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Is wine fake?

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Re: Is wine fake?

#81

Post by foobarian »

KineticLensman wrote: post #6
noodlesUK wrote: post #3

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.

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.

It's typical to drink watered down wine with routine/non-fancy/on-the-road meals. The locals call it 'gemišt' which is a germanism (gemischt = mixed). The wine used for this is bottom of the barrel, since it's a shame to waste good wine for this purpose.

Re: Is wine fake?

#82

Post by gdubs »

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.

Re: Is wine fake?

#83

Post by deadbunny »

wwweston wrote: post #64
ramesh31 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Please don’t make the mistake of thinking “I like to cook” means “I would like to run a restaraunt”. They’re two completely different things.

Can you elaborate on this? I'm sure there's more to it and it could be great to know what some of the specifics are, but it also seems like someone who likes to cook is going to need to be present for a good restaurant

Think of the distance between "I like playing video games" and "I want to work for an AAA developer".

Re: Is wine fake?

#84

Post by jb_s »

nkrisc wrote: post #41
Stratoscope wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I roast my own coffee and buy most of my green beans from Sweet Maria's. 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 coo…

I don’t think I could ever tell two different coffee varieties apart, but I can definitely tell good coffee from bad coffee. Though that’s probably mostly about the roast and freshness more than anything. So there’s probably something to it but I imagine most of it is unintentional bullshit.

I'm probably pretty accurate differentiating African from South American coffees, the flavours are pretty different. I'm not that great at this sort of stuff either, certainly not a food critic. But hey, some people can't tell the diff between pepsi and coke.

Assumes they're roasted nicely, otherwise it's comparing ashtrays with pencil shavings.

Re: Is wine fake?

#85

Post by jasmer »

metadat wrote: post #4
noodlesUK wrote: post #3

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.

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 g…

Yea I think probably most people can tell the difference between $6, $20 and $50 and then struggle beyond that (and beyond that it is very subjective).

But for 'crap' 'ok' and 'good' and 'good+' categories I think it's actually fairly straight forward.

Re: Is wine fake?

#86

Post by retrac »

gspencley wrote: post #7
lkrubner wrote: post #2

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…

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…

I learned the secret in my mid-20s whilst brewing my own cider as a poor student.

Take some decent apple juice without preservatives. Add a bit of yeast; baking yeast for bread at the supermarket will do just fine. Observe basic sanitation principles. Add some sugar, perhaps 150 g per litre of juice. Leave the concoction in a cool, dry place for a few months. A one-way seal for the CO2 release is preferable (a balloon works) but is not strictly required; leave the cap on loose. Carefully pour off the result into a new vessel. Let this settle for another month.

A very palatable drink results at about 4 - 5% alcohol by volume. People figured this out thousands of years ago. And they did not have plastic bottles, germ theory, or infinite hot water on tap. It's trivial to make an alcoholic beverage. The rest is finesse. And posturing.

Re: Is wine fake?

#87

Post by Zamicol »

gspencley wrote: post #7
lkrubner wrote: post #2

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…

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…

"Penn & Teller's Bullshit":

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=295904514122934

Re: Is wine fake?

#88

Post by jb_s »

csa wrote: post #34
metadat wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

> a $6 bottle of Barefoot can be just as good or better than $50 or $300 bottles of swill As someone who has blind tasted many wines… - I can see not being able to tell a difference between $50 bottles and $300 bottles, and even preferring the less expensive option. Some of the tastes can be very subtle, and sometimes the more expensive wines need to be cellared before they really start to shine. - I honestly don’t t…

Not speaking for everyone but I'm pretty sure a lot of people who love extreme hot sauces, it's not so much the flavour but that they just want to feel something for once :o

Re: Is wine fake?

#89

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

antognini wrote: post #49

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…

> "more money than sense."

I've always enjoyed "more dollars than cents" for the dual meaning if you know the phrase is supposed to be "sense".

Re: Is wine fake?

#90

Post by fegu »

pbreit wrote: post #69

I have a theory on the Pepsi challenge: Pepsi is sweeter and so it performs better in a single taste test but is gross when drunk frequently.

I thought this was a well established fact.
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