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

Is wine fake?

asteriskmag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 559 posts

Re: Is wine fake?

#111

Post by EpiMath »

Stratoscope wrote: post #27
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…

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've also been roasting coffee from Sweet Maria's for many years, and the thing that's useful is that I learned how Tom will describe flavors that I like. So, whether he calls it "hazelnut" or "almond" doesn't matter, but when he says "hazelnut" there is a flavor I enjoy that isn't there when he writes "almond"... and some other things like when he writes 'crowd pleasing" there is likely to be a lot of balance... over time the descriptions have become more and more useful to me!

Re: Is wine fake?

#112

Post by wmil »

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…

> 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.

I'm always amused when I hear this, because I live in Ontario. Our alcohol laws are set up to heavily favour local wines.

Of course Ontario reds are consistently both more expensive and worse than foreign wines.

Higher price doesn't mean higher quality here.

Re: Is wine fake?

#113

Post by tomcam »

retrac wrote: post #86
gspencley wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 balloo…

Next time I'm in the pen expect a call from me for that recipe

Re: Is wine fake?

#114

Post by metadat »

ineptech wrote: post #76
Havoc wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>notes of blue I'm so stealing that

It's a running joke in my circle to describe the taste of any expensive wine, beer or coffee as, "strident, yet insouciant."

Word of the day: Insouciant

French adjective

Translated definitions: Carefree, careless, reckless

Re: Is wine fake?

#115

Post by garrickvanburen »

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…

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.

Re: Is wine fake?

#116

Post by triceratops »

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

The restaurant industry is brutal, low margin, and cut-throat. There's long hours and extremely hard work, and customers who don't give a shit about you. If you have a successful restaurant, it's probably because you have a good location (modulo those Michelin-starred gems in out-of-the-way small towns). So the landlord will do their best to extract any surplus value you generated through your skill and ingenuity. I've never worked in the industry and I've still heard of all of this.

Professional cooks have a completely different working style to skilled amateurs. They move faster and more precisely, and are able to juggle far more things at a time. It's a massive step up.

Plus the skillset involved in cooking well is orthogonal to what's needed to run a successful restaurant. Your major costs are labor, rent, and raw materials, and you need a certain personality to drive those down. Customers tend to be price-sensitive (again, apart from those high-end places) so you don't have as much power on the revenue side.

I love cooking. I'm never working in the food business.

Re: Is wine fake?

#117

Post by 2devnull »

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…

“honestly don’t think I have ever had a $50 plus bottle of wine that I would not have preferred over Barefoot, which has approximately zero taste markers of a wine made to taste good.”

I can’t believe that. I’ve never had barefoot and probably never will but there’s a lot of totally undrinkable, maybe even semi-poisonous, expensive wine. It’s not even rare. If you buy from a good merchant this is less of a problem but still, expensive wines go bad, and some were never good to begin with.

Re: Is wine fake?

#118

Post by yamtaddle »

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…

I could see one becoming convinced price has no correlation with quality given the bullshit that's sold in the $10-20 range. "Why, this was $15 but it's plainly worse than the $8 bottle I had last week!" There's some real crap in that bracket, at least around here. Especially French and Californian. I get the impression France drops their trash on us (the USA) in that price range, relying on their national "brand" to sell it for more than it's worth. Above that range, they're consistently damn good, of course.

[EDIT] As for Californian wine in that range, it seems to have a problem with marketing-over-substance. I expect trying to compete in that range on quality is... frustrating.

Re: Is wine fake?

#119

Post by bombcar »

randomdata wrote: post #96
bombcar wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a huge secret across so many different markets; it's insane. The one we may be most familiar with is computers, of course - even a bargain-basement computer today is an absolute beast compared to 10+ years ago. Entire classes of "cheap foods" have disappeared because we are so rich we can make everything "good" - meaning the bargain-basement stuff is now often higher-quality than midrange stuff of 20/50/100 y…

> the original fast food was hot dogs and that's almost entirely gone now. Curious about this history. According to Wikipedia, fast food was common during antiquity, while the hotdog wasn't invented until the 1400s. White Castle seems to be recognized as the origin of modern day fast food and it opened as a hamburger joint.

Fair enough, maybe not the originallest, but some of the now hamburger chains started out as hot dog chains, of which there's one? left IIRC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl%27s_Jr.#History

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_dog

Re: Is wine fake?

#120

Post by nonrandomstring »

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…

> subjective and can be influenced through suggestion. So the atmosphere, the price, the meal pairing can all affect...

Music is a massive factor [1]

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/effects-of-music-on-sales-20...

Post reply on HN