Comment by ericb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ericb | Hacker News Reader

A good friend teased her husband for spending only $7 for a bottle of wine in a facebook status post. So I bet her I would eat a cork if she could consistenly tell the difference. I won.

We held a blind taste test for 12 people with 14 wines ranging from 3.99 to $50. For each variety, there was one wine that was under $7 and one that was $11-50. We bought most, but not all, of the wine at Trader Joes. Participants had to guess if each wine was 'cheap' or 'expensive.' No one got more than 8 right. Aside from guessing the price category, people rated how much they liked the wine from 1-5 so they could see what they liked after the reveal. A 50 dollar Cabernet was one of the lowest rated.

This 3.99 bottle had the 2nd highest rating:

http://cheapwineratings.com/2008/04/10/villa-cerrina-montepu...

Highest rated was a 6.99 Pinot Noir whose name escapes me at the moment. I don't claim the results necessarily prove anything about the wider world, except that my friends have been overspending on wine.

I am convinced that many wineries should sell the same wine for different prices. They could sell the same wine for $7/bottle, $30/bottle and $125/bottle. Of course the $125 should have a different label and should be marketed a lot differently but the wine itself doesn't have to change.

I personally just buy a big jug of dark red cooking wine. I can't tell the difference between it and the other more expensive wine, and I refuse to spend more money for snoberry (note: I have nothing against others paying that much if it makes them feel good/better).

Well, there's a big difference between the issue of wine rating silliness and the wide variety of flavor you'll find in wine. A $10 bottle of gabbiano tastes almost nothing like a $10 bottle of monticello rioja and neither will taste anything like your jug of wine. Saying they taste the same is like to saying orange juice tastes the same as lemon juice, and that both taste the same as grapefruit juice.

I was saying that I couldn't taste the difference and according to the article, many other people can't either. They are essentially tasting the label and the marketing, which is why the marketing and the label should look different in both cases.

They are people more sophisticated and better at wine tasting, but there are a lot of people who just follow irrational marketing cues.

"I was saying that I couldn't taste the difference and according to the article, many other people can't either."

This isn't what the article is talking about. The article is arguing that subjective, linear wine ranking is faulty, that preferences are not objective or static, that it's difficult to distinguish between similar wines and that identifying individual flavors and scents (eg, "lavender, roasted herbs") are tied to the taster's imagination.

If you can tell the difference between grapefruit juice and orange juice, you can tell the difference between a gabbiano, a monticello rioja and a generic merlot. They taste dramatically different and you can't give a merlot to someone who knows what chianti tastes like and have them believe it's a chianti. Different varietals have very distinct flavors.

And when it comes to quality, there is a much, much more significant difference between a poorly stored, very low-quality wine and a mainstream ~$10/bottle wine than there is between a $20/bottle wine and a $100/bottle wine. After all, a number of the pricer wines would be simply $20/bottle if it weren't for the ratings systems critiqued by the article.

You don't taste any oxidation after a few days?

I'd suggest going with boxed wines if that's your preference. Target makes a really good one, and it stays good longer.

Yes the boxed wine tastes better. I also keep it in the refrigerator and take some out some time before drinking it and let it sit. I think that's called "decantering" but I din't know when I started doing it, it just made the wine taste better.

That might be good fun at Thanksgiving or a holiday party. I think it would be important to restrict by type, though (at least for the whites, not so knowledgeable about the reds).

Also, a comment for the OP: If you get the print version of the WSJ, this article appeared just two pages before the regular wine column by the husband/wife team. Sure enough, lots of references to "taste of cranberries", "fruity" etc.

I think a better comparison is to have a wide range of prices for a single varietal. For example, a white is going to taste different than a red. Does one of them taste better?

High-end reds cost more than high-end whites. That could be because they do taste better, are more costly to produce or are more rare.

That said, thumb through a Wine Spectator and you'll see a bunch of high-priced wines that don't rate as well as their price suggests. I usually have good luck with buying bottles where the wine steward has added a special "yummy" sticker or writeup.

Maybe another fun game would be to bring in a favorite art object and have everyone guess what it cost. Just because you or I wouldn't pay $100 for a Kinkade doesn't mean that a lot of people will.

Perhaps this is the sort of thing that happens when we make judgments in areas where we lack expertise.

If I'm not mistaken, part of it is that reds age better (due to the tannins).

You missed an independent variable in this test. What were the relative levels of tasting expertise among the tasters? I think you can only conclude that wine price doesn't matter much for the lowest common denominator there.

I think my last sentence agreed with your point.

For anyone interested, only one person, who was originally from Sonoma Valley, claimed to be a connoisseur of any kind. He didn't do much better than average--I scored higher and make no claim to any expertise.

A similar contest for 5 brands of Tequila (plus a shot of vodka, for the distracted) was done at the Telluride Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop. The outcome was also surprising: second-cheapest Tequila was rated highest by the audience.

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