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Is wine fake?

asteriskmag.com

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Re: Is wine fake?

#431

Post by oska »

jules wrote: post #183
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…

When eating a dish, I can usually identify the ingredients and spices by flavour, but different wines taste more or less the same to me. Some taste different, but I can't say that they taste significantly better than others. Spending $50 more on the food in a restaurant is going to make an enormously bigger difference than spending $50 more on wine. In fact, I find that not drinking wine at all usually makes for a be…

I strongly agree with what you're saying here and having been thinking along similar lines while browsing this thread. Taste is an important factor in food appreciation and one that most people already have and can develop further, to real value (including health benefits) in eating. It often reflects the quality and freshness of the ingredients (and thus nutritional value), as long as the cook also has some skill and hasn't 'ruined' those ingredients in the finished dish. Taste with wine simply doesn't have the same richness and usefulness, beyond indicating when a wine is 'off' or has been too cheaply/chemically processed, etc.

Re: Is wine fake?

#432

Post by antognini »

CSSer wrote: post #426
poulsbohemian wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I had the privilege to get a behind the scenes tour of a winery once because a friend’s family were the owners. They had some pretty sophisticated lab equipment. You could drop in a sample and it could tell you all sorts of things about its chemical makeup (magic to me because I never took much Chemistry). I asked them what sample attribute had the highest correlation with sales and without even hesitating they told…

> I asked them what sample attribute had the highest correlation with sales and without even hesitating they told me it was sugar content.

This was the cause of a big scandal back in the 1980s when it was discovered that some Austrian winemakers were adding antifreeze to their wines. The wines are tested for their sugar content, but diethylene glycol has a sweet test and wouldn't be detected on standard chemical tests for sugar. Unscrupulous winemakers began adding the chemical to their wines to make them taste sweeter and boost sales.

Re: Is wine fake?

#433

Post by dboreham »

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…

Also self-roasting, also beans from SM. These days I just order the 20lb bag of Espresso Monkey and call it good. In the past I've got their sampler sets with a range of different regions but once roasted they pretty much taste the same to me (all good). I suspect the roasting is what makes the most difference (often coffee seems to have been over-roasted).

Re: Is wine fake?

#434

Post by jan467 »

taste might be defined wrong

taste is not your sensoric input on your tongue

taste is a combination of this with smell and visual (eg. color), but also mood, expectation, environment, time, stresslevel, atmosphere, temperature, viscosity and people around.

with this in mind, the exact same thing can taste like 100 times differently without changing the chemical side.

Re: Is wine fake?

#435

Post by randomdata »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #316
randomdata wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

White Castle essentially formalized a prior trend of burger vendors at sporting events, state fairs, etc. These were really simple cheap meaty snacks with little more than the patty and maybe some onions cooked on a griddle and slapped on whatever roll they could get from a local baker. In that sense the WC slider is still fairly true to the original thing. But, I think it's a bit rich to call it the origin of fast f…

> But, I think it's a bit rich to call it the origin of fast food.

Particularly when we just got finished talking about fast food in antiquity. I suppose that explains why nobody said such a thing.

Re: Is wine fake?

#436

Post by beiller »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #415
beiller wrote: post #384

I once wrote software that automatically graded wine "sweetness" based on sugar grams/L output via Spectroscopy? (I think) in a lab. After learing which wines regions / varietals produced what rating (sweet / dry / extra dry) is pretty much all I need now when picking wine. I'd say the sweetness is probably the only major difference between varietals but maybe it's just me. Extra dry is what I like best.

Wait, wouldn't this mostly only work on whites ?

I believe white is generally higher sugar but there are drier white wines still. There was a model fit to sugar content and it worked across red white and rose.

Re: Is wine fake?

#437

Post by rendall »

Me, an American living in the EU: "You cannot mix wine with Coke. That just isn't done!"

Spanish kids, from one of the top 3 premier wine-producing countries of the world: *laughing at my pretension* "Just try it!"

Me: "That's... delicious!"

Wine + Coca-Cola. Try it. Recommended by Spanish kids.

Re: Is wine fake?

#438

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

oska wrote: post #425
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I normally only drink beer but the guy at the bottle shop knows me. He recommended a wine to me the other day, $10. He was right. I grabbed a case for $8 a bottle.

I don't mean to sound patronising but my take on this is simply that he's a good salesman who levered up the personal relationship he's established with you

In all my years of shopping with them, he has only ever recommended me a wine on 1 or 2 occasions because I explicitly asked. I get discounts and tastings regularly. They have warned me from buying things more times then they recommend things. They are not trying to “sell” me anything.

Re: Is wine fake?

#439

Post by rendall »

> Wikipedia broadly agrees, saying:

People must stop citing Wikipedia as a source. This example is particularly egregious, since Wikipedia uses the same sources that the article itself does, so of course it "agrees".

Re: Is wine fake?

#440

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

randomdata wrote: post #435
jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

White Castle essentially formalized a prior trend of burger vendors at sporting events, state fairs, etc. These were really simple cheap meaty snacks with little more than the patty and maybe some onions cooked on a griddle and slapped on whatever roll they could get from a local baker. In that sense the WC slider is still fairly true to the original thing. But, I think it's a bit rich to call it the origin of fast f…

> But, I think it's a bit rich to call it the origin of fast food. Particularly when we just got finished talking about fast food in antiquity. I suppose that explains why nobody said such a thing.

I made a specific response then expanded to a general point. What point does your comment make other than bickering?
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