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How to get the wine you really want

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Re: How to get the wine you really want

#71

Post by ska »

hexane360 wrote: post #64
ogig wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't fully buy this. I expect my chosen jazz critic to be knowledgeable, like, a lot. Same for food and wine. I want to read the words of someone who has eaten on more places, more foods and more flavors than me, not less. Your friend might be too humble.

But even then, they're not any better at 'tasting well'. You don't have to care about the fancy properties of the wine, just whether it tastes good to you.

The same argument can be brought when comparing top 40 pop music and jazz, say. There isn't an objective truth to aesthetics, but that doesn't mean that everyone's opinions has equal depth or nuance.

Some things you get more out of if you choose to spend time with them, but will in turn change your own sense of it, and the experience you are having.

So in some sense you actually do become "better " at tasting/listening well - or at least you become more sophisticated. Which doesn't invalidate the enjoyment that someone else can get from a more superficial engagement, at all.

Re: How to get the wine you really want

#72

Post by lisper »

acheron wrote: post #65
lisper wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, absolutely. Since the infamous cab tasting we've done blind tastings of spirits with similar results. Our favorite vodka, for example, turns out to be Seagrams Extra Smooth, which is about half the price of a "high end" vodka. Unfortunately, it doesn't always turn out that way. My favorite scotch turns out to be Lagavulin or Laphroaig -- I really like the smokey flavor of Islay malts -- both of which are rather…

Well, of course it doesn't work for vodka. The definition of vodka is to be odorless and flavorless. "High end" vodka is almost literally a scam. (Read up on the founding of Grey Goose... the business plan was basically "Hey, I bet if we charge way too much for vodka we can get gullible Americans to pay it!")

I used to think that too, but it turns out that vodkas actually do have distinctive flavors, some of which are better than others (to me). I was skeptical until we tried it, and it turned out that my wife and I could both identify many high-end vodkas very reliably in blind tastings. Ciroc is particularly distinctive.

Re: How to get the wine you really want

#73

Post by achou »

I have that Asian gene that limits how much alcohol I can drink, so I never drank more than a few sips of wine until I was well into my 30s. One day some friends and I went to a nice restaurant to celebrate a milestone, and we ordered a ~$120 bottle of syrah based on an app that showed critics' ratings.

It was a revelation. Whenever I had had wine before, I always picked wines that were considered "approachable." Sweeter, fruitier, and so on. But this wine was different, highly complex and paired beautifully with food (a first for me). Afterwards I chased down the wine online and found one of the few places that sold it, and had a few bottles shipped from across the country. Trying it again later with my wife, who also rarely drank, she agreed it was something special. Since then I've explored other wines and have found that my favorites are generally not the ones that are pushed as approachable for beginners.

I guess the lesson is, if you want to understand what the fuss is all about, don't be afraid to try ones that have more to offer than fruit and sugar. Tannins, full-bodied structure, and balance can be extraordinary.

I have found that there tends to be a sweet spot around $40-100/bottle for the best quality/price. Though to be fair, there are plenty of good wines for less, and plenty of duds in that range and above.

Re: How to get the wine you really want

#74

Post by lisper »

CPLX wrote: post #25
lisper wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I didn't make myself clear. I don't deny that decanting and/or aerating will improve many (perhaps even most) reds. But in my experience, for my own personal tastes, any wine that requires this very rarely ends up tasting as good as one that doesn't.

> Reading those two comments of yours makes me seriously doubt your ability to make observations that generalize to other people.

Two responses:

1. What I've said here is not based just on my own experience, but also on the firsthand observations of other people who have participated in blind tastings along with me. And...

2. The general impossibility of generalizing one's own subjective experience to other people when it comes to wine is kind of my whole point.

Re: How to get the wine you really want

#76

Post by Bulkington »

lisper wrote: post #3

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. 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…

Well, except that blending is a big part of what a winemaker does and, basically, it should be left to professionals. All else is monkeys and typewriters. If you can't tell the diff between a Barefoot and a Silver Oak, what do you think home blending is going to accomplish?

Wine snobbery may be bullshit, just like jazz snobbery. But that's not the same as 'appreciation,' which requires some education and experience, maybe even some aptitude.

Or think instead of sex: Wow, that sure was great! Why would I want to try anything different? tl;dr: You don't know what you're missing, or you're doing it wrong--or, more likely, both.

https://winemakermag.com/95-blending-batches-tips-from-the-p...

Re: How to get the wine you really want

#77

Post by tptacek »

lisper wrote: post #34
thesimpsons1022 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i wonder if it's the same for whiskeys or really any alchohol.

Yes, absolutely. Since the infamous cab tasting we've done blind tastings of spirits with similar results. Our favorite vodka, for example, turns out to be Seagrams Extra Smooth, which is about half the price of a "high end" vodka. Unfortunately, it doesn't always turn out that way. My favorite scotch turns out to be Lagavulin or Laphroaig -- I really like the smokey flavor of Islay malts -- both of which are rather…

Come on. No, it isn't. Nobody in the world is going to confuse Laphroiag with Glenlivet, let alone with Buffalo Trace. They're fundamentally different products: they have different mash bills (so comparing them can be like comparing a Barolo to an Oregon Raspberry wine), they're produced differently (the Laphroaig is peat smoked), and they're aged differently (the Buffalo Trace in new oak for a short time, the Glenlivet in sherry butts for up to two decades).

I hear people make this comparison between wine tasting and whiskey tasting and drives me a little batty.

It's especially unfortunate that this comparison brings vodka into the mix, because vodka is a neutral spirit --- it's not supposed to be distinctive (Dave Arnold, when he was at the French Culinary, used to "make his own" by ordering potable ethyl lab alcohol and diluting it). But try to say the same thing for rum or gin: different brands are wildly different.

Re: How to get the wine you really want

#79

Post by metanoia »

Grishnakh wrote: post #48
Ntrails wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You don't drink wine for the alcohol, you drink it for the flavor. It's just like tea; no one drinks a nice cup of Earl Grey with Bourgamot for the caffeine. If you want to get liquored up, there's far cheaper and more efficient ways to do it than wine, and if you want caffeine, there's faster and more effective ways of getting that too that don't require carefully heating water and steeping a teabag. A lot of people…

> You don't drink wine for the alcohol, you drink it for the flavor.

I really wish that synthehol (of Star Trek fame) were a thing. I was at a champagne tasting of 60+ wines from the best producers (Krug and Roederer come to mind), and made it through 25 or so, spitting each one, and was still terribly buzzed.

If there were a way to enjoy the taste without the effects I would be all for it.

Re: How to get the wine you really want

#80

Post by baldfat »

baldfat wrote: post #29

I 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. https://www.winehq.org

Okay talk about drinking wine on Hacker News it really fits the focus of the site.

Yeah please down vote me for being technology minded.

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