One of my professors in grad school was really into wine and every couple of years he would put on an after-hours wine tasting class for a semester. One of the points he made was that there are absolutely wines which are objectively better and worse and that experts can reliably tell them apart. He had met enough experts who could identify a vineyard and vintage blind to know there was something to it. But sitting on top of that there is a frothy market that is driven by fads, speculation, and hype.
He was of the opinion that generally speaking the quality of a typical wine increases monotonically with price up until around the $40 range with the big steps around the $5, $10, and $20 price points. But above $50 or so, you're no longer paying for higher quality, per se. It's more that you are paying for a unique flavor profile and reliability. But unless you're seeking out that particular flavor profile, you can get a bottle that is just as good for $30-40 (and occasionally even cheaper). And above a few hundred dollars it's all just fads, speculation, and hype. (He liked to say that the people who buy those wines have "more money than sense.") They're good wines, but you can get a bottle that is just as good for a fraction of the price.
I worked at WineSpectator.com in 2012-2013. I'll say this in their favor: the wine tastings were blind. A bunch of interns would set up the wine tasting, pouring the wine into glasses and then hiding the bottles. Only after everything was setup were the editors allowed into the room. So when the editors drank the wine, they had no idea if they were drinking a $9 bottle or a $900 bottle. They had to focus on the taste and balance, and write their report. Only afterwards were they told which wine they had tasted.
Having said that, I'll also mention, the way the editors struggled for new adjectives did sometimes make me laugh:
"a vast, hearty body, notes of blue and a hint of graphite steel"
"a radiance similar to the sun at dawn, a strong body, notes of orange"
There have been a lot of blind wine tastings done and the results are always interesting. Sometimes cheap bottles score as high, or higher than vintages. Other times people can spot the cheap "carton" wine easily.
My wife and I love to cook, have discussed opening our own restaurant, have eaten at lots of very expensive "haute cuisine" restaurants and have tasted lots of wines.
Part of the "problem" is that taste is subjective and can be influenced through suggestion. So the atmosphere, the price, the meal pairing can all affect a person's appreciation of the glass.
I remember an episode of Penn & Teller's Bullshit where they had a "water sommelier" at a restaurant who would upsell customers on speciality bottles of water and they were all filled with the same tap water from the same garden hose at the back of the restaurant. The results were fascinating. Subjects swore they tasted different from one another.
The real question, in my opinion, is whether a high-priced bottle is "worth it" by as near-objective standards as possible. In other words, given two bottles of different prices, all else being equal, would the average person prefer the taste of one over the other?
That varies widely from one wine to another. My wife and I have enjoyed a good vintage but we are also perfectly content with a $15 bottle from a local vineyard here in Ontario, which is our "go to." I'm equally partial to a $15 Rothschild Merlot or Pinot Noir and I wonder if the truly exceptional wines that I've tasted at restaurants were more about the environment, the food pairing, the company and the occasion than they were about the flavour in isolation.
I have gotten fairly into coffee but I struggle to independently pick up these subtle notes. I'll take a sip, struggle to put any concrete words on the taste, and then read the tasting notes and (honestly) think "ah of course, yes I definitely get that". But I'm sure it's all just the power of suggestion.
(An exception is some Ethiopian beans which have an unmistakable blueberry aroma and taste that they are famous for.)
I've stopped worrying too much about "advancing" past that level. Now I just buy the coffee, read the notes, enjoy experiencing the sensations that have been placed in my head. Is it "connoisseurship"? Is it a placebo? Who cares, it's fun!
During covid a friend tried a "smell training" kit from amazon and I bought one too. (pretty fun, with rose, lemon, eucalyptus and clove)
basically, some essential oils of one smell at a time.
Looking at more extensive smell kits, there is a huge jump in price if you get a "master wine aroma kit". They can have many many scents.
It might just be putting names to smells, but I also wonder if you can actually develop or enhance your sense of smell (and therefore the aromatic parts of taste)?
Those quotes made me laugh and reminded me heavily of weed reviews.
Fun tidbit - The difference in aroma, appearance, flavor, and experience of a $9 eighth of cannabis versus a $900 eighth of cannabis would likely be noticeable even to an amateur.
You don’t necessarily need to be a Ganjier[0] to tell.
Efforts to homogenize it and remove labeling do serve to remove brand bias which is why it is standard now at cannabis cups - but still the quality shines through - literally sometimes.
But when it gets down to reviews and describing experiences we are all limited by the English language.
Some quotes from my own reviews:
“The insides almost looked like the outside of a banana slug. That kind of yellow.”[1]
“Beyond the citrus notes, the smell is definitely honeydew to me, not cantaloupe.”[2]
Good wine experts give descriptions that arent just made up but based on a range of real scents - its standard in a sommelier school to have an aroma kit of tens to a hundred or so scents used as comparisons. Its a few hundred dollars investment for a good one.
There probably are objectively 4 categories of wine that pretty much everybody will agree with when given a blind test:
bad - wine that actually has gone bad (skunked, turned to vinegar or some other faul)
low-quality - jug wine (high sugar and/or extremely high acidity and/or strong ethanol flavor)
average/meh - the wine is drinkable and nothing stands out
good wine - the wine hits all the key traits of its varietal
Those super-sensitive can get more fine grained, and anyone who doesn't hate wine will have a 5th "great" category based on their personal preferences. But those are replicable consistently across the population.
The average/good distinction is trainable for the average person with some practice.
In that event, do you know if the 900$ bottles were qualified as more enjoyable than the 9$ bottles?
For instance, in Costa Rica, one year, many wine drinkers prised this wine as exceptionally good, specially consideringn it was very very inexpensive and not even packaged in a glass bottle.
I don't have synesthesia to any notable degree but what you're describing kind of makes sense as being it. Not tastes for me, but sounds can elicit such responses eg. a sound having graphite steel I can well imagine. Or other things that would baffle another person.
Frankly, "notes of blue and a hint of graphite steel" sounds too remote from normal experiences to be consciously made up - I mean, who's going to relate to that anyway?
I’ve blind tasted beer numerous times in multiple different contexts.
Even participated in a session called “tasting on the right side of your brain” all about identifying and interrogating those more abstract impression.
As poetic as they are - they carry insight and information both about the taster and the liquid that - without interrogation even the taster maybe unaware of.
Two scientific points to bring up about this article:
1. When the author talks about Coke vs. Pepsi, he comes to the conclusion that the reason people prefer Pepsi in blind taste tests but Coke in unblinded ones is "Think of it as the brain combining two sources of input to make a final taste perception: the actual taste of the two sodas and a preconceived notion (probably based on great marketing) that Coke should taste better." I've read elsewhere, though, that the reason for this difference is actually because of the difference between "sip tests" vs. "drinking tests". Pepsi is objectively sweeter than Coke, so if you're just taking a few quick sips (as most taste tests are set up), you may prefer the sweeter taste of Pepsi because it stands out more, but if you're drinking a whole bunch, the sweeter taste of Pepsi can feel cloying.
2. The article includes this quote, "the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less." I wonder if this could be due to Berkon's paradox, a statistical paradox that was on the HN front page yesterday, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33677781. After all, I'm guessing most truly bad wines may not be rated at all.
A joke in the UK is that the unofficial slogan of Pepsi is 'yeah fine whatever mate' because when you order Coca-Cola in a pub and they (for some reason) stock Pepsi instead they always have to ask 'is Pepsi ok?'.
My cousin who was one of the people giving the challenge also said they were always supposed to give Pepsi second, because after the bitterness of the coke first, the relative sweetness of Pepsi would be slightly refreshing, even if the drinker liked the bitter taste
>so if you're just taking a few quick sips (as most taste tests are set up), you may prefer the sweeter taste of Pepsi because it stands out more, but if you're drinking a whole bunch, the sweeter taste of Pepsi can feel cloying.
This is not about drinking or sipping though. This is about people prefer Pepsi in blind tests and Coke in unblinded tests.
So this explanation would only make sense if the blind tests are also using sipping and the unblinded tests are using drinking.
Yeah it’s like the difference between competition bbq and craft bbq. Competition stuff is packed with flavor since the judge will get 1 bite. Craft bbq is all about eating well and is balanced.
As someone who ran a wine-tasting group for several years I can tell you this: there are definitely discernible differences between wines. What there is not, however, is any kind of absolute standard for what constitutes a "good" wine. Different people like different things. There are two things that makes wines expensive, and neither of them necessarily correlates with whether a particular wine will taste good to you:
1. Old wines cost more because you have to pay for the storage.
2. Low-production wines that have an affluent following cost more because supply and demand.
And that's it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with you if you if you prefer a Gallo Rhine Wine in a box to a Romanee Conti.
That said, there is definitely a skill and an art to being a Sommelier, and that is the ability to take someone's description of what they like and match it to what's on their wine list. There is no such thing as a "good wine" independent of any particular person's tastes (except if you have a wine that has, say, turned to vinegar) but there is definitely such a thing as a good sommelier.
I am no wine guru but I do know one thing for sure. There is definitely such a thing as bad wine. If paying a little more would guarantee not having a terrible bottle, that would make me pretty happy. In the real world I've not found that to be true though.
> There can be objectively bad pizza — burnt, cold, mushy — but there isn’t really any objective best pizza. Fancier and more complicated pizzas can be more expensive, not because they’re better, but because they’re more interesting. Maybe wine is the same way.
There is. My father was really in to California wines in the 70's and 80's. From my freshmen year of high school in the early 80's I was always served a glass of wine with dinner. A couple of years in to this my friends and I hit our peak drinking phase. One would come up with a gallon jug of Gallo or some off brand box of wine. I would take a sip and just no. I can't drink this, it's awful. Now beer I could drink some of the worst, 40's of old English 800 for example, but wine, ya it at least had to be palatable before I would touch the stuff. My friends thought I was a snob...
In Croatia many years ago, we ordered the cheapest bottle on the wine list. It was disgusting. The locals were amazed that we didn't know to water it down before drinking.
The thing is, wine "quality" is entirely subjective. I've not found much correlation between price and whether I will like it or not. The only safe bet is that if it tastes too strongly of vinegar, probably people won't like it as much. But some European wines (Spain and Italy) intentionally produce wine with a non-negligible amount of vinegar taste.
I know of a single maker that only puts out wines that I consider good or at least okay: Heitz.
Heitz is pricey though, and a $6 bottle of Barefoot or Charles Shaw two buck chuck can be just as good or better than a huge assortment of $50 or $300 bottles of swill. In my experience.
I took the introductory sommelier exam as a hobbyist, but I was in a room with ~200 people in the industry. We collectively blind tasted about a dozen wines, and I watched as people around me mostly guessed correctly with astonishing accuracy.
There may be some nonsense in wine tasting, but it is definitely possible to develop a body of knowledge and experience that allows one to identify wines based on only your senses. It's important to note that the CMS only includes traditionally produced wines in the blind tasting - no curveballs (pinot grigio grown in Alaska or whatever).
Get a bunch of friends to each bring a bottle. Maybe give a criteria, like a price range, so people don't feel obliged to impress with the price tag.
All bottles are delivered to the kitchen at the beginning of the night, where the host puts each in a numbered paper bag. Each attendee gets a score sheet.
Start serving, either by pouring or just putting a few bottles on the table at a time. It's a normal party, apart from each person giving each numbered wine a score, and conversation about the wine being an icebreaker.
At the end of the night total up the scores and reveal the bottles, generally to some hilarity.
It's fun to throw in a few wildcards. As the host, I threw in a couple of extra bottles: one well above the price range and another the cheapest I could find. (Found out after the event that an attendee also decanted a box into a bottle. All in the spirit!). I also poured all the left over bits from each bottle (not glasses!) into a bottle and served that up towards the end of the night.
The cheap wildcard came second. The dregs came middle of the pack and the expensive bottle came below the dregs. It was a fun night and the guessing game really got people talking about what they liked and disliked, but they couldn't be pompous about it, unless they wanted to risk a ribbing at the end of the night.
I really wonder how much of the suspicion of wine comes from the class-conflict accoutrements and marketing.
I used to be a big wine skeptic. It seemed pretentious, overpriced, and boring. The people who liked it were the kind of people I disliked. Most of the places in the town I grew up in all had the same "big reds" at ridiculous prices. Wine was the thing that cost $12 that you paid $60 for at the local steakhouse to look important.
Then, I moved to a lesser-known wine-producing state and started actually trying wine. It took some time--and there were more than a few encounters with snobs and commercial puffery that made me want to rethink it--but it soon opened up into a huge world that I had no idea about before. It was far more fascinating and enduring than previous interests in whiskey or craft beer.
It's a pity that wine gets such a pretentious reputation. It's a fascinating blend of chemistry, geology, geography, and culture that at its heart is an agricultural enterprise.
I made a career limiting move at my first job when I arranged a blind wine tasting at the house of the CEO, who was a pretentious wine snob. I'd have been fine if I stuck to $40-50 bottles but I snuck in some Gato Negro from Chile, then made sure everyone knew when that was the CEO's favourite.
Started my first company shortly thereafter, probably that incident is as responsible as anything else for my entrepreneurial path.
I'm pretty into wine, not in the industry though. But I've tried a lot of stuff (from garbo wines, to stuff like Rayas, Haut Brion, Romanee Conti, etc... some pretty heavy hitters), and I agree that money is not the driving factor. The economics are huge, like sometimes some small producer will just explode and their production is little... but the demand might be high and suddenly you're looking at a 10 euro bottle of wine, going for 120 euros. Lot's of times it's because they actually make something pretty remarkable, but sometimes not.
Having said that, I've seen some incredible stuff. There was a tasting were a friend brought a bottle with him, it was a blind tasting and everyone was supposed to write down what their bottles were. So my friend presented his bottle concealed in aluminum paper as we used to do, and he wrote down the bottle + vintage.
At the end of the night, notes were exchanged, and there was a very very strong taster in the group. It was burgundy night, and he nailed 4/5 wines (6 in total, but the one you brought didn't count), producer, wine, and vintage. My friend told him "you didn't guess the vintage of the one I brought", I don't remember but I think my friend thought that it was a 2008 and this guy said like 2009. When they revealed the bottles, the bottle was indeed a 2009 from the same producer. My friend had taken a different bottle from his cellar and he didn't realize :^). Some folks know what they're drinking very well indeed (5/5
We moved to a farm in wine country in the PNW years back, and I had this 'ah ha' moment. It was the summer before the pandemic, and we had friends visiting. We sat down to eat a meal we made with all of this local food. I took a sip of a wine from a vineyard nearby. That's when the term 'terroir' suddenly made sense. The wine had the same essence as the food we were eating, all being from the same region. But it was elevated. It's like, the celebration of all of this hard agricultural work. The cherry on top.
People find ways to turn anything into a game. And status, striving, gaming – they enter into anything. But for me, I generally just keep a list of favorites. Reds often give me a headache, so a good red, to me, is one that does not. But I've grown to really like Rosé, and it doesn't have to be summer.
Anyway, there's definitely good wine and bad wine. I think personally a good story contributes a lot more to the value of wine than its rating. But 'value' can be very subjective.
More expensive wine doesn't necessarily taste "better" - as better is a highly subjective experience, specific to the individuals preferences. But it does tend to taste more "complex", e.g. like more different things at once, and more elegant, e.g. containing rarer flavour notes like oak or earthyness in reds or clearer mineralic taste in whites.
Also, in wine, the price to value ratio is anything but linear. In most European countries, once you've made it past the 8 euro mark, you can get some great wines that get a lot better up to about 30 euro a bottle. After that,paying an additional 100 only gets you a marginally better wine, if at all.
Overall though, the best advice is to drink whatever you enjoy.
I blind-tasted wine competitively at an international level and it is pretty commonplace to identify region/sub-region/year/grape across 10 wines blind with ~80% accuracy. In fact, many tastings go further than this and you identify chateau/year from 10 wines from the same region - i.e. the Oxbridge teams mentioned there also do a blind tasting competition specifically on left bank Bordeaux. It's relatively straightforward to train yourself to do this. Note that the physical properties of the wine play heavily into this too (colour, reflection in light, viscosity are proxies for alcohol, age, grape, treatment). Additionally, having the requisite knowledge of "this wine would never be served this old, this wasn't a good year in this region because of x weather, this region only grows x,y,z" means you can deduce a lot from quite little information.
I do think people overfit on the colour piece though; you could definitely find some reds and whites which, if tasted without seeing the colour and at the same temperature, would be challenging to tell apart, more-so than differentiating between country/grape/region. I'm not sure what this really proves, apart from being counterintuitive.
That said, there is a lot of bullshit in market of people who buy and sell expensive wine (more so than the professional tasters and vineyards, who are usually genuine enthusiasts). Lots of cheaper wines may be more enjoyable, and wine flavour profiles are often full of weird signalling about what constitutes quality, i.e. "tasting note x is considered desirable/refined/distinguished, ergo it tastes better", which is nonsense and snobbery. Without any bias you might think expensive and old bordeaux tastes like an old boot, but if you've been trained that those specific flavour profiles are distinguished and desirable ('hints of leather and earth').
I've had a lot of red wine in my life; like, probably too much. The only bottle with a memorable taste came from a wine tour in Napa Valley where they said half the field was destroyed in a fire, so they were getting rid of the rest for cheap. The wine was super smoky... and absolutely delicious. I wonder why that never became a thing.
We had a lot of smoke tainted “experimental” wines out from Australian vineyards as 2019 and 2020 releases - some were really interesting, others simply dreadful (with winemakers just glad you were happy to take a punt and get rid of it for them).
Not sure repeating the bushfires that created those releases is a long term strategy though…
10% of market and wine experts are real. The rest is overpriced wines of doubtful quality, fake prices just to give prestige, and so forth. As a rule of thumb, spending 20-50 euros per bottle you can drink italian top wines (French wines are more costly). If you are spending 350 euros for a bottle of Sassicaia or paying a Bordeaux 800 euros, you are probably misleaded by the market. It's not that a top quality Bordeaux is not a great wine, but after the 30/40 euros the quality gain is only marginal and non linear at all, so sometimes a cheaper wine of a less famous maker is going to be better than a wine you pay a lot. 90% of trained customers (the ones that did some kind of 3 months course) can't tell great wines from mediocre wines apart.
Bonus: want to drink a top quality italian wine spending just 30 euros? Buy a couple of bottles of Passorosso by Franchetti. Etna Red, Sicily. Drink it together with some top quality French pinot noir and tell me if it's not on par.
I learned to appreciate wines only after I moved to a wine producing country (Portugal). I cook once a week for my girlfriend and try to choose a different wine each time. After a few years you learn a bit, which ones you like and dislike, and how different wines are. It's a lot of fun. There is nothing fake about it.
This is how I know it's not fake: I was fortunate enough to taste very expensive wines repeatedly as a teenager, not understanding their significance. Yeah I thought the whole thing was snobby, but the wine just tasted so good! When I bought mid-tier wine for the first time at age 21, it tasted "hot," like rubbing alcohol. Same with all the others from the grocery store. I still buy it but often leave it sitting for hours before drinking it, even though I haven't tasted any expensive wines in several years. My friends always say I have low standards for living conditions, which maybe I do, but when it comes to wine, seems like I'm permanently spoiled.
[+] [-] antognini|3 years ago|reply
He was of the opinion that generally speaking the quality of a typical wine increases monotonically with price up until around the $40 range with the big steps around the $5, $10, and $20 price points. But above $50 or so, you're no longer paying for higher quality, per se. It's more that you are paying for a unique flavor profile and reliability. But unless you're seeking out that particular flavor profile, you can get a bottle that is just as good for $30-40 (and occasionally even cheaper). And above a few hundred dollars it's all just fads, speculation, and hype. (He liked to say that the people who buy those wines have "more money than sense.") They're good wines, but you can get a bottle that is just as good for a fraction of the price.
[+] [-] lkrubner|3 years ago|reply
Having said that, I'll also mention, the way the editors struggled for new adjectives did sometimes make me laugh:
"a vast, hearty body, notes of blue and a hint of graphite steel"
"a radiance similar to the sun at dawn, a strong body, notes of orange"
[+] [-] gspencley|3 years ago|reply
My wife and I love to cook, have discussed opening our own restaurant, have eaten at lots of very expensive "haute cuisine" restaurants and have tasted lots of wines.
Part of the "problem" is that taste is subjective and can be influenced through suggestion. So the atmosphere, the price, the meal pairing can all affect a person's appreciation of the glass.
I remember an episode of Penn & Teller's Bullshit where they had a "water sommelier" at a restaurant who would upsell customers on speciality bottles of water and they were all filled with the same tap water from the same garden hose at the back of the restaurant. The results were fascinating. Subjects swore they tasted different from one another.
The real question, in my opinion, is whether a high-priced bottle is "worth it" by as near-objective standards as possible. In other words, given two bottles of different prices, all else being equal, would the average person prefer the taste of one over the other?
That varies widely from one wine to another. My wife and I have enjoyed a good vintage but we are also perfectly content with a $15 bottle from a local vineyard here in Ontario, which is our "go to." I'm equally partial to a $15 Rothschild Merlot or Pinot Noir and I wonder if the truly exceptional wines that I've tasted at restaurants were more about the environment, the food pairing, the company and the occasion than they were about the flavour in isolation.
[+] [-] Stratoscope|3 years ago|reply
Maria's husband Tom writes the tasting notes for each variety, such as...
Rwanda Dry Process Macuba
"Berry notes, floral impression, ripe blackberry, blueberry, fruited acidity, darker roasts tie in delicious bittersweet undertones, like strawberries dipped in chocolate sauce."
Yemen Al Qafr Hawari
"Sweet, somewhat rustic, notes of pistachio cookie, malted chocolate, ginger powder, sesame candies, corn syrup, tobacco leaf. Super chocolatey dark roasts."
I swear (even though I know I'm wrong) that he just makes this stuff up.
[+] [-] NoboruWataya|3 years ago|reply
(An exception is some Ethiopian beans which have an unmistakable blueberry aroma and taste that they are famous for.)
I've stopped worrying too much about "advancing" past that level. Now I just buy the coffee, read the notes, enjoy experiencing the sensations that have been placed in my head. Is it "connoisseurship"? Is it a placebo? Who cares, it's fun!
[+] [-] m463|3 years ago|reply
basically, some essential oils of one smell at a time.
Looking at more extensive smell kits, there is a huge jump in price if you get a "master wine aroma kit". They can have many many scents.
It might just be putting names to smells, but I also wonder if you can actually develop or enhance your sense of smell (and therefore the aromatic parts of taste)?
[+] [-] bitxbitxbitcoin|3 years ago|reply
Fun tidbit - The difference in aroma, appearance, flavor, and experience of a $9 eighth of cannabis versus a $900 eighth of cannabis would likely be noticeable even to an amateur.
You don’t necessarily need to be a Ganjier[0] to tell.
Efforts to homogenize it and remove labeling do serve to remove brand bias which is why it is standard now at cannabis cups - but still the quality shines through - literally sometimes.
But when it gets down to reviews and describing experiences we are all limited by the English language.
Some quotes from my own reviews:
“The insides almost looked like the outside of a banana slug. That kind of yellow.”[1]
“Beyond the citrus notes, the smell is definitely honeydew to me, not cantaloupe.”[2]
[0] https://ganjier.com [1] https://thehighestcritic.com/reviews/cultivar-review-pleazur... [2] https://thehighestcritic.com/reviews/strain-review-melonade-...
[+] [-] twelvechairs|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacobr1|3 years ago|reply
bad - wine that actually has gone bad (skunked, turned to vinegar or some other faul)
low-quality - jug wine (high sugar and/or extremely high acidity and/or strong ethanol flavor)
average/meh - the wine is drinkable and nothing stands out
good wine - the wine hits all the key traits of its varietal
Those super-sensitive can get more fine grained, and anyone who doesn't hate wine will have a 5th "great" category based on their personal preferences. But those are replicable consistently across the population.
The average/good distinction is trainable for the average person with some practice.
[+] [-] rufus_foreman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] alvarezbjm-hn|3 years ago|reply
For instance, in Costa Rica, one year, many wine drinkers prised this wine as exceptionally good, specially consideringn it was very very inexpensive and not even packaged in a glass bottle.
https://vino.cr/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/CLOS-DE-PIRQUE-CA...
I can't remember the exact number, but it cost between $5 and $10. That was over 10 years ago
[+] [-] zasdffaa|3 years ago|reply
Frankly, "notes of blue and a hint of graphite steel" sounds too remote from normal experiences to be consciously made up - I mean, who's going to relate to that anyway?
[+] [-] garrickvanburen|3 years ago|reply
Even participated in a session called “tasting on the right side of your brain” all about identifying and interrogating those more abstract impression.
As poetic as they are - they carry insight and information both about the taster and the liquid that - without interrogation even the taster maybe unaware of.
[+] [-] erfgh|3 years ago|reply
Well that spoils the next tastings. You can remember what the expensive wines taste like and score them higher in the future.
[+] [-] scelerat|3 years ago|reply
Dancing about architecture
[+] [-] emmelaich|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] almog|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Havoc|3 years ago|reply
I'm so stealing that
[+] [-] hbrn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|3 years ago|reply
1. When the author talks about Coke vs. Pepsi, he comes to the conclusion that the reason people prefer Pepsi in blind taste tests but Coke in unblinded ones is "Think of it as the brain combining two sources of input to make a final taste perception: the actual taste of the two sodas and a preconceived notion (probably based on great marketing) that Coke should taste better." I've read elsewhere, though, that the reason for this difference is actually because of the difference between "sip tests" vs. "drinking tests". Pepsi is objectively sweeter than Coke, so if you're just taking a few quick sips (as most taste tests are set up), you may prefer the sweeter taste of Pepsi because it stands out more, but if you're drinking a whole bunch, the sweeter taste of Pepsi can feel cloying.
2. The article includes this quote, "the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less." I wonder if this could be due to Berkon's paradox, a statistical paradox that was on the HN front page yesterday, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33677781. After all, I'm guessing most truly bad wines may not be rated at all.
[+] [-] chrisseaton|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] googlryas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|3 years ago|reply
This is not about drinking or sipping though. This is about people prefer Pepsi in blind tests and Coke in unblinded tests.
So this explanation would only make sense if the blind tests are also using sipping and the unblinded tests are using drinking.
[+] [-] nemo44x|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lisper|3 years ago|reply
1. Old wines cost more because you have to pay for the storage.
2. Low-production wines that have an affluent following cost more because supply and demand.
And that's it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with you if you if you prefer a Gallo Rhine Wine in a box to a Romanee Conti.
That said, there is definitely a skill and an art to being a Sommelier, and that is the ability to take someone's description of what they like and match it to what's on their wine list. There is no such thing as a "good wine" independent of any particular person's tastes (except if you have a wine that has, say, turned to vinegar) but there is definitely such a thing as a good sommelier.
[+] [-] noodlesUK|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|3 years ago|reply
> There can be objectively bad pizza — burnt, cold, mushy — but there isn’t really any objective best pizza. Fancier and more complicated pizzas can be more expensive, not because they’re better, but because they’re more interesting. Maybe wine is the same way.
[+] [-] BashiBazouk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KineticLensman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] metadat|3 years ago|reply
I know of a single maker that only puts out wines that I consider good or at least okay: Heitz.
Heitz is pricey though, and a $6 bottle of Barefoot or Charles Shaw two buck chuck can be just as good or better than a huge assortment of $50 or $300 bottles of swill. In my experience.
[+] [-] mfrisbie|3 years ago|reply
There may be some nonsense in wine tasting, but it is definitely possible to develop a body of knowledge and experience that allows one to identify wines based on only your senses. It's important to note that the CMS only includes traditionally produced wines in the blind tasting - no curveballs (pinot grigio grown in Alaska or whatever).
[+] [-] femto|3 years ago|reply
Get a bunch of friends to each bring a bottle. Maybe give a criteria, like a price range, so people don't feel obliged to impress with the price tag.
All bottles are delivered to the kitchen at the beginning of the night, where the host puts each in a numbered paper bag. Each attendee gets a score sheet.
Start serving, either by pouring or just putting a few bottles on the table at a time. It's a normal party, apart from each person giving each numbered wine a score, and conversation about the wine being an icebreaker.
At the end of the night total up the scores and reveal the bottles, generally to some hilarity.
It's fun to throw in a few wildcards. As the host, I threw in a couple of extra bottles: one well above the price range and another the cheapest I could find. (Found out after the event that an attendee also decanted a box into a bottle. All in the spirit!). I also poured all the left over bits from each bottle (not glasses!) into a bottle and served that up towards the end of the night.
The cheap wildcard came second. The dregs came middle of the pack and the expensive bottle came below the dregs. It was a fun night and the guessing game really got people talking about what they liked and disliked, but they couldn't be pompous about it, unless they wanted to risk a ribbing at the end of the night.
It also works with beers or homebrew.
[+] [-] 78124781|3 years ago|reply
I used to be a big wine skeptic. It seemed pretentious, overpriced, and boring. The people who liked it were the kind of people I disliked. Most of the places in the town I grew up in all had the same "big reds" at ridiculous prices. Wine was the thing that cost $12 that you paid $60 for at the local steakhouse to look important.
Then, I moved to a lesser-known wine-producing state and started actually trying wine. It took some time--and there were more than a few encounters with snobs and commercial puffery that made me want to rethink it--but it soon opened up into a huge world that I had no idea about before. It was far more fascinating and enduring than previous interests in whiskey or craft beer.
It's a pity that wine gets such a pretentious reputation. It's a fascinating blend of chemistry, geology, geography, and culture that at its heart is an agricultural enterprise.
[+] [-] rfrey|3 years ago|reply
Started my first company shortly thereafter, probably that incident is as responsible as anything else for my entrepreneurial path.
[+] [-] Sohcahtoa82|3 years ago|reply
I'm missing something. What made this a big faux pax?
[+] [-] MrGando|3 years ago|reply
Having said that, I've seen some incredible stuff. There was a tasting were a friend brought a bottle with him, it was a blind tasting and everyone was supposed to write down what their bottles were. So my friend presented his bottle concealed in aluminum paper as we used to do, and he wrote down the bottle + vintage.
At the end of the night, notes were exchanged, and there was a very very strong taster in the group. It was burgundy night, and he nailed 4/5 wines (6 in total, but the one you brought didn't count), producer, wine, and vintage. My friend told him "you didn't guess the vintage of the one I brought", I don't remember but I think my friend thought that it was a 2008 and this guy said like 2009. When they revealed the bottles, the bottle was indeed a 2009 from the same producer. My friend had taken a different bottle from his cellar and he didn't realize :^). Some folks know what they're drinking very well indeed (5/5
[+] [-] gdubs|3 years ago|reply
People find ways to turn anything into a game. And status, striving, gaming – they enter into anything. But for me, I generally just keep a list of favorites. Reds often give me a headache, so a good red, to me, is one that does not. But I've grown to really like Rosé, and it doesn't have to be summer.
Anyway, there's definitely good wine and bad wine. I think personally a good story contributes a lot more to the value of wine than its rating. But 'value' can be very subjective.
[+] [-] wolframhempel|3 years ago|reply
Also, in wine, the price to value ratio is anything but linear. In most European countries, once you've made it past the 8 euro mark, you can get some great wines that get a lot better up to about 30 euro a bottle. After that,paying an additional 100 only gets you a marginally better wine, if at all.
Overall though, the best advice is to drink whatever you enjoy.
[+] [-] pea|3 years ago|reply
I do think people overfit on the colour piece though; you could definitely find some reds and whites which, if tasted without seeing the colour and at the same temperature, would be challenging to tell apart, more-so than differentiating between country/grape/region. I'm not sure what this really proves, apart from being counterintuitive.
That said, there is a lot of bullshit in market of people who buy and sell expensive wine (more so than the professional tasters and vineyards, who are usually genuine enthusiasts). Lots of cheaper wines may be more enjoyable, and wine flavour profiles are often full of weird signalling about what constitutes quality, i.e. "tasting note x is considered desirable/refined/distinguished, ergo it tastes better", which is nonsense and snobbery. Without any bias you might think expensive and old bordeaux tastes like an old boot, but if you've been trained that those specific flavour profiles are distinguished and desirable ('hints of leather and earth').
[+] [-] JimRoepcke|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e10jc|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] milderworkacc|3 years ago|reply
Not sure repeating the bushfires that created those releases is a long term strategy though…
[+] [-] doubled112|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jahsome|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bell-cot|3 years ago|reply
(1) lots of subtle and subjective judgement calls
(2) humans yearning to show off their wealth / sophistication / status
...which is NOT fake or widely-faked?
[+] [-] antirez|3 years ago|reply
Bonus: want to drink a top quality italian wine spending just 30 euros? Buy a couple of bottles of Passorosso by Franchetti. Etna Red, Sicily. Drink it together with some top quality French pinot noir and tell me if it's not on par.
[+] [-] 13415|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hot_gril|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fleddr|3 years ago|reply
It comes in many shapes and forms. Coffee snobs. People that buy a Rolex. Or have a 100K audio setup to match their supernatural hearing.
It doesn't have to make objective sense, as long as it makes sense in your head.