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

391–400 of 559 posts

Re: Is wine fake?

#391

Post by SamBam »

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…

At the very least I can easily distinguish the notes (in roasted coffee) that are the sugar/mellow flavors vs the sour/bright flavors.

Cocoa, chocolate, brown sugar, Graham cracker... These are all notes that I want my morning latte to taste like.

Berries, lemon, floral, citrus, melon... These are all flavors I can do in a cold afternoon coffee, but otherwise taste really sour to be.

But it's just two categories for me. I couldn't distinguish any of those flavors individually.

Re: Is wine fake?

#392

Post by xyzzyz »

wgj wrote: post #283
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…

It looks like no one has said this yet. Many of the higher price/quality wines are expected to be cellared for a certain number of years after release. Opened too soon, they will have too much tannin and/or acidity. It costs money to keep wines under the correct conditions. One thing that drives up the price of a bottle is whether someone else already did this for you. A 2014 Bordeaux right now, on average, will cost…

It does not cost nearly as much as the price premium.

A regular household fridge costs something like $100/year to run. My fridge has 20 cubic feet of volume, which is something like 500 liters. This suggests we can fit at least 100 bottles into it. This gives us $1/year as upper bound for storage costs per bottle. This is upper bound, because air conditioning costs go down with volume, due to square-cube law.

Point is, if the price premium was driven mostly by storage costs, it would be significantly lower than it actually is.

Re: Is wine fake?

#393

Post by alfiedotwtf »

School-Cotton wrote: post #294
Bayart wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's common wisdom in France. If you're paying more than 20 euros for a bottle, it's probably already too much. And it's very common for people to buy in bulk at the favour of seasonal discounts or from the producer. If you want to look smart at a dinner party, bring a bottle of something nobody's ever heard about that's remarkably cheap for what you get.

Wine is far more expensive in the US than in France, for various reasons.

Cost of manufacture, and taxes...

"The natural advantages which one country has over another, in producing particular commodities, are sometimes so great, that it is acknowledged by all the world to be in vain to struggle with them. By means of glasses, hot-beds, and hot-walls, very good grapes can be raised in Scotland, and very good wine, too, can be made of them, at about thirty times the expense for which at least equally good can be brought from foreign countries."

-- Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith

Re: Is wine fake?

#394

Post by charlieyu1 »

eloff wrote: post #376
School-Cotton wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wine is far more expensive in the US than in France, for various reasons.

The thing that blew me away about France is you could buy a bottle of wine in the supermarket for less than a bottle of coca cola.

Sigh. £6 a bottle of cheapest wine here in UK because of import tax and alcohol tax.

And I could buy British gin in Hong Kong cheaper than in UK

Re: Is wine fake?

#395

Post by antognini »

wgj wrote: post #283
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…

It looks like no one has said this yet. Many of the higher price/quality wines are expected to be cellared for a certain number of years after release. Opened too soon, they will have too much tannin and/or acidity. It costs money to keep wines under the correct conditions. One thing that drives up the price of a bottle is whether someone else already did this for you. A 2014 Bordeaux right now, on average, will cost…

Yes that's another factor. For the cheaper wines (pretty much anything you can get in a grocery store), they're made to be opened immediately and don't really benefit from aging. But the higher end wines need to be aged.

One of the fun things is that you don't really know exactly the optimum amount of time to cellar a new vintage. So there are online forums where people will buy a case and open one bottle a year and report their results on how the quality changes over time.

Re: Is wine fake?

#396

Post by Serishmus »

xyzzyz wrote: post #392
wgj wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like no one has said this yet. Many of the higher price/quality wines are expected to be cellared for a certain number of years after release. Opened too soon, they will have too much tannin and/or acidity. It costs money to keep wines under the correct conditions. One thing that drives up the price of a bottle is whether someone else already did this for you. A 2014 Bordeaux right now, on average, will cost…

It does not cost nearly as much as the price premium. A regular household fridge costs something like $100/year to run. My fridge has 20 cubic feet of volume, which is something like 500 liters. This suggests we can fit at least 100 bottles into it. This gives us $1/year as upper bound for storage costs per bottle. This is upper bound, because air conditioning costs go down with volume, due to square-cube law. Point…

Yes, but then you are doing a bunch of work — buying a (second?) fridge, paying to rent or own space to put it, making sure the fridge continues to run, making sure you don’t accidentally drink your wine before you meant to. If I cared about this property I would certainly pay someone much more than the cost of storage in electricity terms to not have to do any of that or wait a number of years to get a rolling stock going.

Re: Is wine fake?

#397

Post by neilc »

xyzzyz wrote: post #392
wgj wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like no one has said this yet. Many of the higher price/quality wines are expected to be cellared for a certain number of years after release. Opened too soon, they will have too much tannin and/or acidity. It costs money to keep wines under the correct conditions. One thing that drives up the price of a bottle is whether someone else already did this for you. A 2014 Bordeaux right now, on average, will cost…

It does not cost nearly as much as the price premium. A regular household fridge costs something like $100/year to run. My fridge has 20 cubic feet of volume, which is something like 500 liters. This suggests we can fit at least 100 bottles into it. This gives us $1/year as upper bound for storage costs per bottle. This is upper bound, because air conditioning costs go down with volume, due to square-cube law. Point…

You also need to factor in the time value of money: if the winemaker sells you a 2022 release in 2022, they get paid immediately.

Also factor in temperature and humidity controlled storage (a kitchen fridge will not do), insurance against disasters, backup power generation, and so on. If you think aged wines are overpriced, it is easy to cut out the middleman and age it yourself — so my guess is that the market is reasonably efficient.

Re: Is wine fake?

#398

Post by poulsbohemian »

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…

I live in wine country. Used to have winemakers in the school PTA, so I got to know some of these folks... I'd completely agree with your professor. I'm not a "serious" wine drinker, but with a couple pointers you can pretty quickly start telling the difference in quality. One of our favorite "party tricks" is to set a budget ($10, $15, $20, etc) and buy a handful of bottles - turns out there's a lot of very enjoyable wines at those price points. Very important to understand varietals - some wines are meant to drink young, others will absolutely change over time for better or worse. Also, often at higher price points you are paying for scarcity - if only a few thousands bottles are being made, they gotta sell at $50+ / bottle to even begin to come close to profitable.

If you get to know winemakers, there are a lot of games that go on to doctor grapes. The chemistry and know-how are commendable. You also start to realize there are wine makers who are making wines they like, but that may not hold mass-market appeal. I had a private tasting with a guy who spent years in Napa and now does custom white-label work. I thought his stuff was absolute garbage - not at all to my tastes - but he's in demand because he knows how to do all the magic to pull out certain attributes that some wine drinkers may enjoy.

And that's the real key - drink what you like, at a price point you feel comfortable spending, and it's totally ok if you bought it because it had a cute label. The company you keep matters just as much as the quality of what's in the bottle.

Re: Is wine fake?

#399

Post by calny »

sebmellen wrote: post #144

The most interesting part of the article to me was this: > Based on the theory of predictive coding, our brains first figure out what sensory stimuli should be, then see if there’s any way they can shoehorn actual stimuli to the the expected pattern. If they can’t, then the brain will just register the the real sensation, but as long as it’s pretty close they’ll just return the the prediction. For example, did you no…

Same. This fooled me, as I was reading quickly and missed the duplications. Interestingly, I felt something was off but didn’t think anything of it except maybe “my eyes might be getting tired.” Consciousness/cognition as a prediction machine, and the the resulting cognitive biases and tricks, are fascinating.

Re: Is wine fake?

#400

Post by [deleted] »

jcims wrote: post #337
dmonitor wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know lots of US states have egregious liquor taxes. Alabama is particularly bad: 58% shelf price + $.45/L

Part of that comes from having to pay tax on the barrel every year while it ages.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN