rita-Reserva-Cabernet-Sauvignon...
http://www.winesu.com/zaccagnini-montepulciano.html
http://www.wine.com/v6/Excelsior-Cabernet-Sauvignon-2010/win... (about $6 at Costco with a twist off top!)
Most people like simple wines better, which is in part why less expensive wines usually do better in these studies. Similar studies show that people like McDonalds-esque food more than anything else, because it's mostly just fat and salt, but that doesn't mean that the entire food industry is a conspiracy either.
For people like that, I usually recommend some decent, but reasonably priced South African wines (which tend to be a bit sweet).
At least they're drinking wine ;)
Not sure what I would recommend to new wine drinkers at this point, maybe dry Riesling. Lots of decent slightly sweet wines that are good chilled for the summer ;)
Why are they drinking wine if they don't like wine? What's the context for that?
They are used more and more in low-mid range of wines in France, and nobody complains about it.
Still it does not cut it for more than a year or two of storage.
Of course, 4 or 5 Euros in France usually does the trick for table wine (with a real cork to boot); imagine in the States the same bottle will run $25+
I don't like the plastic corks myself, they seem inordinately hard to pull out of the bottle.
But plastic corks will probably stick around, because they seem to give folks the illusion that they are doing something special when they open the bottle.
I've had expensive bottles I thought were 'meh', and cheap bottles I thought were the greatest thing ever. So I'll agree that wine price is determined by a number of factors, the least of which is flavor.
No, buying $2000 bottles of wine probably is not worth it in terms of maximizing any utility function, but i would argue it is precisely the point.
It maximizes the "Look at me, bitches - I'm so rich I can spend $2000 on wine" utility function.
Those $300-$400 bottles are, IMO, complete bullshit compared to most $100 bottles, which are in turn bullshit compared to many $50 bottles (I've been a Williams-Selyem subscriber for a decade now)... which are in turn bullshit to a ton of great cheap wine from S. America.
I also like two (err, $3?) buck chuck.
And vodka.
Roman Weil (an accounting professor who decided he was more interested in wine than FASB rules) did some empirical analysis on the topic. Here's a paper where he finds that most people can't tell a good year from a bad year on similar wines.
http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/roman.weil/research/Parker-P...
It isn't just that prefer the wrong one, it's that they can't tell the difference. He's done similar studies on "Reserve" wines versus regular, and again most people can't tell the difference, and the ones who do don't necessarily like the better one. He also demonstrated that people can't identify wine based on the tasting notes.
Does this mean wine's not worth drinking? Certainly not. But it encourages a little humility.
The same applies here. Especially with such sensationalised and over generalizing headline.
Drink your wine and enjoy it, you don't need to go to the higher priced wines.
And anybody should be able to tell a $2 wine apart from a $10 one (or better, alcoholic grape juice from wine)
For any headline which asks a yes/no question, the correct answer is always "no."
So is beer, whiskey, fashion, electronic gadgets, and lots of other things. But our perception being altered is part of the experience, and if you need to know that it cost a bit more to do it then good for you and if you get your kicks knowing that it cost just a few dollars then thats fine too.
What's remarkable about wine is you're paying extra not for vanity or features (unless it's for a date or a gift) but for some added taste quality that is probably skewed by knowing the price of the bottle: your brain has the expectation that more expensive wine actually tastes better, so your paying for something that may not even be there, and yet wine drinkers seldom feel enough buyers remorse to stop buying expensive wines.
When else would you get wine? I don't think I've ever bought wine that wasn't for a social occasion (except in college, but then I bought the cheapest stuff I could find).
Some people like drinking it. They'll have a glass or two after a long day at work. But that probably means half a bottle of wine.
This kind of long term, regular, drinking of not-excessive amounts is worrying, especially among women. They don't see it as harmful, when it probably is.
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-16000520)
> Hospital consultants in north-east England have reported seeing an "epidemic" in the number of people in their early 30s with alcoholic liver disease.
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-15129887) - this article talks about units of alcohol. 1 unit of wine is 125 ml at 8% ABV. This is a tiny glass of weak wine. Most wine is at least 10% ABV, or stronger, and a normal glass would be 175 ml or 200 ml. (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Units_of_alcohol_cha...)
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-20410378)
etc etc.
A wine's price indicates three things:
1. Its cost of production. An ice wine, for example, costs more to produce because the cold climate in which it is produced leads to poor harvests. A more expensive production may take prune their trees more, giving a particular quality to their (eventual) grape juice. Some technology allows for more efficient processing of grapes. Cork is more expensive than screw top.
2. The supply and quantity demanded of said wine.
The cost matters in that it sets the amount of supply. Knowing that most people are going to be unwilling to pay 35 bucks for a bottle of ice wine, not much is produced.
There are plenty of good, inexpensive wines. This isn't 1949 where an inexpensive bottle of wine is going to be little different than vinegar.
I enjoy a good wine, but never bothered refining my taste for regions, pairings, etc. Instead, I found a good, local wine shop. When I need a bottle, I just ask for what I want... "something to go with a duck dinner", "something to drink on a hot, summer night", etc. So far, they haven't let me down. I probably average $20/bottle - certainly more than strictly necessary for a good bottle - but I figure it's almost guaranteed I'll enjoy the bottle, and it's going to a local, family business, so I'm ok with that.
"MetaCookie+ is a technology that changes the taste of a cookie when it is being eaten based on an illusion evoked by changing its appearance and scent."
The way something tastes is partially determined by your expectations. Smell, appearance, cost, and if someone tells you it has hints of X, you will probably find that X.
Still, pleasure is personal and your own opinion is the only one that counts.
Try that with me, 1, 50 or 1000 times (preferably the latter) but you will not be able to fool me. White (regardless the color) is so different from red it's like in another dimension.
I don't even know much about wines but it seems hard to imagine I'd confuse a white wine for a red one. But then again I saw an experiment with people tasting jello without any food coloring. People couldn't tell strawberry from lime from grape or anything else. Perhaps not a totally accurate comparison but I do think we see a certain color and our brain starts preparing our other senses for the experience.
Another thing that happens is that certain wines, e.g. Chateauneuf-du-Pape, are just never as cheap as others, and cheaper wines just typically don't have their flavor profile. So if you want that certain taste because whatever food you're pairing it with would be matched better, then you'll find yourself spending a little more, not fundamentally on quality, but on variety. This leads to the tinted white wine "experiment": if you know what you're drinking, you know what you're looking for (the test is sort of interesting, but I don't see it as evidence that wine is bullshit). Recognition is one of the main sources of pleasure in a lot of things. Consider a neophyte looking at oil paintings: many people are baffled by the prices some of them sell for. But for someone that recognizes the evolution of a certain genre, style, and techniques, it may not be so incomprehensible. Similarly, if a flavor profile only appears to exist in certain more expensive wines, one guzzler may appreciate looking for its subtleties. That they would not notice them if they weren't told which wine they were downing is entirely possible.
Lastly, I'm not sure I understand people's gripe with using words like asphalt, tar, leather, tobacco, etc. Flavors, in wine or anything, usually fall into three categories: vegetal, animal, or mineral. If you've picked out a characteristic flavor in what you're drinking, it is not hard to categorize it within those three. What is more difficult is to make this observation more precise, and if you have the enlightenment to see that asphalt is actually what you're reminded of, then why not use the word? It doesn't follow that just because you wouldn't eat asphalt, you could not appreciate the playfulness detecting this aroma.
Yet my whole family was impressed with the Midelton.
Next time, I switched what was in the bottles, it was the Dewars that won.
Point, it's all in their head.
However, there are many goods which have traditionally inflated prices, such as diamonds, but there is no shortage of people who buy into the words of marketers.
That said, aficionado types often agree upon their favorites, so there must be something to the rankings of popular vintage.
Rule 2: If you are confused, follow Rule 1.
oh. the alcoholic drink produced from fermented grapes.
No need to analyze it or suspect a conspiracy. Move along.
This article appeared to be overanalyzing, and the wrong things, in the wrong direction. It was pointless.
Could you visit http://supportdetails.com/ and email me the results? I'm omar@priceonomics.com.
Thanks and sorry for the redirects. Completely unintentional.
De gustibus non est disputandum.
Is wine bullshit? <- the drink
Is Wine bullshit? <- the not-emulator