Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to get the wine you really want

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 164 posts

Re: How to get the wine you really want

#111

Post by xorgar831 »

not_ed_snow wrote: post #68
ogig wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple example; I used the whole day to prepare a strong wild boar stew and that will be a perfect pairing for a very strong wine, possibly old. If you bring a light wine of the year to that table it will get diluted on the strong flavors of the stew. We might have a good night but the wine won't shine.

It seems like you are saying that the wine's qualities and how they pair with the food are very important. I don't think anyone would disagree. The question at hand is whether a cheap/expensive wine, of the same type, would matter in the boar stew example. Personally, I have no reason to believe that a more expensive wine would only shine under these types of conditions. I also think it's a matter of subjective taste…

If you're not drinking a specific wine every day so to speak, and are tasting the subsequent vintages of the wine every year, your pallet won't be able to tell the difference really.

That's how it is for most everyone, I think the disconnect is that the newbie isn't aware of that and make take the "expert's" opinion out of context or too serious. And the experts can be jerks too, but I think it's more people unfamiliar with wine seem to come into contact with the jerks first for some reason and wine gets a bad knock because of that.

Re: How to get the wine you really want

#112

Post by megablast »

samstave wrote: post #56
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…

Oh, you can go to wineries and make your own blend, then they will save the recipe for you and you can go back and get more of them at any later date.

What, every winery will do this for you?

Re: How to get the wine you really want

#113

Post by astrange »

ogig wrote: post #38
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…

My father has been a wine lover for all his, now long, adult life. He has an impressive cellar with some of the best wines of Spain and France. He was also fooled in some blind tastings, like believing a white wine was actually red. But he can also tell the difference between most of his favorite wines, and so do I. So this is not a black or white situation. While some blind taste tests are difficult, others are easy…

> You need to prepare a good meal or cheese to have that old wine with, a table and good people, time for the wine to breath, good glasses... a pleasure setting.

Is there a wine for having with bad people?

Re: How to get the wine you really want

#114

Post by thesimpsons1022 »

lisper wrote: post #87
tptacek wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Glenli…

> Nobody in the world is going to confuse Laphroiag with Glenlivet Of course not. That's not what I'm saying. All I'm saying is that when I do blind tastings, sometimes the cheap stuff turns out to be my favorite, other times not. (And when it does, I'm happy!) > vodka is a neutral spirit --- it's not supposed to be distinctive And yet it is. If you don't believe me, try comparing Ciroc to Smirnov. You don't even hav…

to be fair vodka isn't meant to have different tastes. it's meant to taste as much like hand sanitizer as possible.

Re: How to get the wine you really want

#115

Post by shavingspiders »

rfrank wrote: post #44
ogig wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My father has been a wine lover for all his, now long, adult life. He has an impressive cellar with some of the best wines of Spain and France. He was also fooled in some blind tastings, like believing a white wine was actually red. But he can also tell the difference between most of his favorite wines, and so do I. So this is not a black or white situation. While some blind taste tests are difficult, others are easy…

> There are plenty of sommelier competitions where they tell apart years and zones very precisely. There's a documentary called Somm that follows a few people as they prepare for the Master Sommelier exam, it's impressive how precisely they can determine the year and region of a wine. Example tasting from the doc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKNmcCCE15E

The followup doco is even better - the newly minted master sommeliers proceed to contradict each other, and seem to have a lot more fun than the first one.

Re: How to get the wine you really want

#116

Post by samstave »

megablast wrote: post #112
samstave wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, you can go to wineries and make your own blend, then they will save the recipe for you and you can go back and get more of them at any later date.

What, every winery will do this for you?

Well, I know that Buena Vista will - and I am going there tomorrow... but the people I am going with know a hell-of-a-lot more about this than I do. But the last two times I went to Buena Vista, this was brought up by my date and the group. They did it once. You create your custom blend - then they keep that on file and you can request/buy it any time.

https://www.buenavistawinery.com/

Re: How to get the wine you really want

#117

Post by makeset »

There's an excellent opportunity to apply machine learning here to automatically let you discover what you like. Starting from a set of varietals and/or random blends, it would generate new blends based on your rating feedback, eventually converging towards your preferred tastes. In addition to arriving at your optimal wine(s), a further analysis of the results (plus qualitative labels from experts) could also generate knowledge useful to you elsewhere, like "You like full-bodied left-bank Bordeaux, and also California Merlots. You dislike light-bodied wines in general."

Re: How to get the wine you really want

#118

Post by rsync »

ogig wrote: post #38
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…

My father has been a wine lover for all his, now long, adult life. He has an impressive cellar with some of the best wines of Spain and France. He was also fooled in some blind tastings, like believing a white wine was actually red. But he can also tell the difference between most of his favorite wines, and so do I. So this is not a black or white situation. While some blind taste tests are difficult, others are easy…

"He was also fooled in some blind tastings, like believing a white wine was actually red."

This propensity (being "fooled" by white/red of a wine) is very often cited as "proof" that wine drinkers don't know what they are talking about.

In fact, the broad taste profiles of either white or red grapes - and the difference in expression of those profiles based on temperature - can make it very difficult to discern certain reds from certain whites.

"Fooling" someone with red vs. white really isn't that interesting at all.

Re: How to get the wine you really want

#119

Post by totalZero »

tpeo wrote: post #16
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…

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…

It's part of the fun, no? You read about five different wines, you select one after much consideration, you take it home and talk about the salient points -- good and bad -- of the reviews that you had read, and you uncork the bottle. Everyone takes a few sips to a concert of many "oohs," several "aahs," and a smattering of "this is really good" and "I like this pairing." Finally, after the guests have eaten and some are a little bit buzzed, they all go back to their boring realities. It's a more human form of dogs playing with a ball.

Personally I like it.

Re: How to get the wine you really want

#120

Post by cloudjacker »

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…

> and we soon learned that there was very little correlation between what we liked and what the wine critics and the market liked

What the market "likes" isn't correlated to taste, it is correlated to scarcity.

Certain climates and variations in climate that one year, coupled with name, garner the premiums.

It isn't age or "complex nuance". Although these are one form of magic the industry relies on being perpetuated by consumers, the other is the idea that climates cannot be replicated.

Post reply on HN