That and the €50 ($55) entrance fee proves that the contest is more of a marketing stunt for Gilbert & Gaillard than a real test of wine-making ability.
Many industries have these "contests". Photography publications, for example, run contests that collect entry fees, and winners get featured in the publication. There are writing contests run the same way. It gives the publication content, and instead of paying artists they charge them money.
This prank along with previous studies prove that wine tasting is 100% made up. Anyone telling you they can taste the difference, even between red and white wine, is lying. Its AMAZING that it seems like 99% of average people are convinced that they can taste the difference between red and white wine but they cant.
Yea, this is always the thing that gets me about the "lol wine tasting is all lies" crowd. Sure, I'll easily admit that I may not be able to identify and explain the difference between various grapes or such, but that doesn't mean all wine tastes literally exactly the same. I don't necessarily like wine because it's a specific grape, or a specific origin, or more or less expensive, but that doesn't invalidate that I prefer it to some other wine. And an experienced person who has tried a lot of wine, may be able to take my explanation of what I like and recommend me something I'd like more than something else.
It's a bad argument that relies on muddling the objective and the subjective. Yes, in a totally blind tasting, people can be surprised by what they think something is. But if I walk into a wine bar, and tell them I like red wines that are dry and have red fruit flavors, they can likely give me something I'll enjoy. If they tell me that there's a white wine that they think I'll like because of that explanation, then sweet, that sounds cool and different. It doesn't mean that hurr durr all wine is the same.
Yeah, and it's pretty easy to test by just buying two (a red and a white) bottles and trying yourself. Of course most red food dye the wrong color and you would probably taste it if you used that much... so just blindfold your self and try.
The lack of tannins, malolactic fermentation, and often the lack of oak will make it pretty obvious they are different. It's like saying you can't taste the difference between a Guiness and a Bud, because you've never had them before? Maybe you don't know which is which with a blindfold on, but you can taste the difference.
To be fair, there exists white wines with tannins, oak and even light skin maceration which, if coloured red, could confuse some people inexperience with those types of whites.
Certainly, Grenache comes to mind as a red varietal/preparation that could be confused with some whites. There aren't many common (cheap) white wines with much tannin, perhaps some heavy contact SavBlanc, but that nose is so distinctive that it would be hard to confuse?
My point is mostly about the $3-10 wines which have pretty simple notes. They have very particular styles and relatively restricted grape varietals due to cost, availability, and customer expectations. I'm sure for the right money a good winemaker could take the right white grape and make it taste like a cheap red without the color (lots of skin contact, malolactic fermentation, heavy oak, and some age. On the other spectrum, I'm sure you could screw up and make any wine/grape so terrible you couldn't tell what it came from.
There are also people who couldn't tell the difference between a pilsner and an ale, I suppose.
> Its AMAZING that it seems like 99% of average people are convinced that they can taste the difference between red and white wine
I'm not sure what sort of high-quality wine you drink, cause I drink cheap stuff, and I can 100% tell the difference between a pinot noir and pinot grigio.
Red vs. white isn't a coke vs pepsi thing, it's a coke vs mountain dew.
If you play a bunch of notes for me then I won't be able to identify them exactly either, and I might not even rank them correctly from high to low (especially when played on a variety of instruments) because I'm about as tonedeaf as they come.
That doesn't mean I can't distinguish two songs, or that I can't like one song and dislike another.
People may not be able to identify wine tastes very accurately, but that doesn't mean that "anyone telling you they can taste the difference, even between red and white wine, is lying". Obviously there are differences in taste between different wines, and that statement is so utterly bizarre and so obviously untrue it makes me wonder if you have ever tasted more than one bottle of wine.
That's complete nonsense, though obviously not 100% (I'm no sommelier) I could definitely identify some grapes blind (and then implicitly could tell you if it's red or white). And a master sommelier... well they can do that and then some.
If I wasn't sure of the grape, sure I might not confidently say if it's red or white. Because other than visually that isn't really as big a deal as it naïvely seems? Wine doesn't taste 'red' or 'white' it has different flavours and some grapes are red and others are white, but that's really only a visual difference.
(Ok fine some flavours or textures are so much more common in one vs the other that it might allow a solid guess of the colour even if you had no idea of the grape - 'minerally' or 'bready'/'yeasty' tasting/smelling is probably white; very tannic is probably red. But I think my point stands, it's pretty meaningless, and certainty will come from identifying something more specific, and then knowing what colour that is, to satisfy the naïve hater that thinks that's the most important trait.)
Sure, and maybe you do mean that in agreement, but doesn't that go to my point that the colour isn't really as relevant as someone who thinks it's all a scam and anyone who thinks they like wine is an idiot believes?
And some are blends of both, but we'd call the result white or red according to what dominates. Champagne for example.
> Anyone telling you they can taste the difference, even between red and white wine, is lying. Its AMAZING that it seems like 99% of average people are convinced that they can taste the difference between red and white wine but they cant.
Bro, what? I hardly drink wine, and couldn't tell you whether a red wine is the finest red wine ever or the shittiest, and likewise for white wines, but I can absolutely tell you whether a wine is red or white. Don't know what the hell wines you're drinking.
Anyone telling you they can taste the difference, even between red and white wine, is lying.
There are competitions all around the world where you can go and literally watch people doing this in real time. Anybody can learn to fairly reliably identify 5-6 of most common grapes in a blind tasting with a bit of practice.
> they decided to go with the cheapest and worst-tasting one they could find.
It’s interesting that one group found it worst tasting, while another found it exceptional. Looks like both suck, and maybe the wine was not the best but not the worst either.
Just like the judges were duped into awarding this wine, the first group also thought this was worst tasting because it was the cheapest.
The entire of the article is that the contest is a sham, not a comparative thing about the subjectivity of taste.
Bad wine clearly stands out as bad. Bad wine doesn’t mean “wine you don’t like”. It means “technically flawed wine such that even if you liked this wine you would be very unlikely to prefer it to others in its category”.
It's equally likely that they never really tasted the wine. They just read the faked lab report, tasting notes and recommendations and gave out the award.
These competitions are pay-to-play so if they make it too hard to win, people will stop playing and they won't get paid.
Weird how they do it. We recently sent in some of our family farm cheese to a contest. The judges don't know the name of the cheese or see the labels. They just taste (/smell/feel/eyeball) the cheese and judge it. No judging of the back story.
In the article it mentions how the backstory was part of how they fooled the judges. OP is agreeing with your sentiment about how the backstory should be irrelevant
A while back I spoke to a winemaker who told me that her job was to make a wine that would match any of the price winning wines for less than $40 a bottle. They would buy the wines that won, analyze and match the flavor profile anyway they had to. She would blend wines from different areas and come up with the best flavor she could.
Wine making is not what it used to be. At one time the difference between good wine and great wine was huge. Now with automation and know how it's possible to have great tasting wine be inexpensive.
There's also the situation where winemakers sell their excess wine to bottlers so it's very possible that a great wine is sold cheaply simply because the wine maker needs to sell the excess inventory.
This situation where a very cheap wine wins a contest is not surprising. The big difference is that the flavor of a more expensive wine is more consistent than one you buy very cheaply.
This is what I was thinking, too. I can usually tell between cheap "jammy" wines from the US, which I don't like, versus the cheap Cotes du Rhone I buy, which tastes delicious.
Yea, I feel like that's true of spirits as well. It's easier to get an acceptable Scotch or Rum than it used to be, but at some point, the cost to age something for 5, let alone 10 or 20 years just isn't something you can shortcut, and it produces different flavors. Not to say that a 10 year aged spirit is better than a younger one, but if you do like that flavor, then there's not much else you can do to get it.
I believe it's been tried some, but it both doesn't produce quite the same output in important ways, and it's expensive enough to do that just having a larger building and racking the barrels for longer isn't that much more expensive.
For most spirits, a lot of long-age stuff is about the extraction of wood flavors from the barrel it's in, which I'm not sure anyone's found a great way to do with pressure.
I know there's some difference in temperature though - higher temp aging, either just in a warmer area, or more normally with rum, creates very different aging conditions than normal Bourbon/Scotch/Cognac aging that's traditionally made in more temperate climates. The complaint about a lot of southern US bourbon is that it ends up uncomfortably over-oaked for its age.
Buffalo Trace has an Experimental Collection where they try to isolate one variable in the aging process (temp, wood, mash bill, rickhouse location, etc.). It's interesting if you can get access to a flight of them, but they're pretty rare and expensive.
Quite a few people have tried. Generally the reviews are terrible. The barrel aging process is more complicated than most people think. Lost Spirits (now in Vegas, formerly in LA, Salinas, and Barcelona before that) makes some pretty drinkable stuff that I like, but I'm never going to argue with someone who hates it, because it's noticeably different. There's also some marketing gimmicks like Blackened, where they claim to play Metallica at the barrels to vibrate them or something. This probably doesn't help the reputation of the segment much.
The aging process is somewhat accelerated by temperature, but it's not a simple relationship. This is one of the stated reasons that whiskey made in hot climates (e.g. Amrut in India, Kavalan in Taiwan) tend to be aged less.
I wonder if there is a word for this kind of trickle-down knowledge. I see it in games (big in Dota, even baddies are pretty good now), and suspect the same thing has happened in software.
Not to say there aren't differentiators between good and bad still, but the floor has risen so high compared to what it once was.
Why is it so bad in OH, USA then? Absolute rubbish, they can’t or won’t come close to good. It’s cheap wine that can’t be paired with anything. Objectively , what are the steps they need to take to blindly pass for good?
The big difference is that the flavor of a more expensive wine is more consistent than one you buy very cheaply.
Not really. Cheap wines are made in laboratory like conditions by experts in food chemistry, with grapes sourced and blended from a wide area and 'enhanced' with all kinds of chemicals and additives to consistency and stability. They also use plastic corks or screw corks and aren't really aged, which removes another potential source on inconsistency. More expensive wines are often made with grapes from a single vineyard and made using traditional methods and with minimal additives. This means that the resulting wine is much more susceptible to fluctuations in things like local weather conditions and other 'random' events. In fact one of the 'fun' aspects of wine is tasting how wines from the same grapes, vineyard and wine maker made 1 year apart can end up tasting really different.
You're correct, though I'd push back a bit on "all kinds of chemicals and additives".
They do use them: sulfites for preservation, fining agents for clarity, yeast energizers, acids and bases. But the way you phrase it, it sounds like they're making pop-tarts or chewing gum. A lot of these additives are used even by fine winemakers. Even French winemakers, who have a whole host of rules they have to follow.
Still, I'm picking on your phraseology, but not disagreeing with your point. Modern winemaking is all about control, which produces consistently good but rarely great wines. More expensive wines are more expensive in part because they risk failure -- though few take enough risks to produce a truly undrinkable wine these days.
There's nothing wrong with those "good" wines, though I'm puzzled about the cheap supermarket wine winning a contest. Cheap supermarket wines are entirely drinkable but don't even try to have the qualities that win any genuine prizes. It doesn't take a sommelier to notice that; it tastes like every other wine. Contests usually reward what stands out.
Perhaps some fine winemaker sold off surplus stock. It happens; they have a good year and don't want to dilute the value of their prize brand.
These stories keep coming up about how wine judges are easily duped, and indeed, there is plenty of chicanery surrounding wine ratings. There is a lot of snobbery, and a lot of envy around that snobbery. But there's no reason to pay a lot for a wine unless you've gotten bored with ordinary table wine.
This doesn’t seem like a particularly prestigious contest.
It seems the people doing the “prank” intended to show that a lot of these contests are not legitimate and just an opportunity for the organizers to make some money.
It would be interesting to see whether a legitimate contest that did blind taste tests would fall for such a trick.
Absolutely. The title alludes to the IWC which is at least a fairly prestigious award, and I couldn't have told you it stood for 'international wine challenge' before now, so frankly did think that's what it was. But that isn't where it won gold, it's something I've never heard of and the tasting isn't even blind (eye-catching label, etc.).
This seems to have been a prank to prove the contest was asham
But in much more "authentic" contest, what determines if a wine is better than another? Are they not just different taste and liking them or not is a person's subjective opinion, similar to food preference?
You, assuming you have no knowledge of wine, can absolutely tell the difference between truck stop $2.70 wine and a well made wine from a seasoned winemaker+vineyard+grapes+region. Yeah these awards are often hot air, but the claim that no one can tell the difference between well made wine and garbage wine is a joke. It's black and white, especially when you wake up the next day.
So I make wine, and I do wine tastings and liquor tastings.
The first thing to know, unless you're getting gut rot shit made from petroleum, is that all of it gets you drunk, which is what you're after. Wine, beer and liquor are lifestyle items. If they sold you this stuff on it's actual pitch you'd just grab the bottle closest to checkout and leave. So they have to differentiate themselves with lore, stories, stereotypes, whatever. But at the end of the day, it's all booze. What's the difference between a Jack Daniels drinker and a belvedere vodka drinker? How they view themselves, the type of person they want to portray themselves as and the stories the ads for the bottles tell. People will rationalize that they like it after thefact, and make all kinds of excuses to avoid admitting to themselves that it's vanity and they want to be seen doing it. Made 100% sustainably by an ancient family recipe triple distilled in copper pots using geothermal heat from a volcano in Nicaragua, its all a bunch of bullshit. Just get what tastes good to you and forget about the noise.
I make wine, as a hobby. And I'll tell you, I'd rather drink my simple as hell fruit wine than any of that smoky shit the cute girl at the grocery store tries to sell me with samples. The entire wine tasting world is a sham, I don't mean most, all of it is a giant sham. And for those of you that do wine tastings and buy it, it's easier to fool someone than to convince them that they've been fooled. Just get what tastes good to you and forget about Tue noise.
Just kidding. But try to resell it, and you'll notice a discrepancy that you've not seen in hardly any other product outside of NFTs. Diamonds may be forever, but their resale value sure isn't.
Also they're kinda.. boring? Like visually appealing diamonds have become so commoditized you can buy them at grocery stores. Like it's not even a status symbol anymore in any sense of the word. You're the only person who will know if you have some super rare expensive diamond, we could play the game of "Is it Jared or Neil Lane?" most people won't do much better than flipping a coin.
Assuming a ring is important to you the only things you really need is a metal that's sufficiently soft so it'll be comfortable to wear 24/7, won't rust, and (optionally) some stones you think look cool. My engagement ring is alexandrite and moonstone because I thought the color changing was cool. The reaction I get from people who see it is this weird combination of "wow that's so pretty" and "for some reason I don't think I'm allowed to do that for myself."
Your world-weary nihilism is appealing, but I don’t buy it. Your core premise is flawed: perhaps you drink to get drunk, but that’s not true of everyone. Heck, I don’t think it’s true of most people, other than alcoholics. It’s not true for me. I can’t remember the last time I was drunk.
(Yes, that’s a great straight line. Let it pass.)
Moreover, it’s obvious that different drinks taste different. My wife loves vodka, hates whiskey. I like whisky, not fond of vodka. We both adore Crabbie’s hard ginger ale, which is an objectively terrible beverage (“glucose wine”) made palatable with copious amounts of sugar and ginger. I’ve got a case of it in my living room. We’re not exactly high-brow.
Sure, there’s a lot of pretentiousness in the wine world. There’s still wines I enjoy, and wines I don’t. (And sugar monstrosities I’ll even admit drinking.) I’m not in it to get drunk. And that’s why I don’t buy your nihilism.
I like that your response to a comment that boils down to “Just buy what you like” is to (in so many words) accuse the GP of being a nihilist alcoholic. Please do go on about the “objectively terrible beverage” that you keep a case of in your living room though
Fundamentally it's true. You buy it because it contains alcohol no? If you're not after the drug inside, you'll just buy juice or soda. Hammered or buzzed, you wouldn't buy it if not for it's mind altering effect.
I know vodka is different than whiskey. They even contain different volatiles, which changes the buzz considerably, and the wood esters and things in whiskey are bad for you and give you hangovers.
I've had good decaf where I can't taste the difference between that and the caffeinated stuff.
That's not the same issue here.
And when it comes to soft drink, I can actually taste the difference between the caffeinated stuff and decaf. My mom ran that double-blind test on me when I was younger, where I was not exactly a willing participant. When I proved to her that I could actually taste the difference, she stopped trying to run double blind experiments on me.
> Why are you drinking alcoholic beverages if you don’t care about getting drunk?
For the taste? If I could get my favorite wines, Scotches and beers without the alcohol- WHILE retaining the exact same flavor- which I admit is likely impossible, I'd never go back.
Dunno about the GP, but I stopped "getting drunk" in my 20s
Non alcoholic beer, wine, and champagne are pretty good. Athletic brewing and Brewdog make the best craft NA beer and they are amazing. NA corona, Bud zero and heneniken zero are good too. Same flavor profile as the original. I haven't tried NA gin or NA bourbon yet.
Is there a non-alcoholic Pineau de Charante? Chateau d'Yquem? A non-alcoholic Belgian Trappiste beer?
Sure, there may be some flavors of non-alcoholic drinks out there, but there's a lot more types and flavors of alcohol out there for which there is no non-alcoholic equivalent.
These days, if I'm drinking anything that is alcoholic in any way, it's because of the flavor. I've never liked the feeling of loss of control that comes with being drunk. My only problem with drinking alcohol is that if you drink too much of it because you like the flavor, then you end up getting drunk.
Non alcoholic beer, wine, and champagne are pretty good.
Non-alcoholic beers are OK when compared to mass produced beers (NA Guinness for example is not a million miles from regular Guinness, if drunk cold). None of them can stand up to genuinely great beers. Non-alcoholic wines are way way behind, and way inferior to even cheap wines. NA gin tastes very little like gin if you drink it straight, but can be used to make some very nice non-alcoholic mixed drinks. In fact the only space making serious progress on non-alcoholic drinks is the cocktail space and there are many bars out there where their NA cocktails can comfortably hold their own against their alcoholic counterpart.
Interesting. I think I agree with you. But I second guess it as well. Think about it: you might genuinely like the way these things taste. But what if your body has built up a positive association because of the way it makes you feel? Isn’t it possible that even if it were identical in taste, you’d grow indifferent unless you mix it up?
I love wine, I love the taste. But I don’t really know why I love the way it tastes.
People drink for the buzz it gives. It might be a very light buzz or past out drunk. The difference is the intensity of the buzz. You can't tell me one drink does not affect your senses. It does. Otherwise why do it at all. Fruit punch would do just as well.
>Just get what tastes good to you and forget about the noise.
I think that's a hugely underrated point. Personally I really like devils cut beam as a cheap tasty option, and I much prefer it over a lot of the $100-200 options.
Go with what tastes good to you. Price is loosely correlated at best with "tasty".
> all of it gets you drunk, which is what you're after.
A substantial amount of wine is consumed at lunchtime by workers who most definitely don't want to get drunk, because they are due back at work. Wine is also consumed at monasteries by monks who are forbidden drunkenness. This beverage is consumed in more contexts than just for the alcohol's effects.
They should have said "the effects of alcohol, which is what you're after". Consuming alcohol in small amounts still produces effects that won't prevent you from working but are pleasurable (for some) nonetheless.
No, as already stated by others here, what many people are after when drinking wine is a flavor profile or (in the case of some beverages served in summer) a refreshing quality separate from the effects of the alcohol.
For the Trappiste monks at monasteries like Orval (in Belgium), they did brew a special beer that was just for the consumption of the monks. But it was still alcoholic, just lower in alcohol. Low enough that you would be likely to get full before you get drunk.
Trappist beers are now a (better) supermarket commodity by several different brands (All from Belgium). Usually with more alcohol than a lager, ranging from 2 or 3 years up to 10, and going up to 12%.
what a reductive comment. I am not going preface my reply with "i made wine" for extra cred but I do drink wine and love going to places like sicily, burgundy and ryoja just for walking around and touring wineyards.
Once every couple years this happens and somehow it invalidates all the nuance in the winemaking world. You premise of getting what taste good is the right approach. Everything else is noise is unnecessary.
There's a difference when a wineyard switches winemaster, or start using frappato to substitute for cab due to global warming. Or the 20/21 chianti classico is so different in profile than the rest of the previous years that's it's shaping up to what might be a golden vintage. or how 2020 from napa just isnt worth risking due to smoke taint. Or back in the 90s how mondavi and Michel Rolland almost ruined french wine due to everything being tailored chemi-made to be strong and oaky.
There're stories yes. There're also technicals. And experimentations. Just like every other sector from tech to fashion.
> Just get what tastes good to you and forget about Tue noise
when I got into whiskey-tasting, I noticed that really cheap stuff (<20€ per bottle) always tastes bad, and average priced whisky (~50€) usually tastes good, and even comes with a lot of variety. If you go beyond that (>200€), you'll get the stuff beyond the taste, like exclusivity.
But here is the thing: whisky drinkers don't hide, that higher price tags don't come from the taste. E.g. Stuff like single casks are explicitly about being exclusive.
For me the fun with whisky tasting comes from exploring the taste, and trying to put it into words. It's less about "tasting good" and more about "trying out a new sense".
Wine tasting is a great example of how stats can mislead people. People hear that sommeliers can't tell the difference between cheap wine and expensive wine, and come to the conclusion that sommeliers don't know what they're talking about. They aren't trying to guess the price, though, they're trying to explain and appraise the flavour. A better view of wine tasting is that high quality wines can be purchased at very good prices.
To anyone who thinks even YOU, with no knowledge of wine, cannot tell bottom barrel gas station wine vs. wine made from experts who know what they're doing is a joke. I have personally had my friends BLIND taste test my favorite wines (~$80-$150/bottle) and garbage wine, and no one picks the garbage wine. Why? Because garbage wine doesn't taste very good.
Yes, price points can be ridiculous. A $60 bottle can be better than $1,000 bottle EASILY, because a lot of it is name recognition, rarity, etc. and these medals means almost nothing. Look for brand, region, winemaker, etc. and you can repeat with success.
Disclaimer: I'm fine with cheap wine (~$20/bottle) that's good, and I buy it often. Just like I don't eat at "Michelin Star" restaurants every day.
I don't think this article is saying that "gas station wine" tastes as good as "fancy wine". It's not talking about quality. They're making the point that cheap wine can be good.
So yes junk wine is junk, but not all cheap wine is junk.
I do however expect for this particular instance, they spent a lot of time finding a particularly wonderful €3 wine - while the vast majority at this price probably are distinctly less good.
> I do however expect for this particular instance, they spent a lot of time finding a particularly wonderful €3 wine - while the vast majority at this price probably are distinctly less good.
The article says the opposite:
> There were plenty of wines under €3 to choose from, but they decided to go with the cheapest and worst-tasting one they could find. a €2.50 bottle was selected and then disguised it as a premium product by naming it ‘Chateau Colombier’ and creating a more eye-catching label.
Professional wine tasters are proven to be full of shit from top to bottom time and time again, and yet they still have careers, it's still a very wealthy industry, and people still give them the time of day. Pretty wild.
Not to detract from the general point that most alcohol tasting medals are just marketing and not particularly scientific, but this article is kind of misleading.
In a lot of alcohol tasting competitions (including Gilbert & Gaillard), the scale actually goes Double Gold, Gold, Silver, Bronze. A gold medal in itself doesn't actually mean what you might think it should (i.e., best in class), it's basically so you can sell stickers to put on bottles to fool buyers who don't know the specifics of how these competitions are scored. Broadly, I would interpret Double Gold as "might be good", Gold as "might not suck", and Silver/Bronze as "probably pretty bad since they're marketing their participation ribbons".
An example from the spirits world: the San Francisco Spirits Competition has a 119 page list of results with medals (https://www.sfspiritscomp.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/202...). There's maybe 1-2 Double Golds per page. GABF, the big beer festival, doesn't award Double Golds, but their categories are specific enough that they awarded 100 Gold medals last year.
G&G has this wine listed on their site 3 times. I'm not sure which one is accurate, but the scores are from 85-88. Here's what wine-searcher (a big shopping portal/aggregator for wine) says about the distribution of G&G's ratings:
"Gilbert & Gaillard's wine scores on Wine-Searcher:
Score range: 85 – 100 points
50% fall between: 86 – 90 points
Average score: 88.5 points"
So basically, they rated it as below average on a scale that inflates ratings to the point where almost everything is marketable.
Finally, according to G&G's rules, the wines are tasted blind. The article implies that they're not, but doesn't actually say it.
I think the most reasonable is to go for the grape variety you like and the price point you can afford. Wine is a hobby by itself, you can drink 6 months Pinot Noir, then switch to Malbec, then switch to something else. Plus you can travel on the budget from Chile, Australia, France, USA, Italy...
Years ago, my wife and I went to a “make your own wine” thing in Napa. A few months later we had a blind tasting of our two wines, a $12 bottle of Kirkland Signature from Costco, and a $125 bottle. 6 tasters, and the unanimous result was for the Kirkland Signature.
So much talk, without one mention, of the 'sonication of wine' (and spirits too!), the latest invention. I wonder why? Are you shy to confide, there is nothing to hide anymore? Except old-fashionedness. And distress, fear of loss and comfort-zone. The emperor, agein naked on the throne?
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadOK so they got a famous and trusted sommelier to lie for their story. What does that prove?
Many industries have these "contests". Photography publications, for example, run contests that collect entry fees, and winners get featured in the publication. There are writing contests run the same way. It gives the publication content, and instead of paying artists they charge them money.
But it’s obviously true that different wines taste different. This is easy (and fun) to test at home.
It's a bad argument that relies on muddling the objective and the subjective. Yes, in a totally blind tasting, people can be surprised by what they think something is. But if I walk into a wine bar, and tell them I like red wines that are dry and have red fruit flavors, they can likely give me something I'll enjoy. If they tell me that there's a white wine that they think I'll like because of that explanation, then sweet, that sounds cool and different. It doesn't mean that hurr durr all wine is the same.
The lack of tannins, malolactic fermentation, and often the lack of oak will make it pretty obvious they are different. It's like saying you can't taste the difference between a Guiness and a Bud, because you've never had them before? Maybe you don't know which is which with a blindfold on, but you can taste the difference.
My point is mostly about the $3-10 wines which have pretty simple notes. They have very particular styles and relatively restricted grape varietals due to cost, availability, and customer expectations. I'm sure for the right money a good winemaker could take the right white grape and make it taste like a cheap red without the color (lots of skin contact, malolactic fermentation, heavy oak, and some age. On the other spectrum, I'm sure you could screw up and make any wine/grape so terrible you couldn't tell what it came from.
There are also people who couldn't tell the difference between a pilsner and an ale, I suppose.
I'm not sure what sort of high-quality wine you drink, cause I drink cheap stuff, and I can 100% tell the difference between a pinot noir and pinot grigio.
Red vs. white isn't a coke vs pepsi thing, it's a coke vs mountain dew.
That doesn't mean I can't distinguish two songs, or that I can't like one song and dislike another.
People may not be able to identify wine tastes very accurately, but that doesn't mean that "anyone telling you they can taste the difference, even between red and white wine, is lying". Obviously there are differences in taste between different wines, and that statement is so utterly bizarre and so obviously untrue it makes me wonder if you have ever tasted more than one bottle of wine.
If I wasn't sure of the grape, sure I might not confidently say if it's red or white. Because other than visually that isn't really as big a deal as it naïvely seems? Wine doesn't taste 'red' or 'white' it has different flavours and some grapes are red and others are white, but that's really only a visual difference.
(Ok fine some flavours or textures are so much more common in one vs the other that it might allow a solid guess of the colour even if you had no idea of the grape - 'minerally' or 'bready'/'yeasty' tasting/smelling is probably white; very tannic is probably red. But I think my point stands, it's pretty meaningless, and certainty will come from identifying something more specific, and then knowing what colour that is, to satisfy the naïve hater that thinks that's the most important trait.)
And some are blends of both, but we'd call the result white or red according to what dominates. Champagne for example.
Bro, what? I hardly drink wine, and couldn't tell you whether a red wine is the finest red wine ever or the shittiest, and likewise for white wines, but I can absolutely tell you whether a wine is red or white. Don't know what the hell wines you're drinking.
There are competitions all around the world where you can go and literally watch people doing this in real time. Anybody can learn to fairly reliably identify 5-6 of most common grapes in a blind tasting with a bit of practice.
It’s interesting that one group found it worst tasting, while another found it exceptional. Looks like both suck, and maybe the wine was not the best but not the worst either.
Just like the judges were duped into awarding this wine, the first group also thought this was worst tasting because it was the cheapest.
Bad wine clearly stands out as bad. Bad wine doesn’t mean “wine you don’t like”. It means “technically flawed wine such that even if you liked this wine you would be very unlikely to prefer it to others in its category”.
These competitions are pay-to-play so if they make it too hard to win, people will stop playing and they won't get paid.
Wine making is not what it used to be. At one time the difference between good wine and great wine was huge. Now with automation and know how it's possible to have great tasting wine be inexpensive.
There's also the situation where winemakers sell their excess wine to bottlers so it's very possible that a great wine is sold cheaply simply because the wine maker needs to sell the excess inventory.
This situation where a very cheap wine wins a contest is not surprising. The big difference is that the flavor of a more expensive wine is more consistent than one you buy very cheaply.
All winemakers are capable of designing wines to a broad set of possible tastes with remarkably latitude, but money gets you way more options.
Seems pretty solvable to replace t through P or A in a barrel-aged liquor
For most spirits, a lot of long-age stuff is about the extraction of wood flavors from the barrel it's in, which I'm not sure anyone's found a great way to do with pressure.
I know there's some difference in temperature though - higher temp aging, either just in a warmer area, or more normally with rum, creates very different aging conditions than normal Bourbon/Scotch/Cognac aging that's traditionally made in more temperate climates. The complaint about a lot of southern US bourbon is that it ends up uncomfortably over-oaked for its age.
The aging process is somewhat accelerated by temperature, but it's not a simple relationship. This is one of the stated reasons that whiskey made in hot climates (e.g. Amrut in India, Kavalan in Taiwan) tend to be aged less.
Not to say there aren't differentiators between good and bad still, but the floor has risen so high compared to what it once was.
Not really. Cheap wines are made in laboratory like conditions by experts in food chemistry, with grapes sourced and blended from a wide area and 'enhanced' with all kinds of chemicals and additives to consistency and stability. They also use plastic corks or screw corks and aren't really aged, which removes another potential source on inconsistency. More expensive wines are often made with grapes from a single vineyard and made using traditional methods and with minimal additives. This means that the resulting wine is much more susceptible to fluctuations in things like local weather conditions and other 'random' events. In fact one of the 'fun' aspects of wine is tasting how wines from the same grapes, vineyard and wine maker made 1 year apart can end up tasting really different.
They do use them: sulfites for preservation, fining agents for clarity, yeast energizers, acids and bases. But the way you phrase it, it sounds like they're making pop-tarts or chewing gum. A lot of these additives are used even by fine winemakers. Even French winemakers, who have a whole host of rules they have to follow.
Still, I'm picking on your phraseology, but not disagreeing with your point. Modern winemaking is all about control, which produces consistently good but rarely great wines. More expensive wines are more expensive in part because they risk failure -- though few take enough risks to produce a truly undrinkable wine these days.
There's nothing wrong with those "good" wines, though I'm puzzled about the cheap supermarket wine winning a contest. Cheap supermarket wines are entirely drinkable but don't even try to have the qualities that win any genuine prizes. It doesn't take a sommelier to notice that; it tastes like every other wine. Contests usually reward what stands out.
Perhaps some fine winemaker sold off surplus stock. It happens; they have a good year and don't want to dilute the value of their prize brand.
These stories keep coming up about how wine judges are easily duped, and indeed, there is plenty of chicanery surrounding wine ratings. There is a lot of snobbery, and a lot of envy around that snobbery. But there's no reason to pay a lot for a wine unless you've gotten bored with ordinary table wine.
It seems the people doing the “prank” intended to show that a lot of these contests are not legitimate and just an opportunity for the organizers to make some money.
It would be interesting to see whether a legitimate contest that did blind taste tests would fall for such a trick.
The first thing to know, unless you're getting gut rot shit made from petroleum, is that all of it gets you drunk, which is what you're after. Wine, beer and liquor are lifestyle items. If they sold you this stuff on it's actual pitch you'd just grab the bottle closest to checkout and leave. So they have to differentiate themselves with lore, stories, stereotypes, whatever. But at the end of the day, it's all booze. What's the difference between a Jack Daniels drinker and a belvedere vodka drinker? How they view themselves, the type of person they want to portray themselves as and the stories the ads for the bottles tell. People will rationalize that they like it after thefact, and make all kinds of excuses to avoid admitting to themselves that it's vanity and they want to be seen doing it. Made 100% sustainably by an ancient family recipe triple distilled in copper pots using geothermal heat from a volcano in Nicaragua, its all a bunch of bullshit. Just get what tastes good to you and forget about the noise.
I make wine, as a hobby. And I'll tell you, I'd rather drink my simple as hell fruit wine than any of that smoky shit the cute girl at the grocery store tries to sell me with samples. The entire wine tasting world is a sham, I don't mean most, all of it is a giant sham. And for those of you that do wine tastings and buy it, it's easier to fool someone than to convince them that they've been fooled. Just get what tastes good to you and forget about Tue noise.
I know this, and I still just paid thousands of dollars on a rock for my future wife's finger ;-).
Just kidding. But try to resell it, and you'll notice a discrepancy that you've not seen in hardly any other product outside of NFTs. Diamonds may be forever, but their resale value sure isn't.
Assuming a ring is important to you the only things you really need is a metal that's sufficiently soft so it'll be comfortable to wear 24/7, won't rust, and (optionally) some stones you think look cool. My engagement ring is alexandrite and moonstone because I thought the color changing was cool. The reaction I get from people who see it is this weird combination of "wow that's so pretty" and "for some reason I don't think I'm allowed to do that for myself."
(Yes, that’s a great straight line. Let it pass.)
Moreover, it’s obvious that different drinks taste different. My wife loves vodka, hates whiskey. I like whisky, not fond of vodka. We both adore Crabbie’s hard ginger ale, which is an objectively terrible beverage (“glucose wine”) made palatable with copious amounts of sugar and ginger. I’ve got a case of it in my living room. We’re not exactly high-brow.
Sure, there’s a lot of pretentiousness in the wine world. There’s still wines I enjoy, and wines I don’t. (And sugar monstrosities I’ll even admit drinking.) I’m not in it to get drunk. And that’s why I don’t buy your nihilism.
I like that your response to a comment that boils down to “Just buy what you like” is to (in so many words) accuse the GP of being a nihilist alcoholic. Please do go on about the “objectively terrible beverage” that you keep a case of in your living room though
In some cases it takes on the form of a phrase like "world-weary nihilism".
lol
I know vodka is different than whiskey. They even contain different volatiles, which changes the buzz considerably, and the wood esters and things in whiskey are bad for you and give you hangovers.
Most of us in the developed world have ready access to a variety of alcohol free drinks if the goal isn’t to get buzzed.
In the same way I drink coffee for the taste, decaf even is often not the same.
That's not the same issue here.
And when it comes to soft drink, I can actually taste the difference between the caffeinated stuff and decaf. My mom ran that double-blind test on me when I was younger, where I was not exactly a willing participant. When I proved to her that I could actually taste the difference, she stopped trying to run double blind experiments on me.
For the taste? If I could get my favorite wines, Scotches and beers without the alcohol- WHILE retaining the exact same flavor- which I admit is likely impossible, I'd never go back.
Dunno about the GP, but I stopped "getting drunk" in my 20s
Sure, there may be some flavors of non-alcoholic drinks out there, but there's a lot more types and flavors of alcohol out there for which there is no non-alcoholic equivalent.
These days, if I'm drinking anything that is alcoholic in any way, it's because of the flavor. I've never liked the feeling of loss of control that comes with being drunk. My only problem with drinking alcohol is that if you drink too much of it because you like the flavor, then you end up getting drunk.
Non-alcoholic beers are OK when compared to mass produced beers (NA Guinness for example is not a million miles from regular Guinness, if drunk cold). None of them can stand up to genuinely great beers. Non-alcoholic wines are way way behind, and way inferior to even cheap wines. NA gin tastes very little like gin if you drink it straight, but can be used to make some very nice non-alcoholic mixed drinks. In fact the only space making serious progress on non-alcoholic drinks is the cocktail space and there are many bars out there where their NA cocktails can comfortably hold their own against their alcoholic counterpart.
I love wine, I love the taste. But I don’t really know why I love the way it tastes.
I think that's a hugely underrated point. Personally I really like devils cut beam as a cheap tasty option, and I much prefer it over a lot of the $100-200 options.
Go with what tastes good to you. Price is loosely correlated at best with "tasty".
A substantial amount of wine is consumed at lunchtime by workers who most definitely don't want to get drunk, because they are due back at work. Wine is also consumed at monasteries by monks who are forbidden drunkenness. This beverage is consumed in more contexts than just for the alcohol's effects.
I've heard the same for many historical wineries.
But Orval is doing this? Westmalle? Westvleteren?
Once every couple years this happens and somehow it invalidates all the nuance in the winemaking world. You premise of getting what taste good is the right approach. Everything else is noise is unnecessary.
There's a difference when a wineyard switches winemaster, or start using frappato to substitute for cab due to global warming. Or the 20/21 chianti classico is so different in profile than the rest of the previous years that's it's shaping up to what might be a golden vintage. or how 2020 from napa just isnt worth risking due to smoke taint. Or back in the 90s how mondavi and Michel Rolland almost ruined french wine due to everything being tailored chemi-made to be strong and oaky.
There're stories yes. There're also technicals. And experimentations. Just like every other sector from tech to fashion.
when I got into whiskey-tasting, I noticed that really cheap stuff (<20€ per bottle) always tastes bad, and average priced whisky (~50€) usually tastes good, and even comes with a lot of variety. If you go beyond that (>200€), you'll get the stuff beyond the taste, like exclusivity.
But here is the thing: whisky drinkers don't hide, that higher price tags don't come from the taste. E.g. Stuff like single casks are explicitly about being exclusive.
For me the fun with whisky tasting comes from exploring the taste, and trying to put it into words. It's less about "tasting good" and more about "trying out a new sense".
Yes, price points can be ridiculous. A $60 bottle can be better than $1,000 bottle EASILY, because a lot of it is name recognition, rarity, etc. and these medals means almost nothing. Look for brand, region, winemaker, etc. and you can repeat with success.
Disclaimer: I'm fine with cheap wine (~$20/bottle) that's good, and I buy it often. Just like I don't eat at "Michelin Star" restaurants every day.
So yes junk wine is junk, but not all cheap wine is junk.
I do however expect for this particular instance, they spent a lot of time finding a particularly wonderful €3 wine - while the vast majority at this price probably are distinctly less good.
The article says the opposite:
> There were plenty of wines under €3 to choose from, but they decided to go with the cheapest and worst-tasting one they could find. a €2.50 bottle was selected and then disguised it as a premium product by naming it ‘Chateau Colombier’ and creating a more eye-catching label.
In a lot of alcohol tasting competitions (including Gilbert & Gaillard), the scale actually goes Double Gold, Gold, Silver, Bronze. A gold medal in itself doesn't actually mean what you might think it should (i.e., best in class), it's basically so you can sell stickers to put on bottles to fool buyers who don't know the specifics of how these competitions are scored. Broadly, I would interpret Double Gold as "might be good", Gold as "might not suck", and Silver/Bronze as "probably pretty bad since they're marketing their participation ribbons".
An example from the spirits world: the San Francisco Spirits Competition has a 119 page list of results with medals (https://www.sfspiritscomp.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/202...). There's maybe 1-2 Double Golds per page. GABF, the big beer festival, doesn't award Double Golds, but their categories are specific enough that they awarded 100 Gold medals last year.
G&G has this wine listed on their site 3 times. I'm not sure which one is accurate, but the scores are from 85-88. Here's what wine-searcher (a big shopping portal/aggregator for wine) says about the distribution of G&G's ratings:
"Gilbert & Gaillard's wine scores on Wine-Searcher: Score range: 85 – 100 points 50% fall between: 86 – 90 points Average score: 88.5 points"
So basically, they rated it as below average on a scale that inflates ratings to the point where almost everything is marketable.
Finally, according to G&G's rules, the wines are tasted blind. The article implies that they're not, but doesn't actually say it.
"Prior to tasting, they [the wine samples] are placed in identical packaging that conceals their shape and guarantees anonymity." https://vigneron.gilbertgaillard.com/ruleChallenge/reglement...
I know nothing about this specific competition, but there's no real need to try to influence a nonblind judge given how the deck is already stacked.
If you’re in Napa, check out the wine making thing. It’s lots of fun. https://www.conncreek.com/visit