I think it tastes just fine, and from my plebeian uncultured perspective it's just as good as a $20 bottle. Better, even, because you're not paying a huge mark up. I'm half convinced that wine connoisseurs are fooling themselves when they claim that they can tell the difference between cheap and expensive wines.
It also doesn't take an economist to figure out why this product sells well. The only other place I've seen wine this cheap is in Italy.
> I'm half convinced that wine connoisseurs are fooling themselves when they claim that they can tell the difference between cheap and expensive wines.
TL;DR Yes, it seems you're right about that.
This has been put to the test many times, usually with comical results. This page[0] has some stories, e.g. :
French researcher Frédéric Brochet "submitted a mid-range Bordeaux in two different bottles, one labeled as a cheap table wine, the other bearing a grand cru etiquette." Tasters described the supposed grand cru as "woody, complex, and round" and the supposed cheap wine as "short, light, and faulty." ...when Brochet served a white wine he received all the usual descriptions: "fresh, dry, honeyed, lively." Later he served the same wine dyed red and received the usual red terms: "intense, spicy, supple, deep."
...little correlation has been found between price and preference, even among wine experts, in tasting settings in which labels and prices have been concealed.
Robert Hodgson, a California vintner...noticed that the results of wine competitions were surprisingly inconsistent. ...[he] approached the organizers of the California State Fair wine competition in 2005 with a proposal. In the course of their routine duties, he would sometimes present the judges with samples from the same bottle three times without their knowledge. The judges were among the top experts in the American wine industry: winemakers, sommeliers, critics and buyers as well as wine consultants and academics. The results were "disturbing"... "Over the years he has shown again and again that even trained, professional palates are terrible at judging wine." ...Hodgson continued to analyze the results of wine competitions across the state and found that the medals awarded for wine excellence "were distributed at random".
I think that wine connoisseurs can distinguish between a 2$ wine and a 20$ or more wine.
The problem lays in rating two wines in the same price range, in that case preferences become personal tastes because differences are very difficult to assess.
When you drink very cheap wine the defects are quite easy to perceive.
I've noticed that a higher price tag means I'll be more likely to enjoy something out of a randomly sampled collection. However, to me it doesn't really make the wine that much better.
In other words, if I were in a store with only unfamiliar wine, needing to buy something for a dinner party, I'd probably buy a step above normal.
For normal occasions, there are tons of options in the $10 to $15 price range that I know I like. A $10 bottle I like is always better than a $25 bottle I don't like.
There is a lot of work and craft that goes into the 20 euro bottle - especially when it comes from a small producer.
It takes years to mature, there is uncertainty in the harvest, good barrels, tanks, cork, etc are expensive, lot's of knowledge and experience are required. A high-quality natural cork alone can cost 1.50$.
For 2 dollars you get industrial mass production. Taste-wise it might be fine for some, but it is unlikely to be sustainable and you definitely miss the fun and artisanal part of wine.
It's similar to small local organic farming vs. industrial farming for a more difficult to produce product.
Almost anything you find on shelves of your local supermarket is going to be heavily procesed industrial wine. The price itself will determine use of more expensive/time consuming proceses, but at the end they are all just drink products.
If wine is just a drink for you than there is huge amount of good wines for $10 - $15. Nicely done, good products.
For me, huge wine nerd (and also owner/winemaker of small organic winery) the wine is more like a postcard from faraway place and book of poetry at the same time. I am sure I am not going to be able to tell difference between cheap and expensive wines sometimes, but that is not a point. There is a more into wine than primary aromatics if you want to dig deep into into.
As a wine "connoisseur" (or "nerd"), price isn't really the interesting factor. The fun part of this hobby for me isn't drinking $200 dollar bottles of wine, it's exploring the huge and changing variety of wine out there, and you can happily spend a life time doing that without spending much over $25 for a bottle. Tasting a $20 bottle of some native Slovenian grape you've never heard of can be every bit as fun and rewarding as drinking a $200 bottle of some 'name brand' wine.
One of the most popular wines at my shop (in CA) is a Slovenian Haložan white blend. People may need to get some coaxing to get it into their glass, but you can't deny flavor and they keep coming back for more- especially as its $16 for a liter bottle.
There will be a lot of comments on how $2 wine taste good. Burger from McD taste pretty good as well, right? The problem with those cheap wines is not the taste itself, but the way they are made.
The price of wine is determined by price of grapes. To achieve low price of your input you need vineyards that are hugely productive (say 10 to 20 times of those used for quality production). Even vineyards used for high quality production need a lot of chemical inputs (compared to rest of agriculture), but here we need to go even higher due to high density of grapes and zero green management.
All of the vineyards are optimised for mechanical prunning, management and harvest. No problem with that and we are also seeing this trend in more and more premium wines due to rising cost of work and technological progress.
At the end of growing stage we are having grapes that are not that ripe: probably not a lot of sugar, harsh tanins, lots of acids (and also structure of various acids will be on harsh acid types) and probably some rot on wines (this is normal even in high quality wines).
No problem with any of those parameters: low sugars could be fixed by infusing sucrose, acid could be removed by using potasium bicarbonate, tanin structure could be improved by using artifical tanins (or tanins extracted from wood), color could be fixed by acetaldehyde (cause of headaches, together with high SO2 levels) and whole structure might be balanced by using reverse osmosis.
After use of ten or maybe 50 different additive you get your $2 bottle of wine-like drink. It might even taste good.
Your whole argument seems to boil down to "it's not natural, they add chemicals", which is a weird argument to make on a tech news site. The only additive you actually make a case against is acetaldehyde, which occurs naturally in cheap booze anyway.
The details of the process are certainly interesting, it's just weird you framed them as "problem".
At the point we have all that stuff in there are we really drinking "wine", or are we drinking some kind of alcoholic mixed drink? I personally would not expect, regardless of price point, that something I buy called "wine" has anything other than grapes and yeast, with maybe a bit of added sugar or honey.
After reading that article and the above comment I think I'd rather just mix some grape juice and vodka than some of that really cheap wine.
Agreed, it is a thing to consider. Problem is (at least in the EU) there's no requirement to put any of the ingredients on the label, other than - I believe - "contains sulfates". It's hard for consumers to know this is really some pseudo-wine.
Yeah. There is also no requirements here in the US because alcohol is regulated by the BATFE (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives) rather than the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) or USDA (Department of Agriculture). The regulatory scheme here is more about making sure taxes are paid and bootleggers are caught and punished than creating transparency of product or consumer protection.
Most of the time I just want to get tipsy or drunk with my friends and I don't really care how many hours have the grapes been grazing the sun. If it's ok taste, isn't too unhealthy and gets the job done, it works for me. And I'm pretty sure that's everyone who buys 2€ wine
This is not true, "natural wine" is exploding and there are quite a few wines out there that do not contain any added SO2. We get people in asking for them all the time.
However, the vast majority of wines do contain at least a small amount of added SO2.
There are plenty of expensive wines out there with lots of manipulative additives (sucrose, acidification or deacidification, oak powder, etc) as has been outlined above, but it is much more common in less expensive wine.
There is a scale between wine as a mass produced industrial product and as an artisanal, site-specific hand crafted product, and there are wineries/brands/specific wines that fill in every conceivable spot on that spectrum.
Oftentimes, individual wineries will have different lines of products made in different ways or even in different facilities. Estate grown vs purchased fruit. Physical wineries vs "private labels" made at custom crush facilities. A little tangential perhaps...
The problem is calling those highly procesed products as being wine. I would call those wine-like drinks in the same way McD burger is burger-like product.
Personally I would be worry of pesticide residues in wines. Not just those bottom cheap bottles, but from all mass and non-bio certified producers. Few years ago there was high level of arsenic found in two-buch Chunk, but it is very common across the board: "Together the 34 bottles of conventional wine contained 148 pesticide residues. All 34 bottles contained at least one pesticide, while the mean number of pesticides per bottle was more than four. The highest number of residues found in a single bottle was 10."[0].
Those traces are probably not going to kill you, but let just not see all wines as being created equal.
Mcdonalds and other fast food burgers are the same kind of burgers people buy at the grocery store. The patties are 100% beef, not soy filler and chicken and whatever else makes something a burger like product
The real problem here is that to get your raw materials to produce your wine as cheap as possible (think your BOM), you have only one option: high density, low manual work and very high levels of chemicals to compensate the high density.
This results directly into degraded ecosystems because you basically use the land as a life-less substrate to produce your grapes and all the chemicals which are not degraded or bound to the grapes are ending in the soil.
That afterwards you do a lot a chemical work to convert the grapes into wine is another story.
Note that my salary is coming from both sides. I work as consultant to both the big agro companies and the ones doing food additives and fragrances.
Everybody on the line know very well the real cost of a $2 bottle of wine. But the buyers do not see that on the label only the money they have in the pocket or not.
I think the idea that the pressure to produce your wine as cheap as possible is only there for cheap wines is fiction. For expensive wines the same pressure is there, they want to make a profit. So while with expensive wines, potentially due to the high price they might have the resources to do better, you have no guarantee whatsoever that they actually will.
It depends. I am not that familiar with US, but in most of Europe you do have layered system. Basic table wine rules are quite relaxed, but then you have higher levels with more or less strict rules for farming practices, yield and vinification practices. Those practices are then checked by governing body or goverment.
The difference between cheap and expensive (luxury) products is the margin. Manufacturers of cheap wine have to sell a lot to make a profit because they can't afford to charge any premium. This means going as fast, cheap, and low quality with the ingredients as they legally can. This is how the race to the bottom looks like and it's almost universally applicable in just about every field.
A $2 bottle of wine is less wine and more creative engineering. And that's ok as long as the customers understand what they're getting.
It is very hard to create luxury wine in the middle of nowhere so the price of land is big factor in cost of wines in premium and luxury segment. 1 hectare of good plot in top regions like Barolo, Bordeaux, Champagne or Burgundy starts around 1 to 2 millions of euros, but top plots goes much further than that, 10 millions of euros for hectare of Burgundy Grand Cru is not unheard of. You are making around 4000 litres of wine per year on 1 hectare.
I'm sure all that is true. That's exactly why competition is so strong in the low end and why it's a race to the bottom for quality and price. The most accessible ways of making a product cheaper are mass production, and replacing the expensive components with something you can mass produce cheaply.
The bar for entry at the high end is impossibly high. And those who are already up there have to offer something that cannot be cheaply obtained. A unique natural taste, the image (and protected brand), tradition, etc.
On the other end of the spectrum you have the cheap wines that have no choice but to try to replicate some of that by artificial means while competing with an almost literal flood of competition doing the exact same. The target there is to stay as cheap as humanly possible while minimally meeting regulation in the food sector, and offering wine-like taste.
See the wine like a battery. The cheapest and the most expensive ones look the same and might superficially act the same. And they'll certainly feel the same if you just test them with your tongue. They're on the same spectrum of products but there's a reason why they're at different ends.
Isn't that the same for most products? One big difference between the super cheap mass produced product and the more expensive 'artisanal' product is that the more expensive product has less negative externalities . When I buy the more expensive local meat as opposed to the the super cheap imported meat, part of what I'm paying for isn't just a better product, but also supporting certain farming practices I prefer.
Externalities? Not necessarily. The organic, small farmer raised tomato probably has a much higher CO2 footprint than a corporate farm tomato from Mexico - efficiency at scale can be enormous.
This is the same as quality vs. quantity. Consume less but better. Buy less food, more expensive, but do not throw it away. Buy a good pair of shoes which you can get fixed and use for many years....
Same subject, more or less, which I really enjoyed reading:
It is what Aldi-branded stores still do to some extent in at least Germany/CH and the US. They still have many consistent store-brand products, however.
Trader Joe's is really a different animal. It has a interesting rotating selection of specialty items, usually more global or seasonal in nature with biweekly or monthly "themes," along with a fairly consistent store brand selection of reasonable quality that doesn't just optimize for a low price. Most stores around the nation will have similar items around the same time, and they will be seasonally relevant, so they're not just stocking what was left over in that geographic region.
> There are many other factors that go into the making of super value wine, but the bottom line is this: You get what you pay for. And if you’re not paying much for Two Buck Chuck or California Roots, you’re not getting much, either.
A long article which ends at the default lie of all "premium" products: If the price of something is high it is because of better quality. And: We would never, ever put additives into our premium products like these cheap manufacturers.
And if you believe that .. it's bridge selling time.
Having seen the production process of some premium wine, and having friends that own wineries/beer breweries, and having had industry experience providing software for food manufacturers, I'd say your cynicism does NOT necessarily correspond to reality there.
> No problem with any of those parameters: low sugars could be fixed by infusing sucrose, acid could be removed by using potasium bicarbonate, tanin structure could be improved by using artifical tanins (or tanins extracted from wood), color could be fixed by acetaldehyde (cause of headaches, together with high SO2 levels) and whole structure might be balanced by using reverse osmosis.
This is process chemistry for formulated products. And the only difference between that and cooking is that process chemistry actually cares about quality and consistency of the final product.
Not to mention, whether talking about cheap wine or McDonald's burgers, chemical additives are a bit of a red herring - the goals of the process are achieved as much, if not more, by being in control of how ingredients are mixed, heated, vapourised, deposited or otherwise processed. That's what all this bulky equipment does. Vats that keep the oil within a fraction of degree of a set temperature. Presses and dryers that ensure specific granularity and surface area, combined with conveyors precisely timed to have the half-product lose exactly enough moisture. All other kinds of hardware that doesn't add new chemical compounds, just keeps natural reactions and phase transitions under control. All in a tight loop with automated and manual laboratory testing, that checks both for process parameters and presence of contaminants.
The whole thing is an exercise of minimizing variance in the process, so that the end result hits desired metrics. It carries the usual dangers of optimization systems - the choice of metrics and of things that are not optimized for. But it's not as simple as "more processed = more chemicals = more bad".
> the choice of metrics and of things that are not optimized for. But it's not as simple as "more processed = more chemicals = more bad".
True, but in practice that is how it goes.
Because the McD patties and buns are optimized for shelf-life, for consistency, for being quick to cook, for "cheap taste". Hence high levels of sodium, stabilizers, etc
Yes, "more chemicals" is not necessarily bad, but it depends.
I think it's been some years since I could stomach a McD meal without feeling sorry afterwards.
Yep, a $2 wine flavored and colored artificial drink. The math is math, like saying "natural cheese" when the price is much lower than the cost of milk required to make it. For $2 people should know not to expect much: you need bottles, caps, store margins, taxes, distribution in addition to the rest of stuff.
Added sugar is a huge no-no for me. I wish wineries and spirit makers were forced to disclose in plain terms a lot of this stuff, especially after a price point.
Do you know if organic wines are safe from those chemical additives? I generally expect organic products to be expensive than the regular products, but that's not the case for wines. I find many $10 organic wines in Trader Joes as well as custom local organic green shops.. the price range is very similar to the traditional wines.
I am not familiar with US legislative, but in EU the organic certification describe viticulture part only. Secret to cheap organic winemaking is having fruit from some places like Chile or Argentina that have harsh climate for diseases
Many of these "wine" experiments show more general human biases, so "are humans bullshit?" would be a better question.
Historically, even some physics measurements show herd mentality biases, with scientists being reluctant to publish values too far from generally accepted values.
It appears that the famous, often retold, story of the experiment were experts have been deceived by simple red colorants in white wine is a significant distortion of the actual experiment :
https://sciencesnopes.blogspot.com/2013/05/about-that-wine-e...
Just pasting here the actual points because this "lol they couldn't tell White from Red" is BS
> The most important is that the subjects in this experiment were not, in fact ‘wine experts’. They were undergraduate enology students. They are probably more knowledgeable about wine than the average person, but they were not in any way ‘experts’, or even ‘professionals’.
> It’s simply not true that “Every single one, all 54, could not tell it was white.” as is frequently stated. Even Brochet doesn’t claim that, saying “About 2 or 3 per cent of people detect the white wine flavour”, and the paper that is frequently cited shows that indeed some people gave ‘white wine’ descriptions to the dyed-red wine.
> But even more important than those errors, the study never demonstrated that people can’t tell red wine from white.
And more important to me, if you're really misleading people, your results will be all over the place.
If you want to know if people can tell white from red wines (they can, but just in case), do a blind test, but don't mislead them.
> The most important is that the subjects in this experiment were not, in fact ‘wine experts’. They were undergraduate enology students. They are probably more knowledgeable about wine than the average person, but they were not in any way ‘experts’, or even ‘professionals’.
Last time I checked most people weren't wine experts either, so someone who is maybe a bit more knowledgeable than most people but not so far removed that their experience is completely different sounds like good candidates.
The problem then is still how you get from that study to the claim "even experts can't tell the difference". Given that the study didn't involve experts and the "experts" could still identify differences in taste. The study might be good, the results might be good, but the description of the study and its "conclusion" as spread through the media is hot garbage.
I drank 2-3€ wine all my youth, that’s how we got drunk. It’s cheap and it does the trick rose is better than red which is better than white. Cheap white is the absolute worst. Now I can tell the difference between this and a 7-8€ wine. The higher it gets the more hit or miss it is, but I can taste that some red are “cleaner”. Now that they’re 20€ or 100€ I’m not sure there’s an actual difference...
Let's go back a few thousands of years. There were no refrigerators, and juice-production facilities were not very clean. Also, people were not aware of the existence of bacteria and germs.
And given these conditions, you want to drink juice, or the best available alternative, at any arbitrary moment during the year...
The solution? fermentation. Just ferment the hell out of everything and store it for years. Now you can drink juice anytime you want, it just tastes weird but it's better than nothing.
I live in Italy, and this area (like pretty much the entirety of Southern Europe) is a winemaking region. I can buy decent wines for less than 2 Euros a bottle - and I mean PDO or PGT stuff, the crappy no-brand wine is even much much less.
It does not contain additives, it's just plain wine. I do not drink often so I use it mostly for cooking, but it would be definitely drinkable, and it's probably something that would cost 10 times as much on the other side of the ocean.
Also, wineries sell directly to customers, so if you are really keen into drinking a lot of wine you can just go there, fill several demijohns and then bottle it yourself. My father (and his father, and my mother's father, and everyone else over a certain age) has done this every year for their entire life.
Can confirm - it's a matter of taxation. I bought bottles of wine from there while in Italy for 3EUR per bottle. The exact same bottle retailed for 35CAD in the LCBO in Toronto.
Since moving to Israel I've noticed something very similar. A bottle of Red (yes, that's a brand) can be purchased in the corner store for the equivalent of $8 CDN. In Canada the same bottle was a little over $45.
This is all about protecting the local wine industry through tarriffs - nothing else.
> This is all about protecting the local wine industry through tarriffs
Don't you think it has to do with culture and disincentivizing? Most countries tend to tax potentially harmful products a lot higher than other products. See tobacco for example. The astronomical price for a pack of smokes is not for protecting local industries.
If you're taxing to disincentivize consumption, you tax all alcohol the same no matter what form it's in or where it comes from. If you're taxing European wine more than locally produced wine then it obviously has nothing to do with health.
Of course, but the post I replied to said nothing about local vs import. It only said that some bottles of wine was a lot more expensive in Canada than in their countries of origin.
How do you know it doesn't contain additives? As I understand, additives is pretty much standard in all wines. Even ecologically certified wines are allowed to have additives in them. And there is no obligation to list them on the bottle.
A lot of comments are talking about whether or not an expert can distinguish between a cheap and an expensive wine. I don't understand how they possibly could. You can't taste price. Of course I understand the point of the argument, but it seems to disregard a slew of market dynamics that dictates price. It just seems very uninteresting to try to judge wine expertise by deducing price categories. Maybe I'm wrong?
Nah, you're not wrong. As a bit of wine nerd, I've never heard other wine nerds care too much about how expensive a wine is. What they care about, and love talking about, is geography and grapes and production methods. Now some of those factors do correlate with price, but everybody is very aware that a lot of expensive wine is pure marketing, and that some producers are able to make wines that punch far above their weight, price wise.
Correct- also, in blind tasting, you're never asked to identify the price or price level of the wine.
Now, as a wine professional, you do care about the price of the wine because it is an integral part of your business. However, when I taste to buy for my business, I try to evaluate the wine before knowing the price. Then I decide whether I like it and would like to sell it before going through the second evaluation phase based on price.
77 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadIt also doesn't take an economist to figure out why this product sells well. The only other place I've seen wine this cheap is in Italy.
TL;DR Yes, it seems you're right about that.
This has been put to the test many times, usually with comical results. This page[0] has some stories, e.g. :
French researcher Frédéric Brochet "submitted a mid-range Bordeaux in two different bottles, one labeled as a cheap table wine, the other bearing a grand cru etiquette." Tasters described the supposed grand cru as "woody, complex, and round" and the supposed cheap wine as "short, light, and faulty." ...when Brochet served a white wine he received all the usual descriptions: "fresh, dry, honeyed, lively." Later he served the same wine dyed red and received the usual red terms: "intense, spicy, supple, deep."
...little correlation has been found between price and preference, even among wine experts, in tasting settings in which labels and prices have been concealed.
Robert Hodgson, a California vintner...noticed that the results of wine competitions were surprisingly inconsistent. ...[he] approached the organizers of the California State Fair wine competition in 2005 with a proposal. In the course of their routine duties, he would sometimes present the judges with samples from the same bottle three times without their knowledge. The judges were among the top experts in the American wine industry: winemakers, sommeliers, critics and buyers as well as wine consultants and academics. The results were "disturbing"... "Over the years he has shown again and again that even trained, professional palates are terrible at judging wine." ...Hodgson continued to analyze the results of wine competitions across the state and found that the medals awarded for wine excellence "were distributed at random".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_wine_tasting
In other words, if I were in a store with only unfamiliar wine, needing to buy something for a dinner party, I'd probably buy a step above normal.
For normal occasions, there are tons of options in the $10 to $15 price range that I know I like. A $10 bottle I like is always better than a $25 bottle I don't like.
For 2 dollars you get industrial mass production. Taste-wise it might be fine for some, but it is unlikely to be sustainable and you definitely miss the fun and artisanal part of wine.
It's similar to small local organic farming vs. industrial farming for a more difficult to produce product.
If wine is just a drink for you than there is huge amount of good wines for $10 - $15. Nicely done, good products.
For me, huge wine nerd (and also owner/winemaker of small organic winery) the wine is more like a postcard from faraway place and book of poetry at the same time. I am sure I am not going to be able to tell difference between cheap and expensive wines sometimes, but that is not a point. There is a more into wine than primary aromatics if you want to dig deep into into.
The price of wine is determined by price of grapes. To achieve low price of your input you need vineyards that are hugely productive (say 10 to 20 times of those used for quality production). Even vineyards used for high quality production need a lot of chemical inputs (compared to rest of agriculture), but here we need to go even higher due to high density of grapes and zero green management.
All of the vineyards are optimised for mechanical prunning, management and harvest. No problem with that and we are also seeing this trend in more and more premium wines due to rising cost of work and technological progress.
At the end of growing stage we are having grapes that are not that ripe: probably not a lot of sugar, harsh tanins, lots of acids (and also structure of various acids will be on harsh acid types) and probably some rot on wines (this is normal even in high quality wines).
No problem with any of those parameters: low sugars could be fixed by infusing sucrose, acid could be removed by using potasium bicarbonate, tanin structure could be improved by using artifical tanins (or tanins extracted from wood), color could be fixed by acetaldehyde (cause of headaches, together with high SO2 levels) and whole structure might be balanced by using reverse osmosis.
After use of ten or maybe 50 different additive you get your $2 bottle of wine-like drink. It might even taste good.
The details of the process are certainly interesting, it's just weird you framed them as "problem".
After reading that article and the above comment I think I'd rather just mix some grape juice and vodka than some of that really cheap wine.
Virtually no wine, no matter how expensive, is just grapes and yeast. All wine you can buy in a store contains at least some additives.
However, the vast majority of wines do contain at least a small amount of added SO2.
There are plenty of expensive wines out there with lots of manipulative additives (sucrose, acidification or deacidification, oak powder, etc) as has been outlined above, but it is much more common in less expensive wine.
There is a scale between wine as a mass produced industrial product and as an artisanal, site-specific hand crafted product, and there are wineries/brands/specific wines that fill in every conceivable spot on that spectrum.
Oftentimes, individual wineries will have different lines of products made in different ways or even in different facilities. Estate grown vs purchased fruit. Physical wineries vs "private labels" made at custom crush facilities. A little tangential perhaps...
Personally I would be worry of pesticide residues in wines. Not just those bottom cheap bottles, but from all mass and non-bio certified producers. Few years ago there was high level of arsenic found in two-buch Chunk, but it is very common across the board: "Together the 34 bottles of conventional wine contained 148 pesticide residues. All 34 bottles contained at least one pesticide, while the mean number of pesticides per bottle was more than four. The highest number of residues found in a single bottle was 10."[0].
Those traces are probably not going to kill you, but let just not see all wines as being created equal.
[0] https://www.wineanorak.com/pesticideresiduesinwine.htm
This results directly into degraded ecosystems because you basically use the land as a life-less substrate to produce your grapes and all the chemicals which are not degraded or bound to the grapes are ending in the soil.
That afterwards you do a lot a chemical work to convert the grapes into wine is another story.
Note that my salary is coming from both sides. I work as consultant to both the big agro companies and the ones doing food additives and fragrances.
Everybody on the line know very well the real cost of a $2 bottle of wine. But the buyers do not see that on the label only the money they have in the pocket or not.
A $2 bottle of wine is less wine and more creative engineering. And that's ok as long as the customers understand what they're getting.
The bar for entry at the high end is impossibly high. And those who are already up there have to offer something that cannot be cheaply obtained. A unique natural taste, the image (and protected brand), tradition, etc.
On the other end of the spectrum you have the cheap wines that have no choice but to try to replicate some of that by artificial means while competing with an almost literal flood of competition doing the exact same. The target there is to stay as cheap as humanly possible while minimally meeting regulation in the food sector, and offering wine-like taste.
See the wine like a battery. The cheapest and the most expensive ones look the same and might superficially act the same. And they'll certainly feel the same if you just test them with your tongue. They're on the same spectrum of products but there's a reason why they're at different ends.
“Don’t buy the $2 Trader Joe wine, buy our $20 wine not because it tastes better because we “we don’t use the land as a life-less substrate””
Externalities? Not necessarily. The organic, small farmer raised tomato probably has a much higher CO2 footprint than a corporate farm tomato from Mexico - efficiency at scale can be enormous.
This is the same as quality vs. quantity. Consume less but better. Buy less food, more expensive, but do not throw it away. Buy a good pair of shoes which you can get fixed and use for many years....
Same subject, more or less, which I really enjoyed reading:
"I’ve tracked every piece of clothing I’ve worn for three years": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25869464
I don't know if that's still the case, but it definitely used to be what they were doing.
Trader Joe's is really a different animal. It has a interesting rotating selection of specialty items, usually more global or seasonal in nature with biweekly or monthly "themes," along with a fairly consistent store brand selection of reasonable quality that doesn't just optimize for a low price. Most stores around the nation will have similar items around the same time, and they will be seasonally relevant, so they're not just stocking what was left over in that geographic region.
That’s something I could never comprehend. To me, it doesn’t taste any good.
But I haven't read it yet, so I am not sure if it is worth it.
A long article which ends at the default lie of all "premium" products: If the price of something is high it is because of better quality. And: We would never, ever put additives into our premium products like these cheap manufacturers.
And if you believe that .. it's bridge selling time.
This is process chemistry for formulated products. And the only difference between that and cooking is that process chemistry actually cares about quality and consistency of the final product.
Not to mention, whether talking about cheap wine or McDonald's burgers, chemical additives are a bit of a red herring - the goals of the process are achieved as much, if not more, by being in control of how ingredients are mixed, heated, vapourised, deposited or otherwise processed. That's what all this bulky equipment does. Vats that keep the oil within a fraction of degree of a set temperature. Presses and dryers that ensure specific granularity and surface area, combined with conveyors precisely timed to have the half-product lose exactly enough moisture. All other kinds of hardware that doesn't add new chemical compounds, just keeps natural reactions and phase transitions under control. All in a tight loop with automated and manual laboratory testing, that checks both for process parameters and presence of contaminants.
The whole thing is an exercise of minimizing variance in the process, so that the end result hits desired metrics. It carries the usual dangers of optimization systems - the choice of metrics and of things that are not optimized for. But it's not as simple as "more processed = more chemicals = more bad".
True, but in practice that is how it goes.
Because the McD patties and buns are optimized for shelf-life, for consistency, for being quick to cook, for "cheap taste". Hence high levels of sodium, stabilizers, etc
Yes, "more chemicals" is not necessarily bad, but it depends.
I think it's been some years since I could stomach a McD meal without feeling sorry afterwards.
Added sugar is a huge no-no for me. I wish wineries and spirit makers were forced to disclose in plain terms a lot of this stuff, especially after a price point.
https://priceonomics.com/is-wine-bullshit/
When I put my phone in the pocket I don't usually use, I feel it vibrate in the pock it's usually in. It's freaky-disturbing.
Historically, even some physics measurements show herd mentality biases, with scientists being reluctant to publish values too far from generally accepted values.
> The most important is that the subjects in this experiment were not, in fact ‘wine experts’. They were undergraduate enology students. They are probably more knowledgeable about wine than the average person, but they were not in any way ‘experts’, or even ‘professionals’.
> It’s simply not true that “Every single one, all 54, could not tell it was white.” as is frequently stated. Even Brochet doesn’t claim that, saying “About 2 or 3 per cent of people detect the white wine flavour”, and the paper that is frequently cited shows that indeed some people gave ‘white wine’ descriptions to the dyed-red wine.
> But even more important than those errors, the study never demonstrated that people can’t tell red wine from white.
And more important to me, if you're really misleading people, your results will be all over the place.
If you want to know if people can tell white from red wines (they can, but just in case), do a blind test, but don't mislead them.
Last time I checked most people weren't wine experts either, so someone who is maybe a bit more knowledgeable than most people but not so far removed that their experience is completely different sounds like good candidates.
And given these conditions, you want to drink juice, or the best available alternative, at any arbitrary moment during the year...
The solution? fermentation. Just ferment the hell out of everything and store it for years. Now you can drink juice anytime you want, it just tastes weird but it's better than nothing.
It does not contain additives, it's just plain wine. I do not drink often so I use it mostly for cooking, but it would be definitely drinkable, and it's probably something that would cost 10 times as much on the other side of the ocean.
Also, wineries sell directly to customers, so if you are really keen into drinking a lot of wine you can just go there, fill several demijohns and then bottle it yourself. My father (and his father, and my mother's father, and everyone else over a certain age) has done this every year for their entire life.
Since moving to Israel I've noticed something very similar. A bottle of Red (yes, that's a brand) can be purchased in the corner store for the equivalent of $8 CDN. In Canada the same bottle was a little over $45.
This is all about protecting the local wine industry through tarriffs - nothing else.
Does the grapevine grow in Canada? That would be a surprising discovery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_wine
Don't you think it has to do with culture and disincentivizing? Most countries tend to tax potentially harmful products a lot higher than other products. See tobacco for example. The astronomical price for a pack of smokes is not for protecting local industries.
Now, as a wine professional, you do care about the price of the wine because it is an integral part of your business. However, when I taste to buy for my business, I try to evaluate the wine before knowing the price. Then I decide whether I like it and would like to sell it before going through the second evaluation phase based on price.