121–130 of 559 posts
People talk about wine like it is magic or high art. That there is something deeper to understand. There really isn’t.
Sorry I couldn't help myself!
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The secret is that a lot of cheap wine is pretty darn good. I imagine there's somewhat of a correlation between price and quality, especially at the absolute bottom end of the pricing scale. But it's a very loose correlation.
Absolutely true in South america. I've had a ton of different sub-$5 wines. In my experience, if you randomly buy 20 bottles of $5 wines, one is better than a $100 bottle, plus you also get some 5 great wines, 10 good ones and the rest works for cooking. The best wine I've ever drank cost less than $3 and was produced in a tropical (21 South), 800m altitude region of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Never assume wine is bad bec…
Do you remember what this was called, or specifically where? If I'm ever there I'd love to find this!
Started my first company shortly thereafter, probably that incident is as responsible as anything else for my entrepreneurial path.
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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…
You seem very experienced at wine and food, so I hope you know this. I can taste a wine and like it just fine if I haven’t eaten or drink anything else. But if I eat anything, even just the tiniest bit, the wine to me just becomes sour and I can only taste the alcohol. This completely ruined wine for me. Is this common?
Some are better than others, depending on many factors, and this is not up for debate.
Of course, there is also a lot of bullshit at the higher end of the price spectrum.
I took the introductory sommelier exam as a hobbyist, but I was in a room with ~200 people in the industry. We collectively blind tasted about a dozen wines, and I watched as people around me mostly guessed correctly with astonishing accuracy. There may be some nonsense in wine tasting, but it is definitely possible to develop a body of knowledge and experience that allows one to identify wines based on only your sen…
Some people say you can't tell the difference between Pepsi, Coke, and the diet versions of both, but I certainly can. I've no doubt a sommelier can tell differences between wines. What I do suspect is that you can enjoy moderately priced wines just as well as many more expensive ones.
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. High…
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>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
Well, red wine is red because it's colored by the skin of the grapes.
I guess the critique is that the tasters were inconsistent, they used [very] different language for the wine(s).
Which is definitely interesting. But not that surprising :)
> "jammy"
I had no idea what they meant by jammy, but according to google it's very fruity wine, low acidity, low in tannin. Ah!