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Is wine fake?

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Re: Is wine fake?

#171

Post by Agingcoder »

p1necone wrote: post #26
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…

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.

Not a lot, but quite a bit. Winemakers have told me that they can't sell everything cheaply, and not only for basic economic reasons : if it's too cheap, lots of people won't buy it!

As to the matter of price, most of my wine tasting friends (including some with proper wine collections) are perfectly ok paying 5-10 euros for a bottle, as long as they like the wine - some of them have even made it a specialty to find good and cheap wine.

At the other end, I was once served wine without knowing what it was at a friend's place. I took a sip, then something happened in my head, and I started crying (I cry when food is really good) . I still remember that particular bottle, and the, well, infinite landscape that had suddenly opened in my mind (I know it sounds utterly ridiculous , but this is how it felt). No other wine has had the same effect on me, and it turns out the bottle was worth about 400 euros!

Re: Is wine fake?

#172

Post by Hermitian909 »

wmil wrote: post #112
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. High…

Not OP but good friends with some highend winemakers who hold a similar but slightly different view, which is that below $20 dollars (or whatever the breakpoint is now) most vinyards generally can't afford the processes that allow for the best class of wine to be reliably produced, and above that price point, most can afford those processes.

You do occasionally get cheap wines that hit above their weight, but that's unusual.

More common, you get wineries hitting below their weight for a number of reason the winemakers aren't very good, there are issues with vinyard, it's a bad harvest, or the winemaker just wants bigger profits and is trying to convince people their wine is better than it is.

As an example of vinyard issues, I know a man whose vinyard produces very poor wine because his soil is rich in serpentine, which makes the wine smell funny. Even doing everything "right" his wine is not going to taste as a good as that made identically by someone with better soil.

This does not mean that wines at that price point must be good. I know someone who made the mistake of buying in a vinyard that was extremely rich in serpentine

Re: Is wine fake?

#173

Post by mauvehaus »

aarroyoc wrote: post #135
KineticLensman wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's also typical in Spain. In fact, most family restaurants offer free wine, but it's of that level of quality, so you usually mix it with sparkling water. Also, it's typical of young people to mix cheap wine with Coca-Cola, and have parties with that.

That's actually a fairy delicious way to enjoy cheap wine, and I dare say it compares favorably to some of the digestifs in the world.

Re: Is wine fake?

#174

Post by dragonwriter »

randomdata wrote: post #151
bombcar wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Isn't present day Carl's Jr. just Hardee's by another name? Hardee's began as a burger joint as well. According to research from the University of Guelph, hotdogs are comparatively uncommon in fast food because hotdogs are harder to cook consistently and have a shorter window of enjoyability which makes them less suited to fast food than hamburgers.

> Isn’t present day Carl’s Jr. just Hardee’s by another name?

The corporate parent of Carl’s Jr. bought Hardee’s in 1997, but Carl’s stayed pretty much the same.

Re: Is wine fake?

#175

Post by jsbg »

if you like wine at all, then there is absolutely a correlation between enjoyment and price; that the correlation isn't 1.0 doesn't mean that wine is fake

Re: Is wine fake?

#176

Post by EugeneOZ »

"Your classiest friend invites you to dinner. They take out a bottle of Chardonnay that costs more than your last..."

Why you need this water?

Re: Is wine fake?

#177

Post by csa »

yamtaddle wrote: post #118
csa wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> I could see one becoming convinced price has no correlation with quality given the bullshit that's sold in the $10-20 range.

Yeah. There seems to be a lot of variability below $20. That said, it’ll you do the math, it’s tough to make a wine with a good and distinct character below $20 for reds and $15 for whites (I’ve seen it, but it’s relatively rare).

Also, totally agree with your edit. California wines have a lot of challenges with marketing over substance across the whole range or price points.

Re: Is wine fake?

#178

Post by bombcar »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #157
randomdata wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't present day Carl's Jr. just Hardee's by another name? Hardee's began as a burger joint as well. According to research from the University of Guelph, hotdogs are comparatively uncommon in fast food because hotdogs are harder to cook consistently and have a shorter window of enjoyability which makes them less suited to fast food than hamburgers.

I think Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. were bought by the same company and then evolved towards each other.

Carl's Jr was 'transferred' to CKE (Carl Karcher Enterprises) which then acquired Hardees, and Hardees became Carl's Jr in everything but name (as far as I can tell). What was interesting is the absolute numbers: The "merger" created a chain of 3,828 restaurants – 3,152 Hardee's outlets in 40 states and 10 foreign countries and 676 Carl's Jr. outlets primarily in California.

Re: Is wine fake?

#179

Post by ethbr0 »

2devnull wrote: post #101
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…

Wine makers can easily pick out flaws of different sorts. Wine tasters and wine makers do not taste wines in the same way based on my experience. Some flaws, like Bret, can improve the score of wines given by tasters for certain styles, but wine makers generally scoff at such flaws.

If you're dealing in goods of non-obvious quality, where total supply volume >> total demand volume, markets get weird.

See: beauty products, wine, art

There are people who can discern quality reliably... but those people are an extremely small portion of the total market.

Consequently, things that are not quality (chiefly, marketing and price) start to become dominant features.

Re: Is wine fake?

#180

Post by 78124781 »

taneq wrote: post #106
p1necone wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Very true. I live in a wine region and an $8 bottle from the local booze shop can sometimes be found in restaurants on the other side of the world for $50+. Is not just that cheap wine is often as good as expensive wine, sometimes it’s exactly the same thing.

I once met a local winemaker from a tiny winery in a foreign country who was proud to say that their wine was being served a restaurant in the US. I asked them how much they thought the wine would be priced at given that it was their entry-level wine. The winemaker estimated $20-25. We looked it up--it was $60.
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