311–320 of 559 posts
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Text editor choice. Those are definitely, completely, for sure real.
There are zero subjective calls there, however. My choices are objectively correct and laid down by God Himself, all others are ontologically evil.
Hello fellow spaces over tabs person
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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.
VERY rarely I do a premium wine tasting in California wine country. And, yeah, I kinda get it. There are subtle differences in some of the high-end wines as opposed to midrange stuff. But I'm actually happy with even the better box wines (however crappy the low-end stuff is) and I'd much rather spend disposable income on a better bottle of whisky or a better cheese.
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This depends on the specific kind of wine you're looking for, surely? It would be hard to find icewine for 20 euros, I'd think.
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German wine in the USA is just mass market Rieslings and maybe an ice wine and nothing else. We’d always joke that they save the good stuff for themselves.
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You may find you like peaty single malt scotches.
I once asked for a very smoky whisky and was bought out something completely clear.
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I have sometimes speculated that the purpose of the $50 bottles is to make you think that you're being sensible by buying a $20 bottle, when really the $10 bottle is just fine. A few people will certainly buy the $50 bottle, but the real money is in upsale at the lower end.
Reminds me of the loss leader strategy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader A retail shop will put TVs on sale for 50% off but only keep 5 in stock. They advertise it everywhere, 100 people show up looking for cheap TVs, find it's out-of-stock and buy one of the expensive ones that are only 5-10% off.
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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.
But, I think it's a bit rich to call it the origin of fast food. Modern fast food in terms of what we think of as technology and business model is a bit broader than that. And just "food you get fast" is obviously far older. The original "fast food" in that sense was getting bread from a baker.
Two scientific points to bring up about this article: 1. When the author talks about Coke vs. Pepsi, he comes to the conclusion that the reason people prefer Pepsi in blind taste tests but Coke in unblinded ones is "Think of it as the brain combining two sources of input to make a final taste perception: the actual taste of the two sodas and a preconceived notion (probably based on great marketing) that Coke should t…
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This is a topic I know a lot about, because I have grown grapes here in southern Ontario for years and have looked a lot into the wine industry here and am generally an "enthusiast" about the topic. Part of the reason is just the retail environment, which is a whole cluster of a topic here, but I won't get into that... Because of... history and culture, Ontario "VQA" wine regulations demand that growers grow almost e…
As a Finger Lakes, NY alumnus, I appreciate the respectful comparison to our regional vintage. Reportedly the moderated microclimate of the region due to lakes, and the glacial soil terroir are good combination. Cornells agricultural school also researches experimental varietals. My NY family puts as much pride in the local apples and the summer sweet corn as the regional wine.
The Niagara area in Ontario is a few growing degrees warmer than the Finger Lakes (despite being further north) and Lake Ontario provides more of a protective lake effect on temperatures than the Finger Lakes themselves.
On the other hand, you get better snow cover for insulation in the winters.
In other respects, similar areas.
The battle about vinifera and its place here in Ontario is really kind of the story of Konstantin Frank vs Phillip Wagner in the Finger Lakes. Except here in Ontario, Frank "won" while in the Finger Lakes there was a compromise drawn. Bruce Reisch gets to make excellent new grapes and the local wineries grow them.
Up here, the products of Helen Fischer's grape breeding program doesn't get to contribute to the local winery industry. It's strictly all about -- what vinifera varieties sell well? Grow that and market the crap out of it.
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Wine is far more expensive in the US than in France, for various reasons.
Curious — What are the reasons?
For wines in a top US region, you wind up paying a ton of money for the mortgage on the land, too.
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…
This is certainly true for whiskeys. One of the ways to objectively tell better whiskeys from worse ones, is to learn how to detect acetone! The less that's in there, the better!