I like wine, i’ll drink, but short of it being terrible, i’ve never been able to form a preference for any one type, i certainly couldn’t tell a quality difference between a bottle that costs 15 and one that costs 150
I think the prices much above $15 have more to do with things that have or should have a rare taste rather than a better taste in some sense that is market neutral.
I'm more familiar with the world of spirits but it's much the same situation - there is certainly unpalatable swill on the very bottom shelf, but at some fairly low price point you hit a perfectly adequate level of quality and products priced above that level are about some combination of brand cachet and/or unique and interesting flavors, moreso than being objectively "better".
Rare taste, unusual combinations, extremely smooth character or historical value are some of the marks for why people pay extra for wine.
There's fantastic cheap wine out there, just like you don't have to spend on wagyu beef to get perfectly good steak.
Sommeliers always do blind tastings. Taste and texture descriptors are extremely well understood. Expert winemakers can tell you a lot about the qualities of grapes, climate, and process through blind taste.
This meme that wine is fake really needs to stop. You have no reason to care even one iota about subtleties of expensive wine, but you really don’t need much training to tell good wine from bad wine.
GP doesn't need to, as they said sommelier exams examine on blind tasting. To a level of detail far greater than I could tell you about (though that's largely training I suppose). If someone can't tell that's fine, they can buy whatever they want, but some people can.
(And I don't think many people just start buying expensive wine without ever trying cheaper, surely most start quite cheap, develop a taste for it, and work up to some subjective level of diminishing returns and not wanting to pay more.)
You can go look up what somms study for wine tasting, look at any national or international contest for blind tastings of wine/beer/coffee/spirits, or get a book on winemaking that shows how each descriptor corresponds to specific chemicals that are part of the winemaking process.
There's no need for "experimental" data on an entire field whose current foundation is the state of the art in food science and biochemistry.
Nobody's asking you to trust anything; you can just take some few minutes to read. It's not my responsibility to show you how to Google; you're just being willfully ignorant.
All of the peer reviewed articles linked suggest that "wine tasting experts" can't differentiate or produce any sort of reliable results, or detect flavors consistently.
Except that's not what the article says, and it explicitly notes some of the scientifically identified chemicals involved in producing certain flavors.
"Scores aren't meaningful, past a certain baseline" seems pretty well supported. "Context plays a statistically discernable role in our perception of taste" seems pretty well supported. "Wine experts can't tell any wine from any other" is nonsense and while that's an exaggeration it does seem like you're treading closer to that position than can be supported.
I made wine last year, a really fun process. I'm not particularly into wine, but my wife is and I live in a wine country so we thought we'd give it a try.
We used some grapes from the garden and a load we bought, our process was rustic to say the least.
We had two batches, one got shut off early after catching a nasty mold, but the other came out nicely.
My nicotine-scarred tastebuds could easily differentiate between the two, but I honestly couldn't tell the difference between the good one and store-bought stuff.
I'm from Argentina where wine is relatively cheap and I think many can distinguish a Malbec from a Cauvernet Sauvignon, but it's really difficult to distinguish in the same varietal
I've helped a sommelier friend study for her exams. In wine school you get taught about how different climates and methods in winemaking gives the wine product its character.
With relatively little training it's easy to spot young wine, old wine, wine that passed through oak, defects like Bret, and other properties.
almost any serious research in this field suggest that is completely false, and that even highly trained "experts" are incredibly bad at wine tasting, are inconsistent in their ratings, and fail to identify fakes, white wine with red food coloring, etc. It seems like you've fallen for the wine industry propaganda.
First of all you link an article from a news webpage.
Second of all you link about American wine "judges", with no references to their actual credentials in the field; that you can be a judge for a contest has no indication to your merits.
Third of all these talk about labels being qualified as "bronze", "silver" and "gold" in these contests. If anything this shows you know nothing about the area.
Sommeliers are in the business of marking objective taste and smell descriptors and then using that to distinguish wines in other, broader criteria.
Actually go to a wine tasting with qualified winemakers or spirit makers, and do some tastings comparing how different wine processes, grape varietals, and other factors make a difference, instead of sitting in a sideline pretending you have any idea of what you're quoting.
There's several spirits tastings where the difference in the sizes and properties of distillation columns have objective and notable chemical differences that even an untrained amateur can catch.
There are definitely wine snobs and wine anti-snobs out there. But in my experience, most people just set their wine price range based on household income (or the income level they want you to believe they have).
If you go into any half-decent wine shop, you'll get good recommendations if your price range is $10-15 or $100-150 (or more, I suppose). The people that work at these places are definitely not snobs.
If you put a man in a room with a hundred identical photographs of Jan-Michael Vincent and left him there for a year you’d come back to a complex ranking system of which Jan is the best.
As an outsider on the periphery of this 'debate' I'll offer an answer and it's somewhat complex.
There's so much BS and crap talked about wine that anyone who has a keen interest in it but only limited experience is likely to be easily led astray by the many self-styled experts who've little factual knowledge but who pontificate with erudite prose about the subject.
OK, you correctly ask, what authority entitles me to make such a presumptuous comment—what right do I have to single myself out from those just mentioned? None really—other than having made a few observations over the years as well as having tasted a few better-than-average wines.
At the risk of sounding a pretentious bastard, as bona fides I have to provide you with a known reference. Years ago I had the opportunity to taste the '45 Bordeaux First Growths—and as some would know, they were a bit better than average.
There was a time when I was in a rather elite group of wine tasters (or more correctly I was on the periphery thereof as I never felt fully part of it). Anyway, that gave me access to many wines I otherwise would never have tasted as even then many of them were worth hundreds of dollars a bottle.
That necessary intro over, my observations are:
1. There are very few truly excellent wines, they are wines that one never forgets. I could name about a dozen at most that I've tasted. One that immediately comes to mind is the '45 Haut Brion. Wines like this can never be adequately described but only remembered.
2. Wines of that caliber end up being menace for people like me because they set such a high standard that they ruin one's palate for life—everything tastes so-so after that. Unless you have a millionaire's budget forget them completely.
3. The next tier down are also excellent but still so rare and very expensive that many 'connoisseurs' will never have tasted them: Grange Hermitage, Stags Leap Cabernet, current Bordeaux First Growths, the top Burgundies—Échezeaux, etc. $1,000 is often the stating price! (Note: I can't afford these, my experience of them goes back decades when they were about 1/20th the price.)
4. The 'experts' who comment on wines for a living broadly come in two classes: those who are good and the pretenders. The good ones can be truly excellent, Hugh Johnson for instance but they're almost like hen's teeth. I've only ever known one, Len Evans https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Len_Evans_(wine), and he was brilliant, it was through him that I tasted some of the wines in my first category.
The pretenders are many and some are famous—excellent self-publicists and wine book writers. They have enough experience and knowhow and enough lingo to fool 90% of readers, but you'll usually find they just echo views of true experts like Johnson.
Let me illustrate, quite some years ago I was at an exclusive black-tie tasting of newly released top 1st, 2nd and 3rd Growth Bordeaux with an engineer colleague of mine and a winemaker friend. It was a group of about 25 of the local wine-tasting establishment and was hosted by a very well known wine writer with books to his name. And we were definitely the outsiders huddled at the far end of the table.
In short, it was a blind tasting and the aim was to pick the top most expensive wine in a lineup of about a dozen wines—a Château Lafite Rothschild. Reputations were at stake so they ummed and aahed and pontificated and the vast majority including the host failed to get the Lafite—but my engineering colleague and I did. Suffice to say, little was said but it was obvious what they were thinking 'who are those bastards at the end of the table?'.
Let me say clearly neither of us are experts—we simply didn't have wide enough experience as even back then first growth Bordeauxs were expensive. Nevertheless, in o...
I live in (WA) wine country... I've heard so many stories over the years about ways to adulterate wine. The key is, drink what you like, don't get hung up on price tag or varietal. If at all possible, find the off-the-beaten-path wineries where you can get to know the owners / winemakers. Half the fun is getting the behind-the-scenes story and appreciating one season to the next. It's easy to forget that wine is fundamentally an agricultural product delivered through an industrial process. When you get down and dirty with the winemaker, the grape pickers, the cellar rats, etc it's a different perspective than the $500 bottle at the Michelin-starred restaurant.
30 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 86.6 ms ] threadBuffalo Trace for bourbon, for example.
Sommeliers always do blind tastings. Taste and texture descriptors are extremely well understood. Expert winemakers can tell you a lot about the qualities of grapes, climate, and process through blind taste.
This meme that wine is fake really needs to stop. You have no reason to care even one iota about subtleties of expensive wine, but you really don’t need much training to tell good wine from bad wine.
(And I don't think many people just start buying expensive wine without ever trying cheaper, surely most start quite cheap, develop a taste for it, and work up to some subjective level of diminishing returns and not wanting to pay more.)
There's no need for "experimental" data on an entire field whose current foundation is the state of the art in food science and biochemistry.
Hmmmmmmm
All of the peer reviewed articles linked suggest that "wine tasting experts" can't differentiate or produce any sort of reliable results, or detect flavors consistently.
"Scores aren't meaningful, past a certain baseline" seems pretty well supported. "Context plays a statistically discernable role in our perception of taste" seems pretty well supported. "Wine experts can't tell any wine from any other" is nonsense and while that's an exaggeration it does seem like you're treading closer to that position than can be supported.
The studies in the article suggest otherwise.
We used some grapes from the garden and a load we bought, our process was rustic to say the least.
We had two batches, one got shut off early after catching a nasty mold, but the other came out nicely.
My nicotine-scarred tastebuds could easily differentiate between the two, but I honestly couldn't tell the difference between the good one and store-bought stuff.
I've helped a sommelier friend study for her exams. In wine school you get taught about how different climates and methods in winemaking gives the wine product its character.
With relatively little training it's easy to spot young wine, old wine, wine that passed through oak, defects like Bret, and other properties.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-ta...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-econ...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-econ...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-econ...
First of all you link an article from a news webpage. Second of all you link about American wine "judges", with no references to their actual credentials in the field; that you can be a judge for a contest has no indication to your merits.
Third of all these talk about labels being qualified as "bronze", "silver" and "gold" in these contests. If anything this shows you know nothing about the area.
Sommeliers are in the business of marking objective taste and smell descriptors and then using that to distinguish wines in other, broader criteria.
Actually go to a wine tasting with qualified winemakers or spirit makers, and do some tastings comparing how different wine processes, grape varietals, and other factors make a difference, instead of sitting in a sideline pretending you have any idea of what you're quoting.
There's several spirits tastings where the difference in the sizes and properties of distillation columns have objective and notable chemical differences that even an untrained amateur can catch.
If you go into any half-decent wine shop, you'll get good recommendations if your price range is $10-15 or $100-150 (or more, I suppose). The people that work at these places are definitely not snobs.
Is wine fake? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33698094 - Nov 2022 (542 comments)
There's so much BS and crap talked about wine that anyone who has a keen interest in it but only limited experience is likely to be easily led astray by the many self-styled experts who've little factual knowledge but who pontificate with erudite prose about the subject.
OK, you correctly ask, what authority entitles me to make such a presumptuous comment—what right do I have to single myself out from those just mentioned? None really—other than having made a few observations over the years as well as having tasted a few better-than-average wines.
At the risk of sounding a pretentious bastard, as bona fides I have to provide you with a known reference. Years ago I had the opportunity to taste the '45 Bordeaux First Growths—and as some would know, they were a bit better than average.
There was a time when I was in a rather elite group of wine tasters (or more correctly I was on the periphery thereof as I never felt fully part of it). Anyway, that gave me access to many wines I otherwise would never have tasted as even then many of them were worth hundreds of dollars a bottle.
That necessary intro over, my observations are:
1. There are very few truly excellent wines, they are wines that one never forgets. I could name about a dozen at most that I've tasted. One that immediately comes to mind is the '45 Haut Brion. Wines like this can never be adequately described but only remembered.
2. Wines of that caliber end up being menace for people like me because they set such a high standard that they ruin one's palate for life—everything tastes so-so after that. Unless you have a millionaire's budget forget them completely.
3. The next tier down are also excellent but still so rare and very expensive that many 'connoisseurs' will never have tasted them: Grange Hermitage, Stags Leap Cabernet, current Bordeaux First Growths, the top Burgundies—Échezeaux, etc. $1,000 is often the stating price! (Note: I can't afford these, my experience of them goes back decades when they were about 1/20th the price.)
4. The 'experts' who comment on wines for a living broadly come in two classes: those who are good and the pretenders. The good ones can be truly excellent, Hugh Johnson for instance but they're almost like hen's teeth. I've only ever known one, Len Evans https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Len_Evans_(wine), and he was brilliant, it was through him that I tasted some of the wines in my first category.
The pretenders are many and some are famous—excellent self-publicists and wine book writers. They have enough experience and knowhow and enough lingo to fool 90% of readers, but you'll usually find they just echo views of true experts like Johnson.
Let me illustrate, quite some years ago I was at an exclusive black-tie tasting of newly released top 1st, 2nd and 3rd Growth Bordeaux with an engineer colleague of mine and a winemaker friend. It was a group of about 25 of the local wine-tasting establishment and was hosted by a very well known wine writer with books to his name. And we were definitely the outsiders huddled at the far end of the table.
In short, it was a blind tasting and the aim was to pick the top most expensive wine in a lineup of about a dozen wines—a Château Lafite Rothschild. Reputations were at stake so they ummed and aahed and pontificated and the vast majority including the host failed to get the Lafite—but my engineering colleague and I did. Suffice to say, little was said but it was obvious what they were thinking 'who are those bastards at the end of the table?'.
Let me say clearly neither of us are experts—we simply didn't have wide enough experience as even back then first growth Bordeauxs were expensive. Nevertheless, in o...
BTW, I drink precious little wine these days, those good wines really did screw up my palate. (I don't like most of the wine I can afford to buy.)