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Is wine fake?

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Re: Is wine fake?

#401

Post by poulsbohemian »

antognini wrote: post #395
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…

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…

>you don't really know exactly the optimum amount of time to cellar a new vintage.

This is a hidden benefit of belonging to a wine club. Often you can talk to the wine maker and/or they are opening enough bottles regularly that they can give you a sense of when it's time to drink. After you've been through a few years of the syrah or the cab sav, you get a sense for yourself too because you start to get the pulse of what the winemaker is making.

Re: Is wine fake?

#402

Post by nephanth »

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…

Small remark though, you shouldn’t age wine in a fridge (the humidity is too high, and temperature too low).

There are some fridge-like "wine cellar" contraptions that work well (keep optimal air quality / temperature).

Or a basement does the trick if the humidity is right (needs to be high but not too high)

I remember when I was a kid, my parents had a room in the basement for storing wine that was entirely airtight, with an AC-like device that controlled the air. That’s probably extremely overkill if you aren’t a wine buff (& storing huge quantities of it) though

Re: Is wine fake?

#403

Post by alfiedotwtf »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #398
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 enjoyabl…

This seem to be along the same as what I've found with coffee. I've talked to a lot of specialty roasters, and they personally fly around the world to meet with farmers and work together towards growing certain profiles.

Re: Is wine fake?

#404

Post by poulsbohemian »

FWIW: If you are a person skeptical about wine or trying to understand the world of wine, the Somm movie series is really pretty good. There are absolutely objective differences in wine, in the same way as anything else - beer, whiskey, coffee, free range organic grass fed vs. CAFO. The person below who mentioned acetone taste in whiskey for example, is spot on - you teach your palette one thing and suddenly your whole perspective changes.

Re: Is wine fake?

#405

Post by nephanth »

base698 wrote: post #332
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.

Luckily France doesn't have to pay $1 million an acre like a Napa winery.

Just looked up, an hectare of (10,000 m^2, about 2.47 acre) is 1,102,000€ in the Champagne region

If what you’re saying is true, then an acre in the Napa valley is more than twice as expensive as its counterpart in the Champagne region. Which is weird, I’d expect the Champagne acre to still make you a lot more money

Re: Is wine fake?

#406

Post by BlueTemplar »

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…

Pretty sure that most of the wine's "taste" is actually flavour, and so involves nose way more than tongue ?

Re: Is wine fake?

#407

Post by Godel_unicode »

cycrutchfield wrote: post #279
TulliusCicero wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. How does this jive with the studies showing that, if anything, regular people have a slight preference for cheaper wines?

Regular people also likely prefer junk food to healthy food. The former is laden with sugar, fat, and salt and is engineered to appeal to the vast majority of people. It doesn’t mean that junk food is quality food.

And bad junk food. Try making a high quality chocolate truffle with really nice dark chocolate and put it on the plate with snickers bars. You’ll have all the good stuff left at the end.

Re: Is wine fake?

#408

Post by tracker1 »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #335
bnralt wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 top of that there is a frothy market that is driven by fads, speculation, and hype. I'm sure there are people that can identify different tastes.…

I would personally put many things such as coffee and beer there - I've grown in cultures that have and consume them a LOT, but I'm 45 and still hate the taste of both. Acquired taste one way or another, and I never bothered acquiring it. (Interestingly enough though, two of my buddies also never had a taste for them, until in their late 20s they literally decided to "get into it". Boggles my mind if you're not caffe…

As to trying to develop a taste for things like coffee, beer or wine... I can only say culture is probably the biggest part of it. I tend to have coffee about once a week, mostly for the caffeine... if I have it more than once or twice a week, it doesn't work. But it really helps me get through being up earlier than I'm naturally inclined to for several days. I'd still like it to taste halfway palatable, so I tend to use vanilla flavored SF syrup, stevia and heavy cream that tends to soften the flavor. But I can imagine someone who really likes chocolate or coffee to go that direction, as they amplify each other.

In the end, culture and personal tastes. There is a lot to be said for fitting in.

Re: Is wine fake?

#409

Post by com2kid »

technothrasher wrote: post #347
TulliusCicero wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. How does this jive with the studies showing that, if anything, regular people have a slight preference for cheaper wines?

I don't have much of a wine palate, but I do have a crazy obsession with chocolate. What I notice with the chocolate is that people tend to prefer the cheaper, usually milk, chocolate because they don't actually like intense chocolate flavors. The stuff added to supermarket grade chocolates tends to dull and blend the flavors, hiding what I think is crazy good complexity of flavors (raisin, cherry, tobacco, leather,…

One of the side benefits of keto is that I learned to appreciate dark chocolate.

Single origin chocolate is amazing, and completely different than even the high quality mass market chocolate.

Re: Is wine fake?

#410

Post by kasey_junk »

bergenty wrote: post #329
tptacek wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a bunch of pale straw colored Islays (Ardbeg comes to mind). "Completely clear" would throw me off a bit, but very light? Sure.

It was very smoky and tasted like whiskey. It was probably straw colored, it was dim yellow lighting in there.

You can get white dog to be very Smokey by actually smoking it. If it was low enough proof the lack of age wouldn’t be super obvious.
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