There are wines that suit your taste and wines that don't.
I'm acetic that all wine recommendations are good.
How to get the wine you really want
21–30 of 164 posts
Re: How to get the wine you really want
#22Twenty years ago I was a tea-totaller, but there was a group of people I wanted to hang out with who would get together to drink wine so I decided to try to develop a taste for it. I eventually got to be a pretty hard-core wine snob. My wife and I even ran a wine-tasting group for several years. Then one day we decided to start doing blind tastings, and we soon learned that there was very little correlation between w…
I don't quite understand why you winos take your critics so seriously in the first place. Critics are just people with opinions. Sometimes they can provide good justification for why whatever they're reviewing is good or bad. But not one of them is impartial enough that their opinion can be taken at face value, specially if you're not into the stuff they're pushing. This is more obvious with film and videogame. It wo…
Very efficient decision-process, when you know that no one's opinions can be strong enough to overcome your preferences.
Re: How to get the wine you really want
#23Twenty years ago I was a tea-totaller, but there was a group of people I wanted to hang out with who would get together to drink wine so I decided to try to develop a taste for it. I eventually got to be a pretty hard-core wine snob. My wife and I even ran a wine-tasting group for several years. Then one day we decided to start doing blind tastings, and we soon learned that there was very little correlation between w…
> Twenty years ago I was a tea-totaller, but there was a group of people I wanted to hang out with who would get together to drink wine so I decided to try to develop a taste for it. Could you go into a bit more detail on this? The very idea of forcing myself to "acquire the taste" for alcohol seems distasteful in itself. I've got additional reasons for choosing not to do so, but I'd be interested to hear another poi…
It was purely succumbing to peer pressure. Not something I'm particularly proud of, nor something I would recommend. If you don't like alcohol, and you don't feel like that's holding you back socially, then by all means don't drink. If you don't feel like you're missing out on anything, then you aren't. That's my whole point: you should ignore what other people think and just decide for yourself what you like, even if (maybe especially if) what you like is not to start drinking in the first place.
Re: How to get the wine you really want
#24Twenty years ago I was a tea-totaller, but there was a group of people I wanted to hang out with who would get together to drink wine so I decided to try to develop a taste for it. I eventually got to be a pretty hard-core wine snob. My wife and I even ran a wine-tasting group for several years. Then one day we decided to start doing blind tastings, and we soon learned that there was very little correlation between w…
I don't quite understand why you winos take your critics so seriously in the first place. Critics are just people with opinions. Sometimes they can provide good justification for why whatever they're reviewing is good or bad. But not one of them is impartial enough that their opinion can be taken at face value, specially if you're not into the stuff they're pushing. This is more obvious with film and videogame. It wo…
A good friend of mine is actually a food/wine critic. He has said (and I think this applies to all good critics) that there's nothing special about the tastes of a critic. Some people may be more sensitive than others but critics are pretty much in the same population as the rest of us. The difference between a good critic and someone flapping their gums on Yelp is the ability TO WRITE something worthwhile about the subject, be it wine or food.
Boiling what a critic says down to "good/bad" or "like/dislike" means the reader hasn't taken the time to really understand what was said-- or the critic wasn't very good.
Re: How to get the wine you really want
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Former wine store worker here. Was it the case that the Silver Oak bottle probably needed some time to open up? Still, I agree with your general thrust. I find that my favorite wines, especially per dollar spent, are between $8-20.
> Was it the case that the Silver Oak bottle probably needed some time to open up? This was a long time ago so it's hard to say. But I've had plenty of reds that tasted great straight out of the bottle, so IMHO any wine that needs to "open up" is not as good as one that doesn't. Also, while it is absolutely true that the taste of a wine will change over the course of an evening, it's far from clear how much of this i…
> IMHO any wine that needs to "open up" is not as good as one that doesn't.
Yikes. Gonna have to disagree with you on that. The effect of a wine being aerated/oxidized after being opened and/or decanted is obvious even to a casual wine drinker.
> I now know plenty of wines that reliably taste great (to me) straight out of the gate and keep tasting great through the whole bottle even if I keep it for a couple of days
And, by the same token, the taste of red wine degrades fast and is generally completely unrecognizable within 24-48 hours of opening, even if it's well kept with a fancy stopper.
Reading those two comments of yours makes me seriously doubt your ability to make observations that generalize to other people.
Re: How to get the wine you really want
#26Twenty years ago I was a tea-totaller, but there was a group of people I wanted to hang out with who would get together to drink wine so I decided to try to develop a taste for it. I eventually got to be a pretty hard-core wine snob. My wife and I even ran a wine-tasting group for several years. Then one day we decided to start doing blind tastings, and we soon learned that there was very little correlation between w…
i wonder if it's the same for whiskeys or really any alchohol.
Re: How to get the wine you really want
#27Twenty years ago I was a tea-totaller, but there was a group of people I wanted to hang out with who would get together to drink wine so I decided to try to develop a taste for it. I eventually got to be a pretty hard-core wine snob. My wife and I even ran a wine-tasting group for several years. Then one day we decided to start doing blind tastings, and we soon learned that there was very little correlation between w…
> Twenty years ago I was a tea-totaller, but there was a group of people I wanted to hang out with who would get together to drink wine so I decided to try to develop a taste for it. Could you go into a bit more detail on this? The very idea of forcing myself to "acquire the taste" for alcohol seems distasteful in itself. I've got additional reasons for choosing not to do so, but I'd be interested to hear another poi…
no one(maybe some) likes alcohol the first time. one must acquire a taste for it. that doesn't mean it's not worth it. scotch was so disgusting to me the first time i had it and now it's one of the great pleasures in my life.
Re: How to get the wine you really want
#28Twenty years ago I was a tea-totaller, but there was a group of people I wanted to hang out with who would get together to drink wine so I decided to try to develop a taste for it. I eventually got to be a pretty hard-core wine snob. My wife and I even ran a wine-tasting group for several years. Then one day we decided to start doing blind tastings, and we soon learned that there was very little correlation between w…
One thing you wrote made me curious: That good wine box -- will a wine box from another batch also impress as much? I assume one of the problems with the cheap stuff is the std deviation values? I might add that I got a Moldovan 2 bucks wine in a PET bottle this week and quite liked it. :-) (I prefer dry red Spanish that you almost have to chew (I think the English term i s "rich"?). I should probably just admit defe…
Actually one of the nice things about the mass-produced "plonk" is that it is very consistent. One bottle of Barefoot cab will taste pretty much the same as another, whereas with more expensive wines you get a lot more variation, particularly from year to year. (Wine snobs consider this a feature!)
> vodka in espresso
Whatever works! My wife likes vanilla vodka with olives, and raspberry martinis with a dash of tabasco. But I love her anyway :-)
Re: How to get the wine you really want
#29I want a WINE that runs all the Windows programs in Windows without a hiccup (Adobe Suite included) but then again as a HACKER WINE means Wine Is Not an Emulator.
Re: How to get the wine you really want
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Former wine store worker here. Was it the case that the Silver Oak bottle probably needed some time to open up? Still, I agree with your general thrust. I find that my favorite wines, especially per dollar spent, are between $8-20.
> Was it the case that the Silver Oak bottle probably needed some time to open up? This was a long time ago so it's hard to say. But I've had plenty of reds that tasted great straight out of the bottle, so IMHO any wine that needs to "open up" is not as good as one that doesn't. Also, while it is absolutely true that the taste of a wine will change over the course of an evening, it's far from clear how much of this i…
>so IMHO any wine that needs to "open up" is not as good as one that doesn't.
I respectfully disagree. Basically I stick to cheap wines (for budget reasons), and my decanter will turn almost any unbearable red into acceptable. A newly opened red sometimes just needs to be smoothed out via air a bit -- at the extreme of things, if you leave a glass out overnight it will be flat (not to mention, the alcohol will have evaporated of course).
edit: not sure if "evaporate" is the right scientific term