One of my professors in grad school was really into wine and every couple of years he would put on an after-hours wine tasting class for a semester. One of the points he made was that there are absolutely wines which are objectively better and worse and that experts can reliably tell them apart. He had met enough experts who could identify a vineyard and vintage blind to know there was something to it. But sitting on top of that there is a frothy market that is driven by fads, speculation, and hype.
He was of the opinion that generally speaking the quality of a typical wine increases monotonically with price up until around the $40 range with the big steps around the $5, $10, and $20 price points. But above $50 or so, you're no longer paying for higher quality, per se. It's more that you are paying for a unique flavor profile and reliability. But unless you're seeking out that particular flavor profile, you can get a bottle that is just as good for $30-40 (and occasionally even cheaper). And above a few hundred dollars it's all just fads, speculation, and hype. (He liked to say that the people who buy those wines have "more money than sense.") They're good wines, but you can get a bottle that is just as good for a fraction of the price.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's common wisdom in France. If you're paying more than 20 euros for a bottle, it's probably already too much. And it's very common for people to buy in bulk at the favour of seasonal discounts or from the producer. If you want to look smart at a dinner party, bring a bottle of something nobody's ever heard about that's remarkably cheap for what you get.
When I was 18, I went on a short exchange to a little town in the south of France, and the first day there our hosts took us to get lunch. To our great surprise they picked up a number of bottles of wine to drink in the middle of the school day. We asked them why. Their answer was "beer is too expensive".
You can find proper wine at 4-5€ at the producer, 3.5€ is probably the strict absolute minimum where you can find honest wine direct from producer. Any thing below is just fermented garbage, the grappes that otherwise would spoil the wine, it just happen to have sugar to be fermented, I don't know how the hell how they are pre-processed, just stay away from it.
Once you take into account duty, VAT, packaging, transport and supermarket markup a £5 bottle of wine leaves maybe 25p for the wine producer. That's why the quality/price relationship is so non-linear at the bottom end. 20% more on the bottle price is 400% more to the producer.
"The natural advantages which one country has over another, in producing particular commodities, are sometimes so great, that it is acknowledged by all the world to be in vain to struggle with them. By means of glasses, hot-beds, and hot-walls, very good grapes can be raised in Scotland, and very good wine, too, can be made of them, at about thirty times the expense for which at least equally good can be brought from foreign countries."
Frequently the wine seems hyper local - what I was there in a restaurant we often just ordered the house wine. If you talked to the waiters or owners it was frequently made locally and including by the owners grown in backyards of the hole in the wall places. I think it cuts out a lot of costs - and there was not a bad wine among them.
I always thought that "house wine" is just an euphemism for "whatever we could get our hands on" - a workaround for the restaurant so that they do not have to list a specific brand on the menu.
That is likely true from time to time, but most restaurants seems to keep it fairly consistent as far as I can tell. I think it’s more often a choice of taste on the part of the restaurant for a less expensive but decent wine.
High taxes, transportation cost, and, (for explaining why Californian wine in California is more expensive than French wine in France), economies of scale and subsidies in France.
I don't think Alabama is aging a lot of wine relative to the US market as a whole. It's primarily a "sin" tax. One of the few taxes in the US that can gain popular support.
Wagner Vineyards in upstate NY has ice wine for $30/375ml, $27 (12+) and $24 if you join their club (cult?). Depending on the exchange rate, that can be about 20 Euros.
You could get some really nice local red table wines in Baden-Württemberg for 3-4 Euro for a 750 ml bottle last time I was there.
German wine in the USA is just mass market Rieslings and maybe an ice wine and nothing else. We’d always joke that they save the good stuff for themselves.
And 8 euro wine at Monoprix is better than some >$20 I’ve had in the US. My guess is in France competition is so high and it’s easily sourced that prices don’t necessarily correlate as closely to quality as it does in some other markets.
Just looked up, an hectare of (10,000 m^2, about 2.47 acre) is 1,102,000€ in the Champagne region
If what you’re saying is true, then an acre in the Napa valley is more than twice as expensive as its counterpart in the Champagne region.
Which is weird, I’d expect the Champagne acre to still make you a lot more money
Napoleonic inheritance laws resulted in the continued subdivision of Burgundy landholdings, so that some wines come from tiny plots. There are lots of tiny wine producers in Burgundy. I'm surprised that plots appear on the market at all; I supposed that nearly all plots were kept in the family.
I normally only drink beer but the guy at the bottle shop knows me. He recommended a wine to me the other day, $10. He was right. I grabbed a case for $8 a bottle.
I don't mean to sound patronising but my take on this is simply that he's a good salesman who levered up the personal relationship he's established with you
In all my years of shopping with them, he has only ever recommended me a wine on 1 or 2 occasions because I explicitly asked. I get discounts and tastings regularly. They have warned me from buying things more times then they recommend things. They are not trying to “sell” me anything.
I'm not saying the recommendations are bad, but... it's a shop! Of course they're trying to sell you something!
(Making good recommendations may well be more profitable than making bad recommendations, because if they make bad recommendations you'll stop coming back. But they absolutely are trying to sell you something).
It looks like no one has said this yet. Many of the higher price/quality wines are expected to be cellared for a certain number of years after release. Opened too soon, they will have too much tannin and/or acidity. It costs money to keep wines under the correct conditions. One thing that drives up the price of a bottle is whether someone else already did this for you. A 2014 Bordeaux right now, on average, will cost a lot more than a 2020 of the same wine.
Yes that's another factor. For the cheaper wines (pretty much anything you can get in a grocery store), they're made to be opened immediately and don't really benefit from aging. But the higher end wines need to be aged.
One of the fun things is that you don't really know exactly the optimum amount of time to cellar a new vintage. So there are online forums where people will buy a case and open one bottle a year and report their results on how the quality changes over time.
>you don't really know exactly the optimum amount of time to cellar a new vintage.
This is a hidden benefit of belonging to a wine club. Often you can talk to the wine maker and/or they are opening enough bottles regularly that they can give you a sense of when it's time to drink. After you've been through a few years of the syrah or the cab sav, you get a sense for yourself too because you start to get the pulse of what the winemaker is making.
This is actually the first year in a long time that I have a batch aging -- using wild grapes growing on my property. The first wine I ever made (from a kit), unbeknownst to me, needed to be aged to taste good. Once I learned that, I did the same test: every few months I'd open a bottle and taste it. After a year, most of the "tarry" flavors were gone, after 3 it was getting good. At five I really liked it. Unfortunately, no bottles survived to the 10-year mark, but I did learn to make wines that matured a lot faster!
It does not cost nearly as much as the price premium.
A regular household fridge costs something like $100/year to run. My fridge has 20 cubic feet of volume, which is something like 500 liters. This suggests we can fit at least 100 bottles into it. This gives us $1/year as upper bound for storage costs per bottle. This is upper bound, because air conditioning costs go down with volume, due to square-cube law.
Point is, if the price premium was driven mostly by storage costs, it would be significantly lower than it actually is.
Small remark though, you shouldn’t age wine in a fridge (the humidity is too high, and temperature too low).
There are some fridge-like "wine cellar" contraptions that work well (keep optimal air quality / temperature).
Or a basement does the trick if the humidity is right (needs to be high but not too high)
I remember when I was a kid, my parents had a room in the basement for storing wine that was entirely airtight, with an AC-like device that controlled the air. That’s probably extremely overkill if you aren’t a wine buff (& storing huge quantities of it) though
You also need to factor in the time value of money: if the winemaker sells you a 2022 release in 2022, they get paid immediately.
Also factor in temperature and humidity controlled storage (a kitchen fridge will not do), insurance against disasters, backup power generation, and so on. If you think aged wines are overpriced, it is easy to cut out the middleman and age it yourself — so my guess is that the market is reasonably efficient.
> You also need to factor in the time value of money: if the winemaker sells you a 2022 release in 2022, they get paid immediately.
This is right, I forgot about this: at 5% interest rates, 5 years of storage is actually 25% of the original price, which is probably substantial factor.
> Also factor in temperature and humidity controlled storage (a kitchen fridge will not do),
My kitchen fridge example was only meant to provide an estimate for the cost. Controlling humidity upwards is not expensive at all, it’s even cheaper in fact than controlling temperature.
> insurance against disasters, backup power generation, and so on.
These are extremely cheap at scale. You don’t really need backup power generation, the wine won’t spoil from few hours or even days of inappropriate temperature.
> If you think aged wines are overpriced, it is easy to cut out the middleman and age it yourself — so my guess is that the market is reasonably efficient.
My point was rather that the mere cost of storage is not the main part of the premium. Capital cost is probably significantly higher, but what is probably even higher still is speculation premium: not all wine vintages are appreciating equally, and if you just buy random wines, they will likely won’t appreciate all equally over time.
Yes, but then you are doing a bunch of work — buying a (second?) fridge, paying to rent or own space to put it, making sure the fridge continues to run, making sure you don’t accidentally drink your wine before you meant to. If I cared about this property I would certainly pay someone much more than the cost of storage in electricity terms to not have to do any of that or wait a number of years to get a rolling stock going.
>It does not cost nearly as much as the price premium
for industrial climate control on wines? if you remove the improved drinkability that comes with age, and the scarcity and desireability of well-known chateaux it absolutely does.
There are companies that specialise in storing wine portfolios and you'd be amazed at how much they charge, wine in bottles takes up a lot of room and is really heavy.
You can cellar your own wine. Lots of people do it, but cellar conditions matter and it's an expensive hobby. It's nice to not need to know five years in advance what you will feel like drinking tonight. Optionality is worth something.
But yes, with care a hobbyist can do better than how some retail wine is kept.
Edit: The main points are 1) cool (~55F/13C), 2) dark, 3) not too dry (70% humidity is usually recommended. This is to protect the cork), and 4) store on its side, also to protect the cork from drying out. Five years is a long time.
Most retail wines are made to drink now though. If it's on the shelf it's ready.
Not all wines are the same! Some can benefit from aging but not all.
The whole idea of "sealing" wine in a bottle is to keep it and not actually change it. It's a preservation method. However, the bottle is not really completely sealed and the small air gap at the top is not empty either. The cork might allow a tiny amount of air transfer too. The remains of the wine creation process might also leave some reactive components.
When you store wine it seems that a cellar type environment with its stale and earthy air helps - hmmm I wonder why!
Challenge your tastes or whatevs. For example you might find that a really cheap bottle of white chilled to about 5C and fizzed in a Soda Stream makes quite a decent Champagne analogue.
Haha. Rewinding back to my university days, I had picked up what I thought was a very nice bottle of Beaujolais. I put it above my fridge... and fast forward, opened it with my Bride of 20 years. Pure vinegar. I suspect that bottle had just about everything wrong done to it storage wise, outside of freezing solid.
There are very few wines that could be aged , most commercial bottles are good for 1 to 3 years bo matter how well you store them. Even wines from respectable producers are often going to start being broken in 10 years or so. Wine is living thing and the biological and biochemical processes are going to ruin the liquid at some point. Wines that could survive 20, 30 or more years are exception not rule and you need to know which one to pick.
Depends on what your location and budget is. Storing wine outside or at room temperature doesn’t age it the same way a wine cellar in France would. In general you want ~53-57 Fahrenheit and 50-80% humidity depending on what exactly you want to happen.
Unfortunately, simply digging a hole in your back yard only gets it to the average temperature of your area which may be quite different to that hypothetical wine cellar in France.
In the end keeping even a fairly large room at whatever temperature and humidity level you desire isn’t that difficult, assuming you have the space and budget.
> One of the points he made was that there are absolutely wines which are objectively better and worse and that experts can reliably tell them apart. He had met enough experts who could identify a vineyard and vintage blind to know there was something to it. But sitting on top of that there is a frothy market that is driven by fads, speculation, and hype.
I'm sure there are people that can identify different tastes. I question whether or not those tastes are a sign of objective quality, or just something they've been conditioned to think of as good.
An interesting test would be of people who have never tasted wine before, and have no sense of what a "good wine" is supposed to taste like. But in my experience, most people who aren't used to alcohol will simply find all wine distasteful.
You can actually see this in action when you see different cultures interact. For instance, the baijiu has a similar position in Chinese society as wine does in the West. There's an enormous price range, and a complex range of flavors and aromas. But almost every Westerner I've met found the taste abhorrent when they first tried it (though a small few eventually were able to develop a taste for it).
So though people in different cultures can acclimate themselves to what is currently considered to be good in their culture, I don't think that's the same thing as a certain taste being objectively good.
> I'm sure there are people that can identify different tastes. I question whether or not those tastes are a sign of objective quality, or just something they've been conditioned to think of as good.
I think my professor meant "objective" in the sense that someone with a trained palate will agree with others who have a trained palate. I.e., they're not just saying, "well this tastes good to me." Experts are generally consistent between each other about what tastes good and what tastes bad.
Of course this doesn't necessarily mean that these preferences are objective in a God-given sense. And from what I could tell it does seem that different subcommunities have their own preferences. Californian wine tasters seem to prefer bigger and bolder flavors than French wine tasters, who like subtler flavors.
Taste is almost definitionally subjective and culturally mediated. There are trends in flavors, and the ability of a vintner to match those trends is indistinguishable from producing “better” wine.
If you take the drink outside of its reference culture and try to measure how “good” different examples are, you’re going to get nonsense out.
Food and drink don’t exist in a vacuum. To the extent that you live and participate in the culture of wine (I do not), you may find value in spending for a “better” product. On the other hand, I will happily pay a premium for beers with tasting notes like “barnyard” and “wet horse blanket” or rums tasting of “petrol” and “rotten bananas.”
I would personally put many things such as coffee and beer there - I've grown in cultures that have and consume them a LOT, but I'm 45 and still hate the taste of both. Acquired taste one way or another, and I never bothered acquiring it.
(Interestingly enough though, two of my buddies also never had a taste for them, until in their late 20s they literally decided to "get into it". Boggles my mind if you're not caffeine addicted in your impressionable teens, why you'd actively TRY to develop the taste in your adulthood... But they did, With entirely predictable results :)
I deliberately tried to get into funky Belgian beers in my 30s.
My reasoning was: other people like these, I think they taste gross, but I'm always telling people they can learn to like things, and if I did learn to like them, I'd expand my range of possible pleasures.
I did end up liking them. Not love them, but enough to appreciate them.
I really doubt that there is anything in the world that is enjoyed by a large group of people that I couldn't eventually get myself to like. And then: how wonderful! More things you like.
That's generally my take as well. There's a handful of things that I just don't like in terms of food/beverage. Most of it is mouth feel, I don't like fat chunks, or raw meat... just feels off. As to taste, other than oysters and any kind of diet ginger ale, not much I wouldn't try a again or for a first time. And even the two of those I tried more than once. Spending plenty at a few places to try oysters in various preparations from restaurants that are respected for them. Nope, I'm done. As to diet ginger ale, they all taste particularly nasty to me.
As to trying to develop a taste for things like coffee, beer or wine... I can only say culture is probably the biggest part of it. I tend to have coffee about once a week, mostly for the caffeine... if I have it more than once or twice a week, it doesn't work. But it really helps me get through being up earlier than I'm naturally inclined to for several days. I'd still like it to taste halfway palatable, so I tend to use vanilla flavored SF syrup, stevia and heavy cream that tends to soften the flavor. But I can imagine someone who really likes chocolate or coffee to go that direction, as they amplify each other.
In the end, culture and personal tastes. There is a lot to be said for fitting in.
Coffee can vary largely in terms of taste, between pull lever ristretto and a French press, it can be considered as two different drinks. Drink a 100% robusta espresso (or a blend containing some Large amounts of Robusta) and then a anaerobic coffee from equador or Panama (gesha, Ethiopian hybrid varietal and the like), and one would taste like an Italian espresso while the other a fruity drink.
Same goes with beer or wine, quality goes up with price but in the end, it's all a matter of personal preference.
Considered what you wrote, your palate is looking for sugary stuff, and this wouldn't work for coffee, chocolate, beer or wine.
You are partially right about the variability in preferences for sugar, e.g. there are people who like very much sweet wines, but who do not like at all dry wines and there are others who have the opposite preference, e.g. my mother liked only sweet wines, while my father liked only dry wines.
Nevertheless, the effect of sugar is more complex. For example, I do not like cocoa alone or in too high concentration, as too bitter. Sugar is pleasant, but when alone I do not care about it, I prefer most food with no sugar at all.
On the other hand, I find addictive the combinations of sugar with certain flavors, e.g. sugar + cocoa or sugar + vanilla. So, at least for me, the combination of sugar and cocoa has a very different effect than each component alone.
I tasted some sparkling wines that to me were way better than Dom Perignon. And Pino Noir (forgot particular brand) I get for 20 Canadian pesos again tasted to me way better that some wine I bought for $120 to check why the fuck does it cost so much.
So yes I am pretty sure that some wine is objectively better than sulfuric acid but the rest is just a matter of individual taste. It does not matter that the tester can distinguish between 2 buttles of the same wine and tell the year it's been produced.
> I tasted some sparkling wines that to me were way better than Dom Perignon.
The thing about champagne is it produced using the traditional method [1]. As long as other sparkling wines are also made using the same method, they can be quite good. My favorite non-champagne sparkling wines are Crémants[2]. Much cheaper than champagne, but as good or better depending on your personal tastes
Créments tend to be much sweeter than Champagne, hardly comparable, not like I enjoy either.
To me, Champagne is basically a nostalgic drink at this stage.
> I question whether or not those tastes are a sign of objective quality, or just something they've been conditioned to think of as good.
I mean, that’s kinda a different question right? Like it’s not “objectively good” as in “you’re objectively wrong if you don’t like it.” It’s “objectively good” as in “there are objective standards that have been agreed upon by a large group of people.”
I have sometimes speculated that the purpose of the $50 bottles is to make you think that you're being sensible by buying a $20 bottle, when really the $10 bottle is just fine. A few people will certainly buy the $50 bottle, but the real money is in upsale at the lower end.
A corollary to this is a restaurant selling the wine that they acquire for the lowest price at the mid tier price to maximize profit.
A diner choosing a wine will most likely eschew the lowest price option, and obviously the highest price option will be out of most people’s reach, but customers will “spring” for the mid priced option.
A retail shop will put TVs on sale for 50% off but only keep 5 in stock. They advertise it everywhere, 100 people show up looking for cheap TVs, find it's out-of-stock and buy one of the expensive ones that are only 5-10% off.
That sounds like bait and switch. Loss leader fwiw is a product that retailer intentionally and legitimately loses money on, in order to get you into the store where you'll buy other stuff.
20 years ago, Computers were perennially loss leaders at a best buy I worked at. We sold you $2000 computer at a small loss, hoping you'd buy printer paper and cartridges and cables and warsanty.printers are still notorious loss leaders of course.
Right, that's bait and switch. A loss leader would be you selling milk at a loss in order to get people into the store and then get them to buy the high margin cookies as well.
rottisserie chickens for $3.50 in Australian supermarkets are great examples of loss leaders. They get you in there, to buy chicken...and other stuff :)
> But unless you're seeking out that particular flavor profile
It's not just seeking out a particular flavor profile. If you want to experience something novel for your mouth and you've been drinking only $20 bottles for years, you will never encounter anything new. But if you try $100 bottles, you're much more likely to accidentally discover something new (whether you like it or not is subjective)
Continuously searching for new experiences is an expensive hobby.
If it's produced in the same region, the good stuff is usually less than $20, and most often less than $10. It's not usually worth it to pay for travel, IMO.
You and your parents have all described wine in terms of $. I've tasted a dollar and it tastes like a pound but I would not try to drink it.
Why not describe your experience with the good stuff. We lack decent language to describe taste but we have loads of language for experience and feelings.
Lots of people here are pontificating (me too) about wine but so often the discussion ends up with bottle price and not what is actually important.
I don't see how that follows. There's an enormous amount of different $20 bottles. There's probably enough different ones every year that if you try to you can have a different wine every single time you drink and still spend < $30 (to factor in shipping from further) per bottle - though going so hard on exploration without exploitation of the ones you find you like seems suboptimal anyway.
My experience is that the $20 bottles tend to be made to fit into <50 archetypes. The producers are trying to fit into a specific flavor profile, and are very good at hitting it. There are variations, but usually I would think of those variations as "imperfections," not as "character."
Once you get to $50 and above, they are trying to show you something unique, perhaps an expression or a particular flavor they like or an expression of the local terroir.
Sure, there are thousands of different $20 bottles, but they barely taste unique. It's like cheap coffee. Sure, there might be minute differences between the hundreds of cheap brands but they are barely discernible
That's definitely not true. I occasionally buy 5-6 random 8-20e wine bottles from the local supermarket and they typically vary massively. Even when I order my favourites trying others listed as similar all taste very different to me.
Maybe 50 years ago you couldn't get a cheap good wine without doing it one of five ways but modern logistics allow winemakers to make good wine cheaply with a wide variety of different products and twists.
This is IMO where I've arrived at too. Some wine really sucks. Some wine is incredible. I've definitely been surprised by some <$20 bottles but in general $50+ wines are not going to have the same flaws that are common in cheaper bottles.
With that said... I've had some terrible bottles of $100+ wine from well regarded wineries.
IMO after $50/bottle, Napa Valley and some French wines take a huge drop in quality. The higher-end wines are trading more on marketing and branding than on the culinary experience.
I dated a sommelier with a physics degree for some time and this matches what I learned from her. She had the lesser certificate not the crazy Master one, but still her own kit for doing blind tastings and could reliably identify appellation and varietal if not the vintage and vineyard. Not perfect but right enough to know it wasn't chance.
For most people you really don't need to go above $20 for a wine that's world class in terms of quality. At the higher price points most of what you're buying into is the story and exclusivity. There are things you can taste but as you say, it's arguable if these are actually virtues beyond those two features, and it's doubtful if it outweighs the cost unless you have a lot of disposable income.
> One of the points he made was that there are absolutely wines which are objectively better and worse and that experts can reliably tell them apart. He had met enough experts who could identify a vineyard and vintage blind to know there was something to it. But sitting on top of that there is a frothy market that is driven by fads, speculation, and hype.
> the quality of a typical wine increases monotonically with price up until around the $40 range with the big steps around the $5, $10, and $20 price points.
How does this jive with the studies showing that, if anything, regular people have a slight preference for cheaper wines?
I don't have much of a wine palate, but I do have a crazy obsession with chocolate. What I notice with the chocolate is that people tend to prefer the cheaper, usually milk, chocolate because they don't actually like intense chocolate flavors. The stuff added to supermarket grade chocolates tends to dull and blend the flavors, hiding what I think is crazy good complexity of flavors (raisin, cherry, tobacco, leather, of course cacao, and more) but what others describe as "bitter", "burned", or "tastes like dirt". I completely understand why people like the cheap chocolate, it tastes good and goes down smooth. But it just doesn't excite with complexity the way more specialty chocolate can. I've always wondered if maybe that's the same with expensive vs consumer wines, but in that instance I'm the one on the other side of the coin who likes the cheap stuff.
Perhaps regular people, many of whom don't drink much wine, prefer simple, unchallenging flavors that can often be found in cheap wine. Theres nothing wrong with this, but I don't think it necessarily means that wine "quality" doesn't exist.
Regular people also likely prefer junk food to healthy food. The former is laden with sugar, fat, and salt and is engineered to appeal to the vast majority of people. It doesn’t mean that junk food is quality food.
And bad junk food. Try making a high quality chocolate truffle with really nice dark chocolate and put it on the plate with snickers bars. You’ll have all the good stuff left at the end.
During prohibition in the U.S., people developed a taste for shitty wine (or to be more objective about it, dangerously low quality wine).
I.e., the stuff that someone would make relatively quickly, hidden out in some bathtub hidden from the authorities, with very little quality control.
When prohibition lifted, that was the taste American wine-drinkers had for wine. It was a low brow, low quality, sweet-tasting alcoholic beverage, probably with a weird after taste.
That association apparently stalled the development of high quality vineyards in California. So it's certainly within the realm of possibility that this prohibition era impact continues to exert some influence. I still see a lot of people preferring rather sweet wines, for example.
And while I can't say for sure, something tells me the people who drop an ice cube into their red wine fit into all this somehow. :)
I don't know if this is still the custom; but when I was a kid in France, families would serve wine to their children. They'd serve it half-and-half with water. So children would presumably grow up with an appreciation of watered wine.
I guess that hinges on what you mean by "quality". I suspect that by definition, "quality" means that experts like it. So experts prefer expensive wines more often than "regular people".
I'm "regular people". I drink a lot of wine, nearly always a £5.00 Australian red. I've very rarely drunk an expensive wine that impressed me. Someone served me some amazing Burgundy, back in the late 80s...
"Quality" is a loose term, preference is totally subjective. Most people mix those things up, but there aren't equal. You don't automatically like the "better" wine, or better food. But the trend is the more people know about X (where X = wine in this case), they like "better" X. Where "better" and "quality" has to be defined first.
Typically, if you go down the path of wine education, you first learn a definition of what makes a wine good. WSET [0] e.g. mentions balance, complexity, faults, finish etc as part of what makes a wine "good" (by their definition). If you want to be certified by WSET (Level 3), you have to pass a tasting exam, where you have to examine wines according to their scheme.
Regular people aren't trained in wine or sensory evaluation, thus "quality" means less to them and cheaper wines are often easier to drink, or people are more familiar with them so they like them more (see "mere-exposure effect" [1]).
tl;dr: Liking a wine != the wine is "good". But mixing up those two things make no sense.
But, there is the usual trick there. How do you transform your wine from a $5 wine to a $10 wine? Raise the price by $5. The assumption of quality is something exploitable.
Wine makers can easily pick out flaws of different sorts. Wine tasters and wine makers do not taste wines in the same way based on my experience. Some flaws, like Bret, can improve the score of wines given by tasters for certain styles, but wine makers generally scoff at such flaws.
Bret and the weird hay / mousey flavour from natural wines are different things.
I too am not a fan of natural wines largely because of the additional flavours, but normal sulphite-laden wine can come with a dose of bret and it's different - I particularly enjoy it in some Cote Rotie producers, where it comes out as a hint of smokey bacon.
I would agree that brett can be a contaminant in wine, if that is not what you are going for, but much like how brett has long been the backbone of some trappist and all lambic Belgian beers, there is a case to be made for it in wine - even in fine wines.
If the popularity of brett in beers is anything to go by, you're going to be disappointed. And I hope you are - as much as I love a purely sach ferment, there's lots to love about other yeast and bacteria taking part in the fermentation process, too.
I largely agree with you (and your prof) but I lose interest at about £25 but I will drop this:
A violin (1) can be played to produce two notes at once and a third note will be heard. Since around 1715 that extra, third note was noted and then thought to be an artifact of our ears or something. Recently someone got all scientific and studied the effect. It turns out all or most violins produce the third note but the oldest instruments produce a louder third note. More study needed.
There is a really dodgy analogy here but I can't help conflate a violin's "vintage" with a vin's (err ... wine's) vintage.
Sound and music is phenomenally complicated but quite well understood compared to taste although there is a lot of research and results coming up there. My point is that I don't think that the (say) £/$100 bottle of wine is quite in the same league as the mad cables, especially the digital ones that cost silly money. A £100,000 Strad is capable of making a different noise to your common or garden £10,000 violin.
For example, you note people capable of identifying a source and year for a wine because that's how we classify the stuff, along with some really awful attempts to put taste into words and of course you note the silly cable buyer equivalent. However, there are way more factors involved.
I also think the whole tasting thing needs a massive overhaul. Notes of peach and cut grass and all that bollocks is a bit unimaginative and frankly daft. I've never "drunk" grass, let alone cut grass - yes I understand that smell and taste are quite often synonymous but there is way more to it than that. I have eaten peaches but there is also a huge variety of flavours there that a wine buff overlooks - there is no such thing as a canonical "peach".
I'm not sure how it would work but perhaps we need a taste language that is not completely dependent on other tastes and smells. We might also need an analogy for volume too - mild and punchy are simply rubbish as a scale! I know that industry is churning out a vast number of clever flavours and smells but I think that the language is being left behind.
One of the points he made was that there are absolutely wines which are objectively better and worse and that experts can reliably tell them apart.
This is certainly true for whiskeys. One of the ways to objectively tell better whiskeys from worse ones, is to learn how to detect acetone! The less that's in there, the better!
It would depend on wines you like. I am fine drinking $12 new zealand sauvignon blanc but can't say I've had anything in $40 range that I liked as much as Montrachet.
> He was of the opinion that generally speaking the quality of a typical wine increases monotonically with price up until around the $40 range with the big steps around the $5, $10, and $20 price points.
I'm always amused when I hear this, because I live in Ontario. Our alcohol laws are set up to heavily favour local wines.
Of course Ontario reds are consistently both more expensive and worse than foreign wines.
Not OP but good friends with some highend winemakers who hold a similar but slightly different view, which is that below $20 dollars (or whatever the breakpoint is now) most vinyards generally can't afford the processes that allow for the best class of wine to be reliably produced, and above that price point, most can afford those processes.
You do occasionally get cheap wines that hit above their weight, but that's unusual.
More common, you get wineries hitting below their weight for a number of reason the winemakers aren't very good, there are issues with vinyard, it's a bad harvest, or the winemaker just wants bigger profits and is trying to convince people their wine is better than it is.
As an example of vinyard issues, I know a man whose vinyard produces very poor wine because his soil is rich in serpentine, which makes the wine smell funny. Even doing everything "right" his wine is not going to taste as a good as that made identically by someone with better soil.
This does not mean that wines at that price point must be good. I know someone who made the mistake of buying in a vinyard that was extremely rich in serpentine
Without more information, I would assume that even with preferential tax treatment Ontario wine could be more expensive due to economies of scale. Production must be vastly lower compared to California, France, etc.
Ontario retail alcohol sales are heavily regulated. The LCBO (Liquor Control Board of Ontario) has exclusive rights to import wine and only sells that wine at its retail stores. They reserve a big section of their stores for Ontario wines.
Ontario wineries can get approval to open retail stores, but the product they sell can be at most a 50% foreign blend.
So you always have more retail locations and a wider selection with Ontario wines.
This is a topic I know a lot about, because I have grown grapes here in southern Ontario for years and have looked a lot into the wine industry here and am generally an "enthusiast" about the topic.
Part of the reason is just the retail environment, which is a whole cluster of a topic here, but I won't get into that...
Because of... history and culture, Ontario "VQA" wine regulations demand that growers grow almost exclusively various European vinifera varieties (the famous cab sauv, cab franc, pinot noir, etc.) . There's a list of permitted grape varieties, and most new generation hybrids (like e.g. the ones bred by Bruce Reisch's breeding program at Cornell just a couple hours from the Ontario border, or from Minnesota) are not on it, while a whole laundry list of pure vitis vinifera varietals that can barely grow here are.
If you're not growing one of the permitted varieties, you can't even put the word "Ontario" on your wine label. Nor a bunch of other protected words like "Niagara escarpment" or "Lake Ontario" or whatever.
These European varieties are not well adapted to the northeastern/midwestern/great-lakes region here. They are magnets for disease, and wimps in the cold. They are difficult to grow, and about 1/5 winters, they are frozen to the ground to the point where they often need replanting.
So costs to grow are very high. There's spraying and cold protection costs, but also the extra labour involved in managing cold damage, etc. And there's per-tonne price recommendations per grape varieties, and the permitted vitis vinifera varieties naturally cost more to purchase from growers than cheaper hybrids ; but cheaper hybrids of any quality would struggle to get a VQA label, and in any case the LCBO (our monopoly provincial liquor retailer) won't stock them apart from a few mediocre Baco Noirs.
On top of that the regulatory environment prevents producers who have under 5 acres planted from selling wine. But most townships go further and have even stricter regulations on top (10-20 acres, only allowed to grow in X part of the region, etc.)
These regulations are framed as if they're about protecting consumers, but they're really about protecting entrenched winery industry interests here, as well as cultivating a certain "kind" of wine industry which differs markedly from what you will find immediately across the border in the Finger Lakes in New York. And it's also a reaction to the kind of (beyond crappy) wine industry that existed here until the 70s. It's rules written by the baby boomer victors of a battle to make better quality wines here in the 70s and 80s.
The wine industry here is definitely more "snobby" than in NY and other northeastern areas, and it's mostly appealing to a certain conservative baby boomer demographic. The owners are mostly retired lawyers etc. running the wineries. They seem to think/wish they live in Bordeaux or Tuscany and have tacky faux-chateauxs and it's a whole lifestyle thing ... for you to daytrip from Toronto to bask in.
Like much of Canadian "high" culture, it's an inauthentic imitation of European culture, because of our colonial inferiority complex. If we made it, it can't be good, unless it's a complete imitation.
FWIW, there are very excellent vinifera wines made here. In a hot year, earthy delicious Cabernets are entirely possible. And in almost every year, an absolutely fantastic Riesling is possible. My family has roots in the Rhineland, and I've tasted hundreds of Rieslings from both there and here, and Ontario is right up there. And a quality (but $$) Ontario Cab from a good year is more like a Bordeaux than a typical new world Cab; earthy and more low key, not a fruit bomb. More to my tastes.
Anyways, yes, there's protectionism to some degree, but in reality Ontario wine is expensive because it's just really expensive to grow that kind of wine here.
In general you find this kind of thing a lot in Canada. Regulatory capture is all over the place here. Domestic wine is expensive here for the same reasons data plans are. Canadians tolerate monopolistic bullshit way more than they should.
As a Finger Lakes, NY alumnus, I appreciate the respectful comparison to our regional vintage.
Reportedly the moderated microclimate of the region due to lakes,
and the glacial soil terroir are good combination.
Cornells agricultural school also researches experimental varietals.
My NY family puts as much pride in the local apples and the summer sweet corn as the regional wine.
I like the Finger Lakes area a lot. Shame there's a border in the way. If it was in my own country I'd rather live in Ithaca than here.
The Niagara area in Ontario is a few growing degrees warmer than the Finger Lakes (despite being further north) and Lake Ontario provides more of a protective lake effect on temperatures than the Finger Lakes themselves.
On the other hand, you get better snow cover for insulation in the winters.
In other respects, similar areas.
The battle about vinifera and its place here in Ontario is really kind of the story of Konstantin Frank vs Phillip Wagner in the Finger Lakes. Except here in Ontario, Frank "won" while in the Finger Lakes there was a compromise drawn. Bruce Reisch gets to make excellent new grapes and the local wineries grow them.
Up here, the products of Helen Fischer's grape breeding program doesn't get to contribute to the local winery industry. It's strictly all about -- what vinifera varieties sell well? Grow that and market the crap out of it.
If you buy any California wine, for instance, it was picked by a migrant worker. Times haven't changed much since Grapes of Wrath, other than it's typically Latino workers rather than Dust Bowl refugees.
They're still paid more than California labour. And in any case, apart from not needing irrigation, growing conditions here are way more difficult than California. (At least for now). And equipment and input costs also way higher.
(I grow about a 1/2 acre of grapes here in Ontario)
Yes, I just checked and LCBO's (Ontario province quasi-monopoly on alcohol) and the cheapest bottle of wine is CAD $7.25, an Ontario one so probably terrible. Gallo is CAD $11 which I guess is the US $5 option. Cheap wine bottles are around CAD $9.
Alcohol here is as expensive as in Hawaii (maybe a bit more), OTOH LCBO employs people and there's something to say about more expensive alcohol may prevent alcoholism/accidents etc.
In a similar vein, Best of Panama does a coffee auction where the highest rated coffee sold this year for $2000/lb. It's something like this each year, with a huge premium on first place.
Look at Ninety Plus producer, these $2000 /lb looks like a bargain.
More seriously coffee can be as expensive as wine, and frankly speaking, for good reason. The difference between farms, fermentation process, roasting skills for a se varietal /region produces large differences, like for wine.
> But above $50 or so, you're no longer paying for higher quality, per se.
You can't walk into a grocery store and buy a tree-ripened banana no matter how much money you're willing to pay. This is sort of the proper way to think about high-end wines, as a vehicle that enables one to do something like this, but obviously with grapes.
I disagree. There’s a pretty stark difference between $50 wine and like genuine top quality wine.
The problem is that it’s just highly inconsistent for a variety of reasons, including the fact that even if you trust the label you have no idea if that 20 year old bottle was left in the sun for awhile, and so on. Plus there’s personal taste, etc.
So you can spend a lot and get something underwhelming. In short, it’s complicated.
With that said, having gone for a full day tasting at Mouton Rothschild, and a couple other similar spots like Caymus, Y’quem, etc, I can say with complete confidence that there’s a level of quality thats simply not going to be reached with $50 bottles.
>One of the points he made was that there are absolutely wines which are objectively better and worse and that experts can reliably tell them apart. He had met enough experts who could identify a vineyard and vintage blind to know there was something to it.
Identifying a specific wine is easy, even non experts can learn to do it.
What experts have shown to fail is telling good wines from bad wines, cheapo wines from expensive wines, and so on, in blind tests.
There they are not asked to identify a label and vintage they already known and are familiar with (because they drank it before), but to detect quality.
> There they are not asked to identify a label and vintage they already known and are familiar with (because they drank it before), but to detect quality.
Nope, quality. Including the very basic quality of being able to tell one apart from another:
(...) some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific. The first experiment took place in 2005. The last was in Sacramento earlier this month. Hodgson's findings have stunned the wine industry. Over the years he has shown again and again that even trained, professional palates are terrible at judging wine. "The results are disturbing," says Hodgson from the Fieldbrook Winery in Humboldt County, described by its owner as a rural paradise. "Only about 10% of judges are consistent and those judges who were consistent one year were ordinary the next year.
I worked at WineSpectator.com in 2012-2013. I'll say this in their favor: the wine tastings were blind. A bunch of interns would set up the wine tasting, pouring the wine into glasses and then hiding the bottles. Only after everything was setup were the editors allowed into the room. So when the editors drank the wine, they had no idea if they were drinking a $9 bottle or a $900 bottle. They had to focus on the taste and balance, and write their report. Only afterwards were they told which wine they had tasted.
Having said that, I'll also mention, the way the editors struggled for new adjectives did sometimes make me laugh:
"a vast, hearty body, notes of blue and a hint of graphite steel"
"a radiance similar to the sun at dawn, a strong body, notes of orange"
There have been a lot of blind wine tastings done and the results are always interesting. Sometimes cheap bottles score as high, or higher than vintages. Other times people can spot the cheap "carton" wine easily.
My wife and I love to cook, have discussed opening our own restaurant, have eaten at lots of very expensive "haute cuisine" restaurants and have tasted lots of wines.
Part of the "problem" is that taste is subjective and can be influenced through suggestion. So the atmosphere, the price, the meal pairing can all affect a person's appreciation of the glass.
I remember an episode of Penn & Teller's Bullshit where they had a "water sommelier" at a restaurant who would upsell customers on speciality bottles of water and they were all filled with the same tap water from the same garden hose at the back of the restaurant. The results were fascinating. Subjects swore they tasted different from one another.
The real question, in my opinion, is whether a high-priced bottle is "worth it" by as near-objective standards as possible. In other words, given two bottles of different prices, all else being equal, would the average person prefer the taste of one over the other?
That varies widely from one wine to another. My wife and I have enjoyed a good vintage but we are also perfectly content with a $15 bottle from a local vineyard here in Ontario, which is our "go to." I'm equally partial to a $15 Rothschild Merlot or Pinot Noir and I wonder if the truly exceptional wines that I've tasted at restaurants were more about the environment, the food pairing, the company and the occasion than they were about the flavour in isolation.
I learned the secret in my mid-20s whilst brewing my own cider as a poor student.
Take some decent apple juice without preservatives. Add a bit of yeast; baking yeast for bread at the supermarket will do just fine. Observe basic sanitation principles. Add some sugar, perhaps 150 g per litre of juice. Leave the concoction in a cool, dry place for a few months. A one-way seal for the CO2 release is preferable (a balloon works) but is not strictly required; leave the cap on loose. Carefully pour off the result into a new vessel. Let this settle for another month.
A very palatable drink results at about 4 - 5% alcohol by volume. People figured this out thousands of years ago. And they did not have plastic bottles, germ theory, or infinite hot water on tap. It's trivial to make an alcoholic beverage. The rest is finesse. And posturing.
I remember the USSR during Gorbachev's anti-alcohol campaign - you could walk out onto the balcony of a large apartment building, and see hands waving at you from most other balconies. Not people's hands, mind you - it was rubber gloves, used as a one-way seal on top of large glass bottles used to brew fruit wine. The fruit itself varied depending on what people had access to and the season - I've seen apple, plum, cherry, blackcurrant etc.
There's an entire book (most likely more than one) dedicated to various method of making alcohol at home. My chemistry teacher in high school had one.
Among the methods were fruits, vegetables, plastic bags, and some types of wood. Obviously, the resulting alcohol wouldn't taste like 20yo whiskey, and will probably kill you a bit faster, but the methods were solid.
Beer was probably "discovered" when mashed up grains started fermenting wildly. It's definitely not difficult to make alcohol if one desires!
I do think something can be said to effort put in vs what you get however - I've enjoyed some very good beer that took a little bit more work than letting some grain lying around ferment. Of course, on the other hand, plenty of beers are brewed in Belgium using essentially that method, so it all comes down to one's taste I suppose.
Sugar + yeast will result in alcohol. And yeast is literally everywhere. You can practically just open any fruit juice, let it sit for a while, and you'll have a pretty good chance of getting an alcoholic beverage at the end.
We go to great lengths to keep our fruit juices from fermenting. In fact, non-fermented juice is a relatively recent invention in human history.
> I expelled all my breath and sucked down another glass. Vinegary, yeasty, with a rusty shank of an aftertaste. I was feeling a slight buzz, but I didn’t think I could stomach another glass. It was booze all right, but two glasses was my non-incarcerated limit.
The secret is that a lot of cheap wine is pretty darn good. I imagine there's somewhat of a correlation between price and quality, especially at the absolute bottom end of the pricing scale. But it's a very loose correlation.
This is a huge secret across so many different markets; it's insane. The one we may be most familiar with is computers, of course - even a bargain-basement computer today is an absolute beast compared to 10+ years ago. Entire classes of "cheap foods" have disappeared because we are so rich we can make everything "good" - meaning the bargain-basement stuff is now often higher-quality than midrange stuff of 20/50/100 years ago.
Hot dogs are a decent example, they're all now "meat" and many are "pure beef" when they used to be the disastrous remains of who knows what. And even they are being destroyed by just how cheap hamburger is - the original fast food was hot dogs and that's almost entirely gone now.
> the original fast food was hot dogs and that's almost entirely gone now.
Curious about this history. According to Wikipedia, fast food was common during antiquity, while the hotdog wasn't invented until the 1400s. White Castle seems to be recognized as the origin of modern day fast food and it opened as a hamburger joint.
White Castle essentially formalized a prior trend of burger vendors at sporting events, state fairs, etc. These were really simple cheap meaty snacks with little more than the patty and maybe some onions cooked on a griddle and slapped on whatever roll they could get from a local baker. In that sense the WC slider is still fairly true to the original thing.
But, I think it's a bit rich to call it the origin of fast food. Modern fast food in terms of what we think of as technology and business model is a bit broader than that. And just "food you get fast" is obviously far older. The original "fast food" in that sense was getting bread from a baker.
Why would there be a point? If there was a point it would be presented to the real world where it would provide value, not a meaningless text box on a website made to provide entertainment. What is to be gained from looking for something that doesn't exist?
Isn't present day Carl's Jr. just Hardee's by another name? Hardee's began as a burger joint as well.
According to research from the University of Guelph, hotdogs are comparatively uncommon in fast food because hotdogs are harder to cook consistently and have a shorter window of enjoyability which makes them less suited to fast food than hamburgers.
Yeah, I was thinking of the ubiquity of "street food hot dogs" which are now basically gone (Costco still has hot dogs, however, and baseball stadiums are required to have hot dogs).
Carl's Jr was 'transferred' to CKE (Carl Karcher Enterprises) which then acquired Hardees, and Hardees became Carl's Jr in everything but name (as far as I can tell). What was interesting is the absolute numbers: The "merger" created a chain of 3,828 restaurants – 3,152 Hardee's outlets in 40 states and 10 foreign countries and 676 Carl's Jr. outlets primarily in California.
Interestingly, I always assumed that “fast food” meant the type of food; so a hamburger, even if not made from mass produced ingredients, would always be a “fast food”.
It’s a weird thing - people in the USA know what you mean by fast food and somehow McDonald’s under a heat lamp counts (rarer now but still found) but burgers at the gas station under a heat lamp don’t count.
> In antiquity it was more what we might call street food
In context, though, the original commenter considered things like street hotdog vendors to be fast food. That is not unlike the kind of delivery you would find in antiquity, even if the actual food product differed.
> What really defines fast food is mass production and uniformity.
Technically, what really defines a term is how it is used in a certain context and how it works towards reaching a shared understanding, which was achieved with the original use of fast food found in this thread. You are right that the definition that emerged here does not align with definitions found in other contexts, but those other contexts are irrelevant to this particular context.
> It’s a weird thing - people in the USA know what you mean by fast food and somehow McDonald’s under a heat lamp counts (rarer now but still found) but burgers at the gas station under a heat lamp don’t count.
Absolutely true in South america. I've had a ton of different sub-$5 wines. In my experience, if you randomly buy 20 bottles of $5 wines, one is better than a $100 bottle, plus you also get some 5 great wines, 10 good ones and the rest works for cooking.
The best wine I've ever drank cost less than $3 and was produced in a tropical (21 South), 800m altitude region of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Never assume wine is bad because it's cheap or from somewhere.
One of the big differences in this category (cheap wines) is consistently. You can genuinely find great wines, but there is much greater variance in the quality year to year, or within variety of the same winery. In other words, the following year might be a crap wine, good, or in-between.
Also big brands usually deliver on consistency. Making the same (or very similar) wine year from year on the order or hundreds of thousands of bottles ... yeah, that takes some skill, and favorable location doesn't hurt either :) For example see the big wineries in New Zealand.
But usually if you want something that's exceptional you have to spend a lot on throwing away the unexceptional parts. Not every year will be good, and even if the weather was good there's still no guarantee the wine will be amazing. Yet the costs are there. That's why there's a very hefty premium on brands that only deliver the top-top-top quality. (Obviously they sell the grapes/wine that did not make it under a different brand, but sssh.)
> I assume the big brands get part of the way there by mixing old and new wine, though.
I don't think they can - wine is usually sold by vintage year. "Origin" is usually weaker (e.g., 50% of grapes must be from the declared origin) and my understanding is that is where you can "adjust" year-to-year.
Not mixing between years, but you can mix between different vineyards of the same year. As long as the wine comes from the same region you can keep the branding. There are plenty of contract vineyards that sell to different wineries to enable these mixes.
Not a lot, but quite a bit. Winemakers have told me that they can't sell everything cheaply, and not only for basic economic reasons : if it's too cheap, lots of people won't buy it!
As to the matter of price, most of my wine tasting friends (including some with proper wine collections) are perfectly ok paying 5-10 euros for a bottle, as long as they like the wine - some of them have even made it a specialty to find good and cheap wine.
At the other end, I was once served wine without knowing what it was at a friend's place. I took a sip, then something happened in my head, and I started crying (I cry when food is really good) . I still remember that particular bottle, and the, well, infinite landscape that had suddenly opened in my mind (I know it sounds utterly ridiculous , but this is how it felt). No other wine has had the same effect on me, and it turns out the bottle was worth about 400 euros!
Well, it happens very rarely (I don't cry unless whatever I'm having is extremely good).
When it happens, people find it quite amusing, and it usually starts a conversation about the pleasures of life.
Yep, there is correlation between my perceived quality and price, et the very cheap end of wine. It gets less pronounced the more expensive it gets so, and above certain threshold it is a lot of branding.
So, I think the biggest problem with all those blind wine tastings is that they equate price with quality. Because those two are, as goes for everything in life, only ever so loosely related.
Very true. I live in a wine region and an $8 bottle from the local booze shop can sometimes be found in restaurants on the other side of the world for $50+. Is not just that cheap wine is often as good as expensive wine, sometimes it’s exactly the same thing.
I once met a local winemaker from a tiny winery in a foreign country who was proud to say that their wine was being served a restaurant in the US. I asked them how much they thought the wine would be priced at given that it was their entry-level wine. The winemaker estimated $20-25. We looked it up--it was $60.
That is standard restaurant markup over retail: 200-300%. So a $20 wine you get a wineshop should be priced $60-80 in a restaurant.
One secret is that most nicer restaurants allow you to bring your own wine, provided you pay a "corkage" fee of usually $10-40. So if the wine is say, $30 retail + $20 corkage, you are better off than paying $90-120 for the same bottle at the restaurant.
Well, kind of. You might still be paying for taste, but not necessarily for objective quality. As many people have pointed out in these comments, sometimes you are paying for interesting flavor profiles that are not as easily found in moderately priced wines.
That doesn't necessarily mean better, but you might be paying for scarcity in the flavor.
You can absolutely get a top quality wine for <$60. Even the fancy 18th century European wineries that sell $10,000 bottles of wine will tell you this.
Scarcity is the number one factor that determines the price of an expensive wine. A good quality wine from a recent vintage will cost less than an equally desirable wine from an older vintage, simply because people haven't drank most of it yet.
you can get great wine for under $60 but not top quality
> Scarcity is the number one factor that determines the price of an expensive wine.
just because something is rare doesn't mean it's good; a random rock on a beach is one of a kind but you couldn't sell it for a penny
> good quality wine from a recent vintage will cost less than an equally desirable wine from an older vintage, simply because people haven't drank most of it yet.
no, if it's less expensive it's because there is work involved in cellaring a wine and that adds value
> just because something is rare doesn't mean it's good
That is precisely what I am saying. Rare (and because of that, expensive) doesn’t make a wine good.
> no, if it's less expensive it's because there is work involved in cellaring a wine and that adds value
Yes, for wines that are hundreds of dollars, but that doesn’t necessarily add any quality. For wines that are thousands of dollars, they’re just scarce.
It really depends a lot on the region. For example, price and quality don't correlate that much in Burgundy. It's easy to spend a few hundred dollars on a mediocre bottle.
I recently picked up exactly this, not caring much what I got since it was destined for a pot of mulled wine. I had some of it and was pretty surprised how delicious it was untainted by spices and honey and brandy
VERY rarely I do a premium wine tasting in California wine country. And, yeah, I kinda get it. There are subtle differences in some of the high-end wines as opposed to midrange stuff. But I'm actually happy with even the better box wines (however crappy the low-end stuff is) and I'd much rather spend disposable income on a better bottle of whisky or a better cheese.
>My wife and I love to cook, have discussed opening our own restaurant, have eaten at lots of very expensive "haute cuisine" restaurants and have tasted lots of wines.
Please don’t make the mistake of thinking “I like to cook” means “I would like to run a restaraunt”. They’re two completely different things.
Can you elaborate on this? I'm sure there's more to it and it could be great to know what some of the specifics are, but it also seems like someone who likes to cook is going to need to be present for a good restaurant
The restaurant industry is brutal, low margin, and cut-throat. There's long hours and extremely hard work, and customers who don't give a shit about you. If you have a successful restaurant, it's probably because you have a good location (modulo those Michelin-starred gems in out-of-the-way small towns). So the landlord will do their best to extract any surplus value you generated through your skill and ingenuity. I've never worked in the industry and I've still heard of all of this.
Professional cooks have a completely different working style to skilled amateurs. They move faster and more precisely, and are able to juggle far more things at a time. It's a massive step up.
Plus the skillset involved in cooking well is orthogonal to what's needed to run a successful restaurant. Your major costs are labor, rent, and raw materials, and you need a certain personality to drive those down. Customers tend to be price-sensitive (again, apart from those high-end places) so you don't have as much power on the revenue side.
I love cooking. I'm never working in the food business.
> the landlord will do their best to extract any surplus value you generated through your skill and ingenuity
It sounds like you're describing landlord behavior where they don't simply arrive at a target rent and happily collect it, but attempt to actively monitor revenue of businesses renting from them and then ride the line between capturing that in rent increases below the line where it's worth it to the tenant not to move and unacceptable extortion.
If so, that's both interesting and kinda terrifying. I've never considered that rental prices might be set as much by specific tenant income as market conditions, and now I'm wondering if I should never tell any prospective landlord what my real income is beyond minimum requirements.
A residential landlord can't charge you much more than market rate because you could just move. At some price point a mover is going to be cheaper. Often there's also various rent control laws.
Commercial landlords, especially of restaurants, have way more pricing power because the tenants can't just move. Their customers expect them to be there, or there's a ton of existing foot traffic - location, location, location. And usually tenants put their own money into renovating the space for their needs.
I don't actually know what that is. Like I said, I've never worked in the restaurant biz. Everything I've written is just from reading random shit online.
Triple net is a bog standard leasing agreement for commercial properties - it's nothing specific to restaurants. Basically, you pay the expenses on the building. Taxes, insurance, maintenance costs.
A SUPER common pattern with restaurants is someone moves in and develops a location, tries to make it work for a year or so, then tanks. Then a slightly more savvy restaurateur leases the location along with the previous tenants buildout for far less, makes minimal renovations, and then makes it a success.
Perhaps a quick skim of Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential might help. His position is that running a restaurant is very different from cooking for yourself and friends.
But obviously many people do set up and run restaurants.
But... quoted industry failure rates are insanely variable - from 17% to 60% in the first year, depending who you ask. The variability possibly says something interest in itself.
Clearly a restaurant is literally a food production line. It has to run smoothly and efficiently across a wide range of circumstances and load factors. And it has to handle shortages and customers who may be overly demanding, drunk/high/irrational, or actively hostile, while keeping staff morale high.
I'd guess that being able to make something nice at home seems like a good start, but isn't necessarily the most relevant qualification from a business POV.
"I like playing video games" would be analogous to "I like dining out."
"I like making video games" would be analogous "I like to cook."
Of course "I like making video games" might not mean "I want to work for an AAA developer", but the reasons why would probably be different than those you wouldn't want to make a commercial indie title / open your own restaurant.
As a video game player, developer (non-game), bar/restaurant owner, and a person who likes to cook:
I think the distance between them is about the same, as the GP noted. It's not analogous, but they didn't make that claim.
I have only cooked less than 1% of the time the restaurant has been open. Also "enjoying cooking" has nothing to do with enjoying a commercial kitchen. Pretty sure literally at all.
I feel compelled to put out quality food, but I do not enjoy it at all when I'm not cooking at home.
(Disclaimer: I've never ran a restaurant). A passionate and skilled cook is good, yes, but running a restaurant is about more than that:
* How do you train and employ an effective wait staff?
* How do you design a good menu that's practical to cook a lot of?
* Where do you source your ingredients from? How do you get the quantities you need (and no more)? You might need to cook dozens or hundreds of a certain dish in a day.
* You need to buy or lease a building suitable for a kitchen and dining room. The location is extremely important & will cost you a lot of money.
* Do you choose to embrace delivery apps?
* Can you handle lunch & dinner rush?
* How do you price your menu in order to remain financially solvent, given everything above? (and likely many factors I'm not taking into account)
Some of these things change depending on the nature of the food (e.g. pizza to go vs sit-down fine dining), but it comes with all the problems of a small business.
It is fairly common for a chef to team up with an investor for this reason - let the chef do the food, and the other party do the business stuff. If you're both trying to do both or have a too-personal relationship where you can't say no, it can get messy. That's not to say it never happens or can't work, of course.
Agreed and you don't need to tell me that. I have experience in food service, my extended family has also owned multiple restaurants. I personally spent 15 years running my own business, though not hospitality so it's not quite apples and apples. While we haven't taken the plunge I am putting it mildly when I say "like to cook" and did not feel it necessary to go into my background and knowledge about what goes into the food service industry.
> The real question, in my opinion, is whether a high-priced bottle is "worth it" by as near-objective standards as possible.
This really resonates with me. In day-to-day life "worth it" depends a lot on the person, and especially their financial standing.
I like to try to think of an unbiased "worth it" as plotting cost vs value of everything in the category on a scatter plot. Things that are "worth it" are above the average curve (and the curve is going up at higher prices).
Basically "this option provides more value than most other options of same or lower cost".
You seem very experienced at wine and food, so I hope you know this. I can taste a wine and like it just fine if I haven’t eaten or drink anything else. But if I eat anything, even just the tiniest bit, the wine to me just becomes sour and I can only taste the alcohol. This completely ruined wine for me. Is this common?
The phenomenon of one flavour "colouring" another is perfectly normal. So that in that sense it is "common." I've not heard too many people say that food will "ruin" wine for them, though.
Wine "pairing" is a whole thing. Certain wines go better with certain foods. A good sommelier is expected to be an expert in wine pairings and will recommend wines based on your food order.
The principle is what chefs think of as "balancing" flavours. There are 5 recognized basic flavours: salt, sweet, acidity (sourness), bitterness and "umami" (savoury).
When learning to cook creatively aspiring chefs will think about balancing these flavours, as each will affect your perception of the other. Salt will "neutralize" / "tame" bitterness, sweetness will do the same for acidity / sourness and vice versa.
If what you find is that your wines taste sour after eating a food, then you are probably sensitive to sweetness and / or sourness. Most people can experience what you are describing by eating a bite of something really sweet, like cheesecake, and then tasting a dry wine. It will taste VERY sour as a result because your taste buds have just been desensitized to sweetness based on the really sweet food that you just ate, so the sweetness in the wine will not be perceived, leaving only the acidity.
It just sounds like in your case this phenomenon has been dialed up to 11.
Some people have hypersensitivity to some particular taste. I'm oversensitive to bitterness, and basically can't drink beer at all, and only the sweetest wines (late harvest, icewine and similar) are actually enjoyable.
I've also been roasting coffee from Sweet Maria's for many years, and the thing that's useful is that I learned how Tom will describe flavors that I like. So, whether he calls it "hazelnut" or "almond" doesn't matter, but when he says "hazelnut" there is a flavor I enjoy that isn't there when he writes "almond"... and some other things like when he writes 'crowd pleasing" there is likely to be a lot of balance... over time the descriptions have become more and more useful to me!
I don’t think I could ever tell two different coffee varieties apart, but I can definitely tell good coffee from bad coffee. Though that’s probably mostly about the roast and freshness more than anything. So there’s probably something to it but I imagine most of it is unintentional bullshit.
I got gifted a coffee subscription recently, and I was actually surprised how different each coffee was.
I think almost anyone could tell the difference between different coffees side by side. I just don't think people are super focused on the coffee flavor when they drink their regular brew.
I've also heard that if the coffee is too hot, the flavours don't come out completely (heard it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-iNAyu-ejo), so maybe that plays into it too?
Yes, you definitely have to brew your coffee correctly. Honestly, I've found regular cheap coffee makers are acceptably good and consistent. They are designed to drip water that is the right temp.
Where you have to be careful is when boiling the water yourself for a chemex or aeropress brew. Done right, those are better. But I can't be bothered most days.
I’ve found that brewing my coffee in 190 F water in an infuser type pot to give the taste I prefer best. Just good coffee flavor with no bitterness and is also conveniently a temperature that is immediately drinkable by the time I pour it.
I'm probably pretty accurate differentiating African from South American coffees, the flavours are pretty different. I'm not that great at this sort of stuff either, certainly not a food critic. But hey, some people can't tell the diff between pepsi and coke.
> I swear (even though I know I'm wrong) that he just makes this stuff up.
I don't know if this in particular is made up or not. But tasting notes, especially of the marketing kind, can be a collection of notes from different preparation methods, consumption temperatures, and, most likely, from being drank next to other coffees that taste different and might bring out each other's individual accents.
Also self-roasting, also beans from SM. These days I just order the 20lb bag of Espresso Monkey and call it good. In the past I've got their sampler sets with a range of different regions but once roasted they pretty much taste the same to me (all good). I suspect the roasting is what makes the most difference (often coffee seems to have been over-roasted).
I have gotten fairly into coffee but I struggle to independently pick up these subtle notes. I'll take a sip, struggle to put any concrete words on the taste, and then read the tasting notes and (honestly) think "ah of course, yes I definitely get that". But I'm sure it's all just the power of suggestion.
(An exception is some Ethiopian beans which have an unmistakable blueberry aroma and taste that they are famous for.)
I've stopped worrying too much about "advancing" past that level. Now I just buy the coffee, read the notes, enjoy experiencing the sensations that have been placed in my head. Is it "connoisseurship"? Is it a placebo? Who cares, it's fun!
It might be useful to you - it definitely was for me - to get a few french presses of strikingly different coffees that are 'emblematic' of certain flavor profiles. This was a long time ago, so I just used Starbucks blends (sorry current me) but you could certainly do something even more telling nowadays. So you'd get a yergachiffe that was definitely blueberry, but then a slightly different Ethiopian bean that's very lemony, and some Arabian style Indonesian beans for Spice characters, a Guatemalan or something for nuttiness, etc.
It's much easier to get subtle notes in cuppings than drinking brewed coffee, because the brewing method will skew the taste. You also need to train your palate, you obviously can recognise what tastes good to you, but most of us never actually worked on pinpointing those flavours.
Unfortunately, some roaster embelish those notes to drive up sales, since it's the only to differentiate between coffees, especially if you're not familiar with that particular farm/region.
Or, you can just ignore them and have fun :)) Coffee can be a rabbit whole where you can spend lots of money to get certain microlots or improving your water profile.
During covid a friend tried a "smell training" kit from amazon and I bought one too. (pretty fun, with rose, lemon, eucalyptus and clove)
basically, some essential oils of one smell at a time.
Looking at more extensive smell kits, there is a huge jump in price if you get a "master wine aroma kit". They can have many many scents.
It might just be putting names to smells, but I also wonder if you can actually develop or enhance your sense of smell (and therefore the aromatic parts of taste)?
I've little doubt that when smell was an important part of finding and identifying food people would have better trained senses. Whether a kit from Amazon can enhance your sense of smell, not sure. Certainly not without spending a lot of time with it.
Those quotes made me laugh and reminded me heavily of weed reviews.
Fun tidbit - The difference in aroma, appearance, flavor, and experience of a $9 eighth of cannabis versus a $900 eighth of cannabis would likely be noticeable even to an amateur.
You don’t necessarily need to be a Ganjier[0] to tell.
Efforts to homogenize it and remove labeling do serve to remove brand bias which is why it is standard now at cannabis cups - but still the quality shines through - literally sometimes.
But when it gets down to reviews and describing experiences we are all limited by the English language.
Some quotes from my own reviews:
“The insides almost looked like the outside of a banana slug. That kind of yellow.”[1]
“Beyond the citrus notes, the smell is definitely honeydew to me, not cantaloupe.”[2]
Good wine experts give descriptions that arent just made up but based on a range of real scents - its standard in a sommelier school to have an aroma kit of tens to a hundred or so scents used as comparisons. Its a few hundred dollars investment for a good one.
There probably are objectively 4 categories of wine that pretty much everybody will agree with when given a blind test:
bad - wine that actually has gone bad (skunked, turned to vinegar or some other faul)
low-quality - jug wine (high sugar and/or extremely high acidity and/or strong ethanol flavor)
average/meh - the wine is drinkable and nothing stands out
good wine - the wine hits all the key traits of its varietal
Those super-sensitive can get more fine grained, and anyone who doesn't hate wine will have a 5th "great" category based on their personal preferences. But those are replicable consistently across the population.
The average/good distinction is trainable for the average person with some practice.
I agree with your classification
(you can add "high quantity of sulfites" to low-quality. Those taste like the headache you’re going to get on the next day.)
Also while price doesn’t predict which category you are, it’s hard to find a very cheap good wine. You have to either know your stuff, or buy something more expensive
In that event, do you know if the 900$ bottles were qualified as more enjoyable than the 9$ bottles?
For instance, in Costa Rica, one year, many wine drinkers prised this wine as exceptionally good, specially consideringn it was very very inexpensive and not even packaged in a glass bottle.
I don't have synesthesia to any notable degree but what you're describing kind of makes sense as being it. Not tastes for me, but sounds can elicit such responses eg. a sound having graphite steel I can well imagine. Or other things that would baffle another person.
Frankly, "notes of blue and a hint of graphite steel" sounds too remote from normal experiences to be consciously made up - I mean, who's going to relate to that anyway?
I’ve blind tasted beer numerous times in multiple different contexts.
Even participated in a session called “tasting on the right side of your brain” all about identifying and interrogating those more abstract impression.
As poetic as they are - they carry insight and information both about the taster and the liquid that - without interrogation even the taster maybe unaware of.
Two scientific points to bring up about this article:
1. When the author talks about Coke vs. Pepsi, he comes to the conclusion that the reason people prefer Pepsi in blind taste tests but Coke in unblinded ones is "Think of it as the brain combining two sources of input to make a final taste perception: the actual taste of the two sodas and a preconceived notion (probably based on great marketing) that Coke should taste better." I've read elsewhere, though, that the reason for this difference is actually because of the difference between "sip tests" vs. "drinking tests". Pepsi is objectively sweeter than Coke, so if you're just taking a few quick sips (as most taste tests are set up), you may prefer the sweeter taste of Pepsi because it stands out more, but if you're drinking a whole bunch, the sweeter taste of Pepsi can feel cloying.
2. The article includes this quote, "the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less." I wonder if this could be due to Berkon's paradox, a statistical paradox that was on the HN front page yesterday, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33677781. After all, I'm guessing most truly bad wines may not be rated at all.
A joke in the UK is that the unofficial slogan of Pepsi is 'yeah fine whatever mate' because when you order Coca-Cola in a pub and they (for some reason) stock Pepsi instead they always have to ask 'is Pepsi ok?'.
My cousin who was one of the people giving the challenge also said they were always supposed to give Pepsi second, because after the bitterness of the coke first, the relative sweetness of Pepsi would be slightly refreshing, even if the drinker liked the bitter taste
>so if you're just taking a few quick sips (as most taste tests are set up), you may prefer the sweeter taste of Pepsi because it stands out more, but if you're drinking a whole bunch, the sweeter taste of Pepsi can feel cloying.
This is not about drinking or sipping though. This is about people prefer Pepsi in blind tests and Coke in unblinded tests.
So this explanation would only make sense if the blind tests are also using sipping and the unblinded tests are using drinking.
The parent comment says that sipping gives a different experience to drinking which would explain preference for Coke vs Pepsi in blind vs unblinded testing.
I argue that this doesn't make sense as an explanation, as blind vs unblinded testing is orthogonal to sipping vs drinking.
So, if this is the explanation, they'd have to set the testsa very particular way, for seemingly no reason (expept, perhaps, such manipulation of results).
Yeah it’s like the difference between competition bbq and craft bbq. Competition stuff is packed with flavor since the judge will get 1 bite. Craft bbq is all about eating well and is balanced.
Speaking of which, “people prefer” is really vague (if not a weasel wordy) in this kind of studies-say-aphorism.
If there were 6 subjects, does it mean “5-6 of them changed their answer depending on the experiment” or “2 consistently preferred coke, 2 consistently preferred pepsi, and 2 don’t really care but bring the vote to a 4/6 majority based on confounding factors”
Generally most wine magazines don't publish the scores of the really bad stuff and the makers don't send it in for review. Most cellar tracker users also have fairly high average ratings, simply because they know what they like and know how to source it.
Speaking only for myself, I drank Coke for years because, well, of course I did, Pepsi is the "inferior" drink.
But at some point, I realized that every time a restaurant told me they only had Pepsi, instead of being annoyed, I was actually happy. Only then did I realize that I actually prefer Pepsi, and have been drinking Pepsi ever since. (I have quite a sweet tooth, so the fact that Pepsi is much sweeter means it tastes much better.)
I literally had to learn this about myself by observing my gut reaction to being told a restaurant only had Pepsi, because Coke being obviously better was so ingrained in me.
There's plenty more colas for more refined tastes, starting with Coca-Cola signature mixers. They were originally created for bartenders, but I think majority of people would pretty easily tell them apart from Cola and Pepsi in a blind tasting.
As someone who ran a wine-tasting group for several years I can tell you this: there are definitely discernible differences between wines. What there is not, however, is any kind of absolute standard for what constitutes a "good" wine. Different people like different things. There are two things that makes wines expensive, and neither of them necessarily correlates with whether a particular wine will taste good to you:
1. Old wines cost more because you have to pay for the storage.
2. Low-production wines that have an affluent following cost more because supply and demand.
And that's it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with you if you if you prefer a Gallo Rhine Wine in a box to a Romanee Conti.
That said, there is definitely a skill and an art to being a Sommelier, and that is the ability to take someone's description of what they like and match it to what's on their wine list. There is no such thing as a "good wine" independent of any particular person's tastes (except if you have a wine that has, say, turned to vinegar) but there is definitely such a thing as a good sommelier.
My dad tells the story of how he went to a shop to pick up some wine when they were being economical, and was in the "value" section. A wino of the classic type approached and pointed out the (I believe it was) Franzia.
"That's the good stuff," he said, then added confidentially: "...doesn't give you the shakes."
My dad bought the box and many more over the years. Never got the shakes. Quality is relative!
> the ability to take someone's description of what they like and match it to what's on their wine list
Absolutely, I worked in a wine store for years and it was always awesome having a customer come back and buy more bottles of something I recommended.
> What there is not, however, is any kind of absolute standard for what constitutes a "good" wine. Different people like different things.
This is me with Eastern U.S. wines. I understand that conventional wisdom poo-poos Vitis labrusca (even though it saved European wine!) but I do love foxy wines from that region.
Old and scarce wines you have to pay for because there just are only so many bottles to be had. You pay for the craft, where it came from, the heritage, the tradition, and for the fact that there's a limited supply that has an expiry date as well. You pay for the privilege of drinking that and reducing the finite supply.
It's like people buying a vintage car. It's worth a lot more than the sum of its parts. Because there might only be a handful left to buy. And it might have been owned by interesting people. It goes to the highest bidder. Same with a original paintings by some of the old masters. You might not be able to tell them apart from a good forgery or replica. But they are one of a kind and that drives their value. Scarcity.
Wine snobs of course are just that, people pretending to taste subtle differences that would probably fail a blind test. But there are undeniably wines that are very tasty and wines that are very much a bit bland and underwhelming (or hangover inducing). And there's a wide variety of different wine with very different flavor profiles that are pretty easy to tell apart. So, with some training identifying the difference between those is not that hard. There are grape varieties, yeast varieties, different aging and blending methods, soils, climates, etc. A good sommelier will be able to tell those apart. And a regular drinker will also taste the difference. And a wealthy drinker will seek out the rare experiences that are there to be had in the form of overly expensive bottles that provide just that.
I'm perfectly happy to drink cheap wine and I do so regularly. The mass produced stuff tends to be stable in quality and perfectly drinkable. I live in Germany and I noticed my local supermarket has Rumanian wine from only a single vendor (red, white, and rose). Affordable price and I figured they would not bother stocking it if it was really bad. So, I've tried them and while it's not amazing, it's very drinkable. There are also some local German wines that seem popular and are very drinkable. When in doubt, go for the bottles that are nearly out of stock. Trust your fellow drinkers to know a good bar-gain.
I do enjoy the occasional expensive bottle where you take a sip and notice that "hey this is some really tasty stuff". Not sure if I would pay 40 euro for it but I do enjoy it when I get served some. And I'll spend a bit more when I have dinner guests.
> Low-production wines that have an affluent following cost more because supply and demand.
Champagne region produces some astonishing volume of sparkling wine, like hundreds of millions of bottles per year. Any given bottle of sparkling from Champagne costs approx. 2 times more than cremant of the same quality.
I am no wine guru but I do know one thing for sure. There is definitely such a thing as bad wine. If paying a little more would guarantee not having a terrible bottle, that would make me pretty happy. In the real world I've not found that to be true though.
> There can be objectively bad pizza — burnt, cold, mushy — but there isn’t really any objective best pizza. Fancier and more complicated pizzas can be more expensive, not because they’re better, but because they’re more interesting. Maybe wine is the same way.
I feel like the difference between cheap tasty pizza vs expensive tasty pizza is that I usually feel a lot worse after eating the cheap stuff. Physically worse, not emotionally worse because I cheaped out of something.
There is. My father was really in to California wines in the 70's and 80's. From my freshmen year of high school in the early 80's I was always served a glass of wine with dinner. A couple of years in to this my friends and I hit our peak drinking phase. One would come up with a gallon jug of Gallo or some off brand box of wine. I would take a sip and just no. I can't drink this, it's awful. Now beer I could drink some of the worst, 40's of old English 800 for example, but wine, ya it at least had to be palatable before I would touch the stuff. My friends thought I was a snob...
In Croatia many years ago, we ordered the cheapest bottle on the wine list. It was disgusting. The locals were amazed that we didn't know to water it down before drinking.
That's also typical in Spain. In fact, most family restaurants offer free wine, but it's of that level of quality, so you usually mix it with sparkling water.
Also, it's typical of young people to mix cheap wine with Coca-Cola, and have parties with that.
It's typical to drink watered down wine with routine/non-fancy/on-the-road meals. The locals call it 'gemišt' which is a germanism (gemischt = mixed). The wine used for this is bottom of the barrel, since it's a shame to waste good wine for this purpose.
Haha, I had the same experience: ordered the house wine at a restaurant—wine they actually made at that restaurant—and it was thoroughly mediocre :P I'm not much of a wine drinker and Croatian wines from local wineries were fine to my taste, but the ≈homemade wine was an unambiguous step down.
When my grandparents lived in Croatia in the pre-WW2 years they used to mix a little wine into their water because the water quality was bad. I guess the wine killed the germs, or at least masked the taste of the water.
Sorry, I just don't remember after all this time. Although IIRC the label's picture had a peasant sort of character who appeared to be holding a glass at arm's length (or at least that's how we interpreted it)
The thing is, wine "quality" is entirely subjective. I've not found much correlation between price and whether I will like it or not. The only safe bet is that if it tastes too strongly of vinegar, probably people won't like it as much. But some European wines (Spain and Italy) intentionally produce wine with a non-negligible amount of vinegar taste.
I know of a single maker that only puts out wines that I consider good or at least okay: Heitz.
Heitz is pricey though, and a $6 bottle of Barefoot or Charles Shaw two buck chuck can be just as good or better than a huge assortment of $50 or $300 bottles of swill. In my experience.
> a $6 bottle of Barefoot can be just as good or better than $50 or $300 bottles of swill
As someone who has blind tasted many wines…
- I can see not being able to tell a difference between $50 bottles and $300 bottles, and even preferring the less expensive option. Some of the tastes can be very subtle, and sometimes the more expensive wines need to be cellared before they really start to shine.
- I honestly don’t think I have ever had a $50 plus bottle of wine that I would not have preferred over Barefoot, which has approximately zero taste markers of a wine made to taste good.
- There are inexpensive wines (sub-$8) that can hold their own versus $20-30 bottles, but that almost always involves generous use of oak chips and an audience that doesn’t mind the imbalanced flavor profile. Most people don’t mind the imbalance, especially since the wines are usually inexpensive, high alcohol, and taste better than wine at a similar price point.
- Folks who can’t differentiate wine taste may be “non-tasters”. I dislike this term of art, but it’s folks who have fewer taste buds per unit area of their tongue. Tell-tale signs are people who salt everything and/or use hot sauce to an extreme level.
- For folks on a budget who want to drink decent wine, Trader Joe’s Reserve wines ~$10 a bottle) punch way above their weight. These are basically $20-30 retail bottles of wine that needed to be cleared at the winery cellars quickly to make space for a new vintage. “Shiners” is the term of art for these bottles pre-labeling.
I could see one becoming convinced price has no correlation with quality given the bullshit that's sold in the $10-20 range. "Why, this was $15 but it's plainly worse than the $8 bottle I had last week!" There's some real crap in that bracket, at least around here. Especially French and Californian. I get the impression France drops their trash on us (the USA) in that price range, relying on their national "brand" to sell it for more than it's worth. Above that range, they're consistently damn good, of course.
[EDIT] As for Californian wine in that range, it seems to have a problem with marketing-over-substance. I expect trying to compete in that range on quality is... frustrating.
> I could see one becoming convinced price has no correlation with quality given the bullshit that's sold in the $10-20 range.
Yeah. There seems to be a lot of variability below $20. That said, it’ll you do the math, it’s tough to make a wine with a good and distinct character below $20 for reds and $15 for whites (I’ve seen it, but it’s relatively rare).
Also, totally agree with your edit. California wines have a lot of challenges with marketing over substance across the whole range or price points.
“honestly don’t think I have ever had a $50 plus bottle of wine that I would not have preferred over Barefoot, which has approximately zero taste markers of a wine made to taste good.”
I can’t believe that. I’ve never had barefoot and probably never will but there’s a lot of totally undrinkable, maybe even semi-poisonous, expensive wine. It’s not even rare. If you buy from a good merchant this is less of a problem but still, expensive wines go bad, and some were never good to begin with.
The most likely expensive dud you're going to see is aged Burgundy reds. Many don't make it.
Very old red wine (e.g. 30+ years), if it's not fortified or a dessert wine, is also not particularly pleasant. I've had some very famous Bordeaux from some celebrated 70s vintage, a sip from Hedonism Wines in London, and it was very much not worth it; more than anything else, it reminded me of clothes in an old person's closet.
On the other hand, the same day I had a sip of something sweet from the 19th century - like 1898 or something - from Crimea, and it wasn't bad. It wasn't great, but it wasn't bad or undrinkable either. Might have been related to these batches - https://quillandpad.com/2020/07/21/the-massandra-collection-...
> but there’s a lot of totally undrinkable, maybe even semi-poisonous, expensive wine
“A lot”? Really? Change your wine merchant if that’s the case.
That said, sure, I mean, if you want to include flawed wines like ones with brett, ones that haven’t been stored properly (e.g., in the sun), wines way past the their peak, etc., then one will certainly run into some bad wines at any price point.
That’s sort of a given, imho, and is in no way a reflection of the quality of the wine.
That certainly doesn’t in general make the high end wine “fake” or not worth a higher price (at least to some point), which is the point of the linked article.
When eating a dish, I can usually identify the ingredients and spices by flavour, but different wines taste more or less the same to me. Some taste different, but I can't say that they taste significantly better than others. Spending $50 more on the food in a restaurant is going to make an enormously bigger difference than spending $50 more on wine. In fact, I find that not drinking wine at all usually makes for a better experience if the food is good, because the super strong flavour of wine destroys your ability to discern flavours on the next bite. Not all that different from putting hot sauce on all your food, in fact.
I strongly agree with what you're saying here and having been thinking along similar lines while browsing this thread. Taste is an important factor in food appreciation and one that most people already have and can develop further, to real value (including health benefits) in eating. It often reflects the quality and freshness of the ingredients (and thus nutritional value), as long as the cook also has some skill and hasn't 'ruined' those ingredients in the finished dish. Taste with wine simply doesn't have the same richness and usefulness, beyond indicating when a wine is 'off' or has been too cheaply/chemically processed, etc.
Not speaking for everyone but I'm pretty sure a lot of people who love extreme hot sauces, it's not so much the flavour but that they just want to feel something for once :o
I'd be shocked if you thought there's was actually no correlation if you're thinking of a price range from $5 to $100+. The worst wines by far I've had have been the ultra cheap stuff. Once you get above like $20 or whatever your personal threshold is though the variance is much smaller in terms of quality I'd say.
You do make a good point; the worst of the worst tend to be the ultra cheapies.
With that said, there are unbounded arrays of cheap and expensive selections that all taste like shit (again, in my opinion - others likely perceive them differently).
I've met plenty of people who happily drink something I consider 100% not palatable or suitable for human consumption.
> The thing is, wine quality is entirely subjective.
The article says it isn't. And I agree. Go buy a two-buck chuck at Trader Joe's, and a $50 Chateauneuf de Pape from 2018. One is an acrid, acidic fruit punch, the other is a balanced soft tannin delight. I guarantee your palette can tell the difference, or your money back. :)
Agreed, they have different qualities. Still, characteristics don't automatically translate to people preferring the expensive one because it's "better", it's only "different". Individual taste preferences introduce a high degree of variance.
Yea I think probably most people can tell the difference between $6, $20 and $50 and then struggle beyond that (and beyond that it is very subjective).
But for 'crap' 'ok' and 'good' and 'good+' categories I think it's actually fairly straight forward.
Anything related to taste and smell is partly subjective, partly intersubjective. The sense of smell varies from person to person due to genetic differences, different learned tastes, partial anosmia, etc. This is also the reason why one like a perfume and another one hates it. The chromatograph can analyze a substance objectively but every nose smells it a bit differently.
I took the introductory sommelier exam as a hobbyist, but I was in a room with ~200 people in the industry. We collectively blind tasted about a dozen wines, and I watched as people around me mostly guessed correctly with astonishing accuracy.
There may be some nonsense in wine tasting, but it is definitely possible to develop a body of knowledge and experience that allows one to identify wines based on only your senses. It's important to note that the CMS only includes traditionally produced wines in the blind tasting - no curveballs (pinot grigio grown in Alaska or whatever).
> Some people say you can't tell the difference between Pepsi, Coke, and the diet versions of both, but I certainly can.
I feel sorry for people with such insensitive taste buds.
I can understand not having a preference, but being unable to tell the difference at all? I wonder what other flavors they're missing out on in other foods.
At the other end, yes, there are some sommeliers with very sensitive tastebuds that are ridiculously good at identifying wines.
But I would wager that at least 90% are faking it, or it's all in their head, and the blind taste tests expose them. It's like audiophiles and their need for HDMI cables that cost 4 digits.
I once found myself at a fast food joint where there was a self serve fountain with Diet Coke in the regular Coke dispenser. I hesitantly asked if that was the case and the counter person cheerfully admitted that they'd run out of regular Coke and figured nobody would notice the substitution.
I regret not asking how many people had, in fact, noticed and inquired.
I think people who regularly drink Coke might not notice the difference right away but for someone who drinks diet drinks, regular coke tastes like straight syrup now.
I noticed immediately. I find the flavor of artificial sweeteners (and some of the recent plant-derived sugar substitutes) as distinctive as you find sugar.
I recognize the irony of including HFCS among the "natural" sweeteners. Isn't that just 10,000 spoons (of sugar)?
I suspect there's a chicken and egg effect with pricing and blind tasting. Someone who can identify wines blind surely knows how much each region/producer/style costs, and based on that would assign a guessed price. Example: Paulliac is expensive, this tastes like a Paulliac, therefore wines that taste this must also be expensive.
Get a bunch of friends to each bring a bottle. Maybe give a criteria, like a price range, so people don't feel obliged to impress with the price tag.
All bottles are delivered to the kitchen at the beginning of the night, where the host puts each in a numbered paper bag. Each attendee gets a score sheet.
Start serving, either by pouring or just putting a few bottles on the table at a time. It's a normal party, apart from each person giving each numbered wine a score, and conversation about the wine being an icebreaker.
At the end of the night total up the scores and reveal the bottles, generally to some hilarity.
It's fun to throw in a few wildcards. As the host, I threw in a couple of extra bottles: one well above the price range and another the cheapest I could find. (Found out after the event that an attendee also decanted a box into a bottle. All in the spirit!). I also poured all the left over bits from each bottle (not glasses!) into a bottle and served that up towards the end of the night.
The cheap wildcard came second. The dregs came middle of the pack and the expensive bottle came below the dregs. It was a fun night and the guessing game really got people talking about what they liked and disliked, but they couldn't be pompous about it, unless they wanted to risk a ribbing at the end of the night.
The nice thing about the party is that everyone is in on the joke and they are in it together. They know from the beginning that there are going to be surprises and much of the conversation is around this. The host can avoid an advantage by putting the bottles into blank bags then getting someone else to apply the numbers.
My family often does this, but more like you have to figure out which wine is which out of 14 across many varieties and provenance. My wife and I both got 2nd and 3rd place with only mixing up two. Though it was less so what is cheap what is expensive, it is an interesting game nonetheless. We blamed the many years we spent in Napa on being so good :P
I played a more "advanced" version of this. There was roulette like table. you could bet on drink name/type (type of wine/whisky/rakia/vodka/etc..), country of origin and what it's made from. Dealer was pouring under table from covered bottles.
I really wonder how much of the suspicion of wine comes from the class-conflict accoutrements and marketing.
I used to be a big wine skeptic. It seemed pretentious, overpriced, and boring. The people who liked it were the kind of people I disliked. Most of the places in the town I grew up in all had the same "big reds" at ridiculous prices. Wine was the thing that cost $12 that you paid $60 for at the local steakhouse to look important.
Then, I moved to a lesser-known wine-producing state and started actually trying wine. It took some time--and there were more than a few encounters with snobs and commercial puffery that made me want to rethink it--but it soon opened up into a huge world that I had no idea about before. It was far more fascinating and enduring than previous interests in whiskey or craft beer.
It's a pity that wine gets such a pretentious reputation. It's a fascinating blend of chemistry, geology, geography, and culture that at its heart is an agricultural enterprise.
I made a career limiting move at my first job when I arranged a blind wine tasting at the house of the CEO, who was a pretentious wine snob. I'd have been fine if I stuck to $40-50 bottles but I snuck in some Gato Negro from Chile, then made sure everyone knew when that was the CEO's favourite.
Started my first company shortly thereafter, probably that incident is as responsible as anything else for my entrepreneurial path.
I'm pretty into wine, not in the industry though. But I've tried a lot of stuff (from garbo wines, to stuff like Rayas, Haut Brion, Romanee Conti, etc... some pretty heavy hitters), and I agree that money is not the driving factor. The economics are huge, like sometimes some small producer will just explode and their production is little... but the demand might be high and suddenly you're looking at a 10 euro bottle of wine, going for 120 euros. Lot's of times it's because they actually make something pretty remarkable, but sometimes not.
Having said that, I've seen some incredible stuff. There was a tasting were a friend brought a bottle with him, it was a blind tasting and everyone was supposed to write down what their bottles were. So my friend presented his bottle concealed in aluminum paper as we used to do, and he wrote down the bottle + vintage.
At the end of the night, notes were exchanged, and there was a very very strong taster in the group. It was burgundy night, and he nailed 4/5 wines (6 in total, but the one you brought didn't count), producer, wine, and vintage. My friend told him "you didn't guess the vintage of the one I brought", I don't remember but I think my friend thought that it was a 2008 and this guy said like 2009. When they revealed the bottles, the bottle was indeed a 2009 from the same producer. My friend had taken a different bottle from his cellar and he didn't realize :^). Some folks know what they're drinking very well indeed (5/5
We moved to a farm in wine country in the PNW years back, and I had this 'ah ha' moment. It was the summer before the pandemic, and we had friends visiting. We sat down to eat a meal we made with all of this local food. I took a sip of a wine from a vineyard nearby. That's when the term 'terroir' suddenly made sense. The wine had the same essence as the food we were eating, all being from the same region. But it was elevated. It's like, the celebration of all of this hard agricultural work. The cherry on top.
People find ways to turn anything into a game. And status, striving, gaming – they enter into anything. But for me, I generally just keep a list of favorites. Reds often give me a headache, so a good red, to me, is one that does not. But I've grown to really like Rosé, and it doesn't have to be summer.
Anyway, there's definitely good wine and bad wine. I think personally a good story contributes a lot more to the value of wine than its rating. But 'value' can be very subjective.
More expensive wine doesn't necessarily taste "better" - as better is a highly subjective experience, specific to the individuals preferences. But it does tend to taste more "complex", e.g. like more different things at once, and more elegant, e.g. containing rarer flavour notes like oak or earthyness in reds or clearer mineralic taste in whites.
Also, in wine, the price to value ratio is anything but linear. In most European countries, once you've made it past the 8 euro mark, you can get some great wines that get a lot better up to about 30 euro a bottle. After that,paying an additional 100 only gets you a marginally better wine, if at all.
Overall though, the best advice is to drink whatever you enjoy.
Yep, and it can be argued that this kind of complexity spectrum is the foundation of connoisseurship itself, in any domain. The journey from amateur to expert is one of becoming bored with simple, easy-to-understand things, and gradually seeking out more complicated things to satisfy one's curiousity.
I blind-tasted wine competitively at an international level and it is pretty commonplace to identify region/sub-region/year/grape across 10 wines blind with ~80% accuracy. In fact, many tastings go further than this and you identify chateau/year from 10 wines from the same region - i.e. the Oxbridge teams mentioned there also do a blind tasting competition specifically on left bank Bordeaux. It's relatively straightforward to train yourself to do this. Note that the physical properties of the wine play heavily into this too (colour, reflection in light, viscosity are proxies for alcohol, age, grape, treatment). Additionally, having the requisite knowledge of "this wine would never be served this old, this wasn't a good year in this region because of x weather, this region only grows x,y,z" means you can deduce a lot from quite little information.
I do think people overfit on the colour piece though; you could definitely find some reds and whites which, if tasted without seeing the colour and at the same temperature, would be challenging to tell apart, more-so than differentiating between country/grape/region. I'm not sure what this really proves, apart from being counterintuitive.
That said, there is a lot of bullshit in market of people who buy and sell expensive wine (more so than the professional tasters and vineyards, who are usually genuine enthusiasts). Lots of cheaper wines may be more enjoyable, and wine flavour profiles are often full of weird signalling about what constitutes quality, i.e. "tasting note x is considered desirable/refined/distinguished, ergo it tastes better", which is nonsense and snobbery. Without any bias you might think expensive and old bordeaux tastes like an old boot, but if you've been trained that those specific flavour profiles are distinguished and desirable ('hints of leather and earth').
I've had a lot of red wine in my life; like, probably too much. The only bottle with a memorable taste came from a wine tour in Napa Valley where they said half the field was destroyed in a fire, so they were getting rid of the rest for cheap. The wine was super smoky... and absolutely delicious. I wonder why that never became a thing.
We had a lot of smoke tainted “experimental” wines out from Australian vineyards as 2019 and 2020 releases - some were really interesting, others simply dreadful (with winemakers just glad you were happy to take a punt and get rid of it for them).
Not sure repeating the bushfires that created those releases is a long term strategy though…
You can "no true scottsman" your way to make that true or false, depending.
I might say "Cars and yachts are not so widely faked, but are both status symbols", but then you might say "ah, but those are less subjective. A yacht objectively does not sink, and a car objectively needs less maintenance or goes faster or has better ride quality"
I might say "having a subjectively defined set of books on your bookshelf is a sign of sophistication and status, and is not widely faked", but you might say "ah, but the books are objective, having 1984 and K&R C are objectively a sign of programmer status"
I might say "owning a 'nice house' in a big city is a status symbol, 'nice' is very subjective, but it's not widely faked", to which you will point out reality is fake and I cannot even prove houses are real in the first place.
I don't know about judging the binary, but there are more- and less- faked luxury good appreciations. Whiskey is less faked than wine is (but, like most things, the distinctions blur as you go up in price; that makes, like, a kind of basic economic sense, right?)
follow up thoughts assuming that _everything_ lives on a simple spectrum of least faked and most faked
(1) I posit that certain demographics are _aware_ of the 'fake's or 'widely-faked' things(material, immaterial, symbolic) which they willingly or unconsciously/historically/inadvertently subscribed/habituated/endowed into
(1a) how do we ascertain where ourselves (and others) are on that scale of awareness
(1b) of the groups who belong on the _less aware_ side of the awareness spectrum, what are the classes of fake things which they subscribe to that they will not concede to be fake at all
(2a) Is there a demographic that willingly/consciously/unconsciously wants to be deceived
(2b) What are the classes of things which they normally want to be deceived by?
Connection between wine connoisseurs and notion of high-status is generally accepted and the connection between status, self esteem and serotonin is well established [1-3]. There is one interesting study (which unfortunately i cant access) on rationality (or rather suppression of) during blind wine testing [4] which i presume iterates this point in context of wine
Solomon et al expounded Terror Management Theory[5] based on Becker's Denial of Death[6] which suggests one experimental measure for ascertaining degree of irrational attachment (or degree of irrationality); given a threat or reminder of death, humans will strongly assert whatever symbolic attachment (eg religion, race, choice of text editor, wine vs non wine loving, wine choice, truffle choice) they have and discriminate anyone who belongs to the 'other' due to the serotonin triggering nature of asserting the value of your attachment/identity. What i do want to see is a social/fMRI study of technological workers and 'fashion' ie irrational/subjective choices made in supposedly rational/objective domains (choice of text editors etc), related [7]
[1] Sylwester, Robert. "Serotonin, students, and self-esteem." The Education Digest 63.2 (1997): 16.
[2] Breuning, Loretta Graziano. Habits of a happy brain: retrain your brain to boost your serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, & endorphin levels. Simon and Schuster, 2015.
[3] Pyszczynski, Tom, et al. "Why do people need self-esteem? A theoretical and empirical review." Psychological bulletin 130.3 (2004): 435.
[4] Caltagirone, C., et al. "Rational versus emotional behavioral responses in wine tasting: a transcranial magnetic stimulation experiment." American association of wine economists annual conference. 2011.
[5] Greenberg, Jeff, Tom Pyszczynski, and Sheldon Solomon. "The causes and consequences of a need for self-esteem: A terror management theory." Public self and private self. Springer, New York, NY, 1986. 189-212.
[6] Becker, Ernest. The denial of death. Simon and Schuster, 1997.
[7] Breuning, Loretta. "The neurochemistry of science bias." Groupthink in Science. Springer, Cham, 2020. 3-14.
10% of market and wine experts are real. The rest is overpriced wines of doubtful quality, fake prices just to give prestige, and so forth. As a rule of thumb, spending 20-50 euros per bottle you can drink italian top wines (French wines are more costly). If you are spending 350 euros for a bottle of Sassicaia or paying a Bordeaux 800 euros, you are probably misleaded by the market. It's not that a top quality Bordeaux is not a great wine, but after the 30/40 euros the quality gain is only marginal and non linear at all, so sometimes a cheaper wine of a less famous maker is going to be better than a wine you pay a lot. 90% of trained customers (the ones that did some kind of 3 months course) can't tell great wines from mediocre wines apart.
Bonus: want to drink a top quality italian wine spending just 30 euros? Buy a couple of bottles of Passorosso by Franchetti. Etna Red, Sicily. Drink it together with some top quality French pinot noir and tell me if it's not on par.
I learned to appreciate wines only after I moved to a wine producing country (Portugal). I cook once a week for my girlfriend and try to choose a different wine each time. After a few years you learn a bit, which ones you like and dislike, and how different wines are. It's a lot of fun. There is nothing fake about it.
The "fake" part is the idea that wines are objectively better than each other. Afficianados can invent their own standards, and that's fine, but those standards don't need to apply to people who simply want to enjoy wine.
What muddies the water is that wine has an association with aristocracy that has never been had with Coke and Pepsi, or pizza with pineapple vs no pineapple.
Sure, wine is more complex than many other tastes, but so is beer, and beer has mostly been considered a blue collar affair, historically speaking.
Everyone is right and wrong at the same time. All wine is good and all wine sucks. Any given bottle will be a hit or miss, regardless of price. With price, you may be getting a more rare varietal, but that doesn't mean your friends will appreciate it.
A given wine needs to target its audience. Are your friends adventurous? Then you might actually consider sharing that bottle of Sagrantino, as they may appreciate the experience even if they don't like it that much. But if their tastes are generally more... conventional, then just go with that $9 Cabernet Sauvingnon from Trader Joes that can't offend anybody. Do you have wine snob friends who you want to make jealous? Then the $300 bottle of whatever is right for you, as you'll not only be able to gloat but perhaps spend less as you have an excuse not to crack it open until it "peaks" some time in the next century.
There is nothing fake about that either. You don't have to pass a blind test, you usually see the wine. It's the same with food - the presentation counts, too. Or with almost any kind of luxury good. Almost any brand is more expensive than "no name" products even though the production costs are the same.
Of course, people can be against luxury goods but the point is they're not getting it. People pay for brand and prestige, including some wine affiocionados (though not me). That's perfectly normal for luxury markets.
By the way, beer is way less complex than wine. It's not even remotely comparable, primarily because beers are "designed" by professional brewers for specific target markets. You can't do that as easily with wine, it depends more on the grapes, weather, and location.
This is how I know it's not fake: I was fortunate enough to taste very expensive wines repeatedly as a teenager, not understanding their significance. Yeah I thought the whole thing was snobby, but the wine just tasted so good! When I bought mid-tier wine for the first time at age 21, it tasted "hot," like rubbing alcohol. Same with all the others from the grocery store. I still buy it but often leave it sitting for hours before drinking it, even though I haven't tasted any expensive wines in several years. My friends always say I have low standards for living conditions, which maybe I do, but when it comes to wine, seems like I'm permanently spoiled.
Interestingly, as I understand Charles Shaw buys suprlus wine from nice vinyards and blends them to make their offering. So the wine is likely to be totally inconsistent, but probably ok to even occasionally good.
Personally, I think red blends are often better than single wine varietals. They're often perceived as cheaper, but from a taste perspective, I find they're usually more balanced in flavors and more complex as a result.
The Pepsi Challenge has LOTS of faults and isn't a great example.
I believe that one of the "debunkings" about the Pepsi Challenge was that people preferred the initial swig of Pepsi but preferred Coke if the question was asked after more consumption, after the beverage had warmed up, etc. Effectively, you could set up the situation to get people to choose one or the other quite easily.
I've also heard that Pepsi is sweeter than Coke, and that after the initial swig, some people that at first said they liked the Pepsi more were turned off by the sweetness.
I am a wine enthusiast for about 10 years. On an average week I am tasting 2-3 wines. I can definitely tell good wine from bad and more or less guess grape variety and geography in blind tasting.
Saying all that, I am mostly buying wines in $20-$30 price range, because most of the times I can't tell difference between good $20 and good $50 wine in blind tasting. I strongly beleive that $100+ wines are nothing but a marketing, except really old (30+ years) vintages. Those are just pricing for their rarity, not their taste, and mostly used as an expensive presents.
There are also things like favorite regions (mine is Tuscany and South Italy), vintages (2006 and 2010 in Italy were mostly golden, 2016 is very promising) and innumerable hacks like buying wine across the road from that prestigious chateaus and terroirs, or tasting non-Champagne sparkling from France - same quality for half the price. It's funny and tasty game, I like it.
A nice thoughtful piece on tasting wine. Under scrutiny, sensational conclusions typically fall apart and sometimes they really tell you more about the "experts" than about wine. Fortunately for me, I can enjoy wine at many different price-points. However, I usually find the bottles which move me the most are priced at $50+.
Ten years ago I spoke to a winemaker whose goal was to match the test of a certain top level price winning wine. She said that they did chemical analysis and never ending taste tests. She said that she was not the only one. They thought that low price wines should eventually taste just as good as any of the super expensive ones. Even then it was hard to tell the difference. She pointed out that the different types of wines would eventually taste very similar to the point that most people would not be able to tell the difference. The price she was aiming for was less than $20 per bottle.
I suspect that very bad wine is very evident but good wines are very hard to identify by taste since they are very similar in taste. The only difference is the bottle and the price.
Wine is like any other consumer product. People pay for the brand and the utility. But brand is the big price differentiator.
I enjoy wine, but not to the level of detecting different ages or locations. I do, however, enjoy trying to find flavors in Whiskey, and I can attest that it's not all fake. The process and age makes a difference, and the age definitely comes out in the flavor of a whiskey. Of course it does, leaving a strong liquor in a cask will add flavors, and obviously time will determine how much of which flavors are imbued. I have a bottle of Bulleit rye, and my first taste impression was "I've had this before". Turns out it's made by some massive conglomerate that makes almost all rye whiskey in the US, and I had, indeed, had it before. It's as simple as recognizing a brand of ice cream or candy by taste. Candy might be harder, actually. Sugar masks flavor far better than alcohol.
A friend of mine from uni was really into wine. Won the varsity wine tasting competition. He bought a case of Italian reds because he knew it was his weakness. You absolutely can get good at wine, but not from casually drinking a glass every so often. Like all disciplines it takes practice.
Wine quality ranking (and price) in France is less interested in what tastes good and more interested in what is most distinctive.
A lot of fine wine is priced on geographic prestige / scarcity. For example, there are many hectares of land that can produce Chablis (much of it perfectly fine to you and me), but only 1% of the wine producing estates of the region have Grand Cru status. This status is a combination of competency of the wine producer + geography of the estate (more so geography). The chablis grand cru producing estates sit at the top of the appelation, and all the environmental variables (“terroir”) of this micro area and the expression of these in the final product contribute to the wine being considered more distinctive.
The most interesting part of the article to me was this:
> Based on the theory of predictive coding, our brains first figure out what sensory stimuli should be, then see if there’s any way they can shoehorn actual stimuli to the the expected pattern. If they can’t, then the brain will just register the the real sensation, but as long as it’s pretty close they’ll just return the the prediction. For example, did you notice that the word “the” was duplicated three times in this paragraph? Your brain was expecting to read a single word “the,” just as it always has before, and when you’re reading quickly, the mild deviation from expected stimuli wasn’t enough to raise any alarms.
I believe Vsauce had a video on this topic one. I’ll edit the content if I find it.
Same. This fooled me, as I was reading quickly and missed the duplications. Interestingly, I felt something was off but didn’t think anything of it except maybe “my eyes might be getting tired.” Consciousness/cognition as a prediction machine, and the the resulting cognitive biases and tricks, are fascinating.
My absolute favourite wine in the world is less than AU$30 a bottle - every vintage is spectacular. The winemaker wants ordinary people to drink his wines, so this is the price he sets. They are accordingly very difficult to buy - cellar door opens for just 2 weekends a year and supply is very limited. I’d back virtually anyone who likes this style to genuinely enjoy it, without knowing anything about its provenance.
I’ve tasted wines 10x or 20x the price, and they really are no better. They likely cost exactly the same to make, but their price is impacted by demand.
In general, I think most people can tell a $10 bottle from a $30 bottle. I suspect very very few could reliably pick a $300 bottle from a $30 bottle.
I keep teasing this, but my friend Jerry and I have done a whole series of Triangle Tests on various aspects of making coffee. We've finally settled on him publishing a Just The Facts, Ma'am doc, and me publishing the narrative. Real soon now.
Anyhow:
Our philosophy is "It doesn't matter what the experts can taste. What matters is what you can taste."
So for wine, it's easy for you & your friends or relatives to put out three glasses, two the same and one different, and see if the taster can pick out the outlier. If they can't, why should they care which one WineSpectator says is better?
I've done this experiment with friends a few times. Personal experience. Almost anyone can tell really shitty wine from the rest, think your one or two bucks cardboard container wine. Almost nobody can tell a 10 euro bottle from a 100 euro bottle.
This also goes for other food and drinks. It's the same with coffee. You can taste really cheap and awful coffee, but if anyone can tell me they can reliably differentiate between decent beans and one of those fancy "it was fermented and digested by a monkey" specialty brands I'm scpetical.
I went to dinner with my dad and a coworker of his when I was a quite a bit younger. The coworker suggested a bottle of _very_ expensive champagne that he and his wife had enjoyed together before.
It was very nice, and I said something like, “my limited experience with champagne probably doesn’t give me the proper appreciation for this.”
He said “Nonsense. If it tastes good to you, then it’s a good champagne, period.”
That’s kind of been my motto for food and drink ever since. Regardless of price, some things are just going to please you more than others, so enjoy them.
> (Do wines ever have 6-carbon carboxylic acids, or 10-carbon alkanes — i.e., goats, armpits or jet fuel? I am not a wine chemist and cannot answer this question. But one of the experts interviewed on Somm mentioned that a common tasting note is cat urine, but that in polite company you’re supposed to refer to it by the code phrase “blackcurrant bud.” Maybe one of those things wine experts say is code for “smells like a goat,” I don’t know.)
FWIW: If you are a person skeptical about wine or trying to understand the world of wine, the Somm movie series is really pretty good. There are absolutely objective differences in wine, in the same way as anything else - beer, whiskey, coffee, free range organic grass fed vs. CAFO. The person below who mentioned acetone taste in whiskey for example, is spot on - you teach your palette one thing and suddenly your whole perspective changes.
I enjoy wine, I am not a connoisseur by any stretch, but I can differentiate enough that I know what I like, and what I don't.
Friends of mine have held two professionally run wine tastings over the years, and they were great fun, and very educational. The wines were all decanted, you could not see what they were, and it was interesting to see that every wine scored on a bell curve with the group. The scores were anonymous, so you didn't have to worry about how you felt about any given wine.
My favorite part is that in each of the two tasting sessions, the highest price bottle scored well, but not at the top. In each, the top white and the top red were both roughly $30 dollar bottles. Also in each, a couple roughly $10 bottles scored really well.
The other thing that I learned, and apply regularly, is that at the $20 price point, you are generally buying a good tasting bottle of wine. $16 to $24 seems to be a really safe range for my tastes
The best bottle of wine I've ever had was an $8 pinot noir.
My friends and I like wine and, at that point in my life, we went wine tasting pretty regularly. One weekend we all instantly loved one of the wines.
We found out they were trying to clear out old inventory, and were selling it for $8 each. We bought the rest of their supply (about 2 cases) and split it among the 4 of us.
Off-topic: I was very surprised by how expensive wine is in California. I live in an European country where you can find good wine for less than 5 EUR a bottle. I couldn't find anything below 20 USD a bottle neither in San Francisco or Los Angeles. Why is wine so expensive in California if it's such a major wine producer?
My neighbor loves to organize wine tasting session with friends, one day, he opened some bottle, and when I poured it, I added some apple juice (about 50%) and nobody in the group noticed anything. I know that a few expert can actually tell wine apart and categorize them, but I now know that most of the time people have no idea :)
Wine quality = 12.145 + 0.00117 winter rainfall + 0.0614 average growing season temperature - 0.00386 harvest rainfall
This is the formula developed by Orley Ashenfelter to predict the quality of wine, as described in the book Super Crunchers by Ian Ayres. It is the Moneyball of wine and he claims it does just as well as experts.
> I’ll make one more confession — sometimes I prefer pizza from the greasy pizza joint down the street to pizza with exotic cheeses from a fancy Italian restaurant that costs twice as much. Does this mean the fancy Italian restaurant is a fraud?
No, it means the original studies were right to have a sample large enough to account for one person who's taking a position they wouldn't normally take on that particular day! But what it doesn't do is invalidate the findings of the larger study.
PS: I got to the end of the article thinking the author hadn't made a very convincing case, then I saw that it was Scott Alexander, and my first reaction was "oh, he's smarter than me, I probably didn't read it carefully enough." So, I guess I'm like the lady at the Judgment of Paris who asked for her scorecard back.
I have not partaken, for some time, and when I did, I was an aficionado of such fine vintages as Mogen David 20/20, Night Train Express, and Thunderbird.
However, I have friends that are very much into it, and will happily spend sick amounts of money on bottles of what to me, is just spoiled grape juice.
I don't disagree but I do have a question about the blind tasting: Is it possible that knowing about a wine's age or provenance allows our brain to focus on and look for specific details? For example, you can feed me meat and I might think it is delicious but soon after if you tell me it is snake or dog meat I will vomit all over the place and find that particular taste offending.
Isn't taste just a signal interpreted by the brain?
I am sure you all have seen those experiments with a fake hand next to the person's but they are blocked from seeing their real hand, they start feeling touch and pain on the fake hand! Can taste also be visually and mentally affected by sight or some other knowledge?
It's unfortunate that the price section of the article isn't a bit more nuanced. There is definitely a big difference - it just has diminishing returns effect and the drop off price point is likely lower than most experts are willing to admit
I loved this article. My take away would be - there are differences between wines, some people are good at telling them apart, but people make mistakes and can be tricked, so take everything you hear about wine with a grain of salt.
Wine tasting is exactly like bicycle saddles. Like saddles even have tiers, $20, $75, $150, $300, $500+.
Sometimes, when you spend more money, you get a better product, but it might not fit your ass (technically your sit bones, but I digress). Because human physiology differs greatly between people, you really do have to try a bunch of bike saddles to find the correct one that works for you . This can be a time-consuming and expensive process. In in an attempt to narrow down the correct answer, you might look up some reviews online. But in the end, it really comes down to what you like and there are no shortcuts.
> They look at 6,175 tastings from 17 wine tasting events and find that, among ordinary people (nonexperts), “the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less.”
Wines at wine tastings are hardly a random selection. They should look at supermarket wines.
In my experience paying more (over £8) definitely increases the chance of getting a nice bottle, but it doesn't guarantee it. But that effect is only true up to maybe £15 at the most. Above that you're throwing money away.
I've had some incredible wines, but it is beyond fucked up that you can lay down $40 for a bottle of trash, and that is just OK. In what other industry is the quality so inconsistent?
I have a friend who is a sommelier who told me that she could turn a $20 bottle of wine that I had into a $100 bottle. She took the wine from my hand, plonked it on the table and said "here is your $20 dollar wine". Then, she took it again, brought it behind her back, back around to the front, and presented it to me with two hands -- one hand under the main body of the bottle and one hand on the neck of the bottle. "Here is your $100 dollar wine, sir".
I work at a small intersection between wine and tech. Wine is not fake, but from a marketplace view can be considered as the progenitor of much of what we see today in tech. Before Silicon Valley, before Crypto, before Semiconductors... there was wine. And pretty much all of the same hype-machine rules have applied. You see wine that almost anyone would like get no traction whatsoever, and marginal swill marketed with lots of money and by influencers winning awards and notoriety.
> In 2001 Frédérick Brochet of the University of Bordeaux asked 54 wine experts to test two glasses of wine [...] that one had been coloured red with a flavourless dye.
Well, red wine is red because it's colored by the skin of the grapes.
I guess the critique is that the tasters were inconsistent, they used [very] different language for the wine(s).
Which is definitely interesting. But not that surprising :)
> "jammy"
I had no idea what they meant by jammy, but according to google it's very fruity wine, low acidity, low in tannin. Ah!
The language was proscribed, the tasters (surprise! students from the University) were asked to apply them to the wines. Of course they put the "red wine" words to the "red" wine.
I don't even know how to process this. It doesn't jibe with my experience at all. Obviously almost anyone can tell the difference between red and white wine, they are completely dissimilar, like orange juice and apple juice. It's very hard to believe that anyone that had both will confuse them.
And even I, who have no expertise at all, no real interest even, can mostly tell if a wine is from France or Italy for example, and most of the time if it's cheap or not.
In my local supermarket in Spain, they sell wine in a carton (like milk) for around 80 cents of an euro per litre. It is perfectly nice if you want to drink a glass with lunch, mix it with gaseosa in summer (like Sprite) or cook with it.
They also sell cava for less than 5 euros a bottle. It makes a roast chicken on Sunday appear somewhat more festive. The first time a colleague in the UK told me about fruity or orange taste in wine I was completely perplexed as to what he meant.
I once wrote software that automatically graded wine "sweetness" based on sugar grams/L output via Spectroscopy? (I think) in a lab. After learing which wines regions / varietals produced what rating (sweet / dry / extra dry) is pretty much all I need now when picking wine. I'd say the sweetness is probably the only major difference between varietals but maybe it's just me. Extra dry is what I like best.
I believe white is generally higher sugar but there are drier white wines still. There was a model fit to sugar content and it worked across red white and rose.
Once buying wine at a specialist shop in Austria, I got to do a blind test of Austria vs. Portugal reds, and I clearly could discern the delicious Portuguese Dão ;)
I don't like wine, or know anything about it, but I once was invited to a blind wine tasting party at a ritzy yacht club. So, of course I searched around for the absolute cheapest bottle I could find, it cost me $0.99. It was voted #2 out of a dozen very expensive wines.
My conclusion is that wine prices are certainly fake. Maybe there are good and bad wines, but you can certainly get a top notch bottle of wine for a dollar.
Maybe this supports the articles theory, but I feel wine is more of an experience more than just the chemical composition of the drink. After all, wine isn't consumed just for it's nutritional content.
You can get a good story from a bottle of wine - particularly around the vintage. Things like weather conditions in the years leading up to the pick and then right at the pick, volume of grapes and maturation method.
Saturday night I ordered a Tempranillo and my wife ordered a Cabernet Sauvignon, I knew the glasses had been switched by smell.
I can usually tell the difference between a $10 bottle of wine and a $30 (CDN). If I couldn't, I would buy the $10 wine by the case. I would unlikely be able to tell a $30 cab from a $100 cab and would probably prefer the $30 one.
I don't think I am unusual or extraordinary in this sense.
Wine is just fermented grapes. It is not magic. Expensive bottles of wine may be better on average, but largely just because they put in even more quality controls and so deliver a more consistent wine. It is not magnitudes of a difference.
People talk about wine like it is magic or high art. That there is something deeper to understand. There really isn’t.
It's not just grapes. Many wines technically aren't even vegan. Not uncommon for gelatin, egg whites, milk, or fish bladders and many other additives to be used in achieving the desired taste and color before the wine is filtered.
But grapes are not all the same: besides the taste of grapes varying depending on the soil, climate, orientation to the sun etc., there is also the judgement of when to harvest. Once in harvest season grapes can approach and then pass the desirable sugar level in a matter of days.
During the winemaking process there are many variables that cannot be codified from season to season because of variation in the grapes, such as increasing or decreasing acidity (and how), fermentation temperature, adjusting tannins, and probably more.
This is all true, but much of the variation can be controlled with modern techniques and careful monitoring. Not magic, science. Again, this has a cost, so it is not that it has no value, but it does not justify a 400% - 1000% markup.
I'm surprised that no one talks about how a certain wine makes you feel. Ever since I started partaking in cannabis, I've noticed that many of the labels describe the effects you are likely to experience.
Granted, wines aren't so different to reliably reproduce physical and mental effects, but maybe it's a new angle for marketing :)
I would love wine reviews where the reviewer drinks 3 glasses and then reviews how they feel the next morning. Wines use all sorts of additives to achieve their taste. Some wines leave me feeling worse the next day than others.
> But I recently watched the documentary Somm, about expert wine-tasters trying to pass the Master Sommelier examination. As part of their test, they have to blind-taste six wines and, for each, identify the grape variety, the year it was produced, and tasting notes (e.g., “aged orange peel” or “hints of berry”).
If you are interested in this topic, you may find the book "Gulp" interesting. https://maryroach.net/gulp.html The writer talks about wine and olive oil tasting, among other things.
A long time ago, I was on one of my first business trips with an older colleague. We were staying at a rather nice hotel, and it had a really nice bar with an extensive collection of liquor. We noticed some bottles that looked really old, and looked through the huge wine/liquor menu to find them. What we found was they were Armagnac, and the oldest bottle was from the 1800s and it was $350 a glass. Coincidentally our rooms cost $350 a night.
What if, we thought, we each bought a glass, and made sure that was our only purchase at the bar, and put that on our room account. We could fudge the dates, and put an extra day stay. My colleague said he knew the payroll woman and this probably would work.
First problem though, we had no idea what Armagnac tasted like, how could we tell if it was good if we had never tried it before? At this time the bartender came by and asked what we wanted. We thought, lets order a 'good' one and pay cash, then we order the fancy one for the room. So we asked him for a 'good one'. He poured us one and showed us the bottle, then left.
We looked into the book for it, and found it was $40 a glass. Well whisky was around $4, and Jack was like $5, for comparison. That was fairly pricey at the time for our own cash, we weren't that well paid, but we did say a good one. We smelled and tasted it. It smelled good, and it was so smooth. We savored it.
The bartender came back, asked, "How is it?". We said, "Its really good, but... $40 a glass? I know we said a good one but ...". Bartender stood back, "I would never do that to you sirs!". Punched the drink into the computer, it was $4, same as well drinks.
Honestly, the next sip I took was harsh, and had a bad aftertaste. It completely changed just knowing it was the same price as the cheapest swill you could get. Now the bartender could have given us a discount, but what it meant for us was that the $350 one was a waste of effort. We would have no idea if it was good or not.
People must stop citing Wikipedia as a source. This example is particularly egregious, since Wikipedia uses the same sources that the article itself does, so of course it "agrees".
Expensive wines are expensive because they are rare, not because they are better. If you value your money its not for you. The same is not true of beer, I can't really say with liquor
Everyone's taste is so different. I've found usually what makes the most difference for me is the wood barrels used to age the wine, and how much time they spend in those barrels. The good barrels are expensive, so the wines are usually more expensive. My friends don't share the same taste, and I wine that I absolutely love is just not their favorite.
I've also found a ton of variation in wines among bottles. I have a relatively cheap bottle I really like that is at the local grocery, and some have that great flavor that I really appreciate, and some are just blah. I've seen the same thing wine tasting, I have a wine I love and I bring the bottle home and it's sometimes not the same. I've kind of narrowed it down to spending time in the trunk of the car while I drive home in 100deg F temps. Now I bring a cooler with me to keep the wine at the cellar temp, but if you ask anyone who knows about wine they would say I'm being ridiculous. A wine fridge isn't required, a short time of the wine getting warm doesn't "damage" the wine, but I swear I can taste the difference. Maybe it's just luck, I've never A/B tested it.
Even though wine snobbery might be fake, that shouldn't minder your enjoyment of wine! Drink what's tasty and have a good time enjoying wine together (or alone if that's your jam)!
I think this piece is more of a reaction to the hackneyed articles we've all seen about how wine knowledge is all bs. It's a qualification of those conclusions that does a good job of explaining that the reality is a little more complicated.
I think it is a breath of fresh air to read something thoughtfully put together.
If you just care about the bottom line, yeah there isn't anything shocking. Wine is real.
If you want to learn about some of the details, then this has substance. I certainly wasn't familiar with the studies mentioned and their data. Did you know that 11/13 experts could identify the varietal and country of origin for a French Gamay?
IMHO, the content is vastly better than articles and threads with people squabbling about the latest thing Elon said on twitter.
The movie Somm was one of the funniest unintentional comedies I’ve ever seen. Just fake it til you make it, apparently. If you fail, simply keep retesting. Drink what you like. :)
As someone who enjoys French table wine what is the local equivalent in California? So much of it seems to be high alcohol and overwhelming flavours, kinda like the IPAs.
if you like wine at all, then there is absolutely a correlation between enjoyment and price; that the correlation isn't 1.0 doesn't mean that wine is fake
It depends on what "true" means. That there are diminishing returns to investments over a threshold? That's probably true of all these luxury goods. Past a certain point in whiskey, you're not necessarily paying for "better" so much as chasing some interesting distinction (a particular sherry note, an especially punchy cereal flavor in a high-proof bottling, &c). In each category of whiskey, there is a satisficing price point, and serious whiskey drinkers would (perhaps unlike wine drinkers) pretty uniformly tell you not to depart that price point without a good reason to.
It's interesting to me that the focus of this question is whether or not Wine experts are full shit or not. I have no trouble believing that with all the differences in inputs and technique, the final products would have material differences, and that some individuals are able to distinguish the difference.
More interesting to me is whether with enough experience I (or most people) can develop into one of those people - ie whether it is more akin to learning to read or learning to dunk.
taste is a combination of this with smell and visual (eg. color), but also mood, expectation, environment, time, stresslevel, atmosphere, temperature, viscosity and people around.
with this in mind, the exact same thing can taste like 100 times differently without changing the chemical side.
Some commentators claim that certain housing experts have "preferences" (or "things they like"), but several studies that concealed the exteriors of housing from participants showed that university undergrads unblindfolded for fifteen seconds could not judge whether they were inside of a townhouse or a single family home!
TLDR - wine is not fake. Some people like different things and are willing to pay for it. Article is pretty fair but underemphasizes diversity of preferences. Don't buy expensive wine or an expensive house just because it has a fancy label unless you know it has some feature that you care about. If it does and you can afford it, then sure, go have fun.
TL;DR -- "Wine is not fake. Wine experts aren’t fake either, but they believe some strange things, are far from infallible, and need challenges and blinded trials to be kept honest. How far beyond wine you want to apply this is left as an exercise for the reader."
It is a showoff sport. Insane wine prices are there for rich people who have too much money to spend, or people who are in desperate need of validation. We all know someone in a McMansion with premium beige textured walls and a few Lexus who has a "wine cellar" that they can't stop talking about. The market is mostly for them.
I say "mostly" because like TFA says, some people really can tell the difference, but I feel bad that they have to pay so much more due to the idiot tax.
Yeah, there's definitely some learned skill in IDing wines by region/variety.
My "system" for picking wines has two approaches:
- Buy Trader Joe's Reserve in a variety I enjoy
- Visit local wine shop, tell them my budget and what I'm eating for dinner, and buy whatever they suggest
Both approaches yield pretty good results for not much money.
I'll leave "risking" the $5 bottles from Safeway to somebody else. The $10-$30 bottles I get are consistently good enough, and often better than good enough.
1. If you doubt high end wine exists (e.g., it's all BS above $20 or whatever people say) and you have the means, find a bottle of Jean-Louis Chave Hermitage (the Syrah) of any vintage. Enjoy it at your favorite Italian / French restaurant. If they know wine they'll be happy you brought it. The Chave is far from cheap but it's affordable for what I call superwines (get it, like supercars?) and it really is something you'll never forget.
There is a quality with great red wine that in indescribable -- I've never even met a wine person who can describe it -- but it's undeniable when you experience it. I've experienced it with great wines like that Chave and occasionally with (lucky) midrange wines.
2. The rest of an enjoyable relationship with wine is mostly avoiding bad ones. But you develop strategies for this over time. It's very easy to get a red wine that's harsh or a white wine that's too sweet. These won't be fun to drink and will pair poorly with food if you're eating. Some tips:
- If you need a white to drink or eat with, favor Sauvignon Blanc -- it's not too sweet, it usually hasn't been oaked to death and apparently pretty hard to screw up. Get Marlborough if you want something fruity and anything French if you want something more laid back.
- If you're eating red meat favor Napa Cab. It's really hard to go wrong here.
- If you're in France or Italy just get anything. That close to the source + a strong wine culture you'll rarely be disappointed. This is a good time to try new wines.
- If you need a Champagne, it's Billecart-Salmon without question. It's one of the smaller Champagne houses who isn't caught up in prestige-pricing, glamour Champagne fashion BS. Affordable and excellent.
Things to avoid:
- Bordeaux -- now, I drink this a lot but I have experience. If you really need to (it's sounds cool) favor the left bank wines. They're generally higher value. I say avoid because the market is full of crappy, low cost Bordeaux that just takes advantage of the label.
- Burgundy -- just say no. Burgundy is arguably the best red. But not the bottle you're going to buy. You have to really know what you're doing here or be willing to spend a lot. I've gotten lucky once with a cheap bottle of Burgundy and when I say cheap that is relative.
- Pinot in general. Burgundy can rarely pull it off, no one else can either.
- Chardonnay -- tends to be too oaky or too sweet.
- Pretty much any other white, for the same reason.
- Sparkling wine. See Champagne above. Prosecco is too sweet and pretty much everything else is a crapshoot.
Wash:
- Italian reds are my favorite and they can be equally good and affordable but it's a bit of a crapshoot. Look for things that are 100% Nebbiolo, Sangiovese or 'Super Tuscans' which are basically the same blend as Bordeaux (but usually better at the same price). For the most part, avoid the other stuff.
- Montrachet -- arguably the best white (Chardonnay) that can be had but they're pricy and still hit and miss.
A few professors in my undergrad econ department have done a lot of actual academic research into this, and, in fact, started the American Association of Wine Economists (https://wine-economics.org) with other economists who are interested in wine worldwide. They have a quarterly peer-reviewed journal, and the articles are genuinely interesting. Sample topics from the latest issue: "Does quality pay off? “Superstar” wines and the uncertain price premium across quality grades" or "Tracking the wines of the Judgment of Paris over time: The case of Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars’ Cabernet Sauvignon"
A few things I've gleaned from them over the years:
1) People definitely come to a wine tasting and think they have to sound smart. There's always someone who thinks they need to say "something-something oaky" to "fit in" because it's something they saw on TV. The point is not to sound like what you think a smart person sounds like, the point is to find a wine you like. Hard to get around it, but that's what a lot of articles like this are basically pointing out. It's not wrong, but it's also kind of missing the point.
2) People have different fundamental taste profiles – just like some people just like Coke instead of Pepsi, and a €100 Pepsi will taste "bad" to someone who's expecting a €100 Coke. But if you like Pepsi – and there is a real reason that bottle of pepsi costs €100 (e.g. materials, aging, process, etc.) – you're really going to like that €100 Pepsi.
3) As a consequence of 1), there are definitely wines that are more "marketing driven," and tap into that insecurity. I know a few people who have been offered thousands of dollars to steam off the label of empty bottles of wine they kept in their cellar for sentimental reasons, so that those labels could be re-glued to a bottle of whatever, so that they could then be trotted out to pump some dude's ego. It's a shame, but that's people.
4) @Antognini is pretty on target here. For the same vintage, if you open it up right away, you can get a very tasty "house" bottle of wine for €15, but you should taste a very significant difference in the €40-€50 of wine from the same maker. The difference is more likely to show up when you cellar it. The €15 bottle might last for about 3-5 years before losing its taste. The €40 will gain complexity and flavor for 10-15 years. A more expensive bottle from a reputable maker should/might/maybe/is supposed to signal that it's been made to last even longer, like 40-50 years.
The entire field is absolute hogwash. Blind testers can’t tell the difference. I was mad the other day because I saw wine glasses categorized by what kind of wine should go in them— give me a break.
According to the article, this result comes from a study that used inexperienced undergrads, and those who have passed more rigorous training protocols perform better.
Yes, it's scientifically proven to be fake, but let people have some fun, what's the big deal? There are worse crimes than pretending to have the ability to super-taste wine.
I feel like the bigger argument to make here, is that taste itself is fake.
It's an illusion created by our brain, by taking in all of the various factors and determining whether we should be rewarded by it or not.
We see countless time color has effect on taste, scent has an effect on taste, mood has an effect on taste, expectations have an effect on taste.
Taste therefore isn't this static thing that we seem to think of it as.
> Judges were most consistent at the bottom of the range—they always agreed terrible wines were terrible—and least consistent near the top.
A hypothesis to explain this: We've evolved a detailed sense of taste to help us distinguish harmful food (spoiled, inedible, etc.) from safe food. That would suggest that our sense of taste is most heavily calibrated to detect bad flavors since those are the actionable danger signals that tell us to spit something out.
Part of something tasting good is simply the absence of off-putting bad flavors. Then, once those are out of the way, you can have more interesting but subtle nuances that elevate it to something much better.
I suspect that it's easier to reach agreement on bad wine (or bad food of any category) because it's likely bad because of the presence of one or more wrong notes that most of us are sensitive to and dislike.
Once you've eliminated all of those, you have a wine that's good but perhaps undifferentiated. To go beyond that, though, you quickly enter the realm of personal preference. Because any flavor component that doesn't signal danger is equally as valid as any other and it may be mostly up to memory associations or other mostly arbitrary preferences.
He was of the opinion that generally speaking the quality of a typical wine increases monotonically with price up until around the $40 range with the big steps around the $5, $10, and $20 price points. But above $50 or so, you're no longer paying for higher quality, per se. It's more that you are paying for a unique flavor profile and reliability. But unless you're seeking out that particular flavor profile, you can get a bottle that is just as good for $30-40 (and occasionally even cheaper). And above a few hundred dollars it's all just fads, speculation, and hype. (He liked to say that the people who buy those wines have "more money than sense.") They're good wines, but you can get a bottle that is just as good for a fraction of the price.