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

451–460 of 559 posts

Re: Is wine fake?

#451

Post by cthalupa »

noughtme wrote: post #132
2devnull wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Some flaws, like Bret I cannot wait for the current trend of brettanomyces contaminated "natural" wines to die.

Many natural wines do not contain any brett.

I would agree that brett can be a contaminant in wine, if that is not what you are going for, but much like how brett has long been the backbone of some trappist and all lambic Belgian beers, there is a case to be made for it in wine - even in fine wines.

If the popularity of brett in beers is anything to go by, you're going to be disappointed. And I hope you are - as much as I love a purely sach ferment, there's lots to love about other yeast and bacteria taking part in the fermentation process, too.

Re: Is wine fake?

#452

Post by petre »

antognini wrote: post #432
CSSer wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 test…

No post body was provided.

Re: Is wine fake?

#453

Post by petre »

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…

Which directly reflects the quality of the wine drinking public. I like the French approach better: educate your customers' tastes. In Russia they also drink sweet wines because most people there view wine as a juice that one puts in their vodka. The rich substitute the wine with very expensive champagne.

Re: Is wine fake?

#454

Post by cthalupa »

kube-system wrote: post #48
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.

Above $60, you’re mostly paying for name, provenance, or prestige rather than taste.

Well, kind of. You might still be paying for taste, but not necessarily for objective quality. As many people have pointed out in these comments, sometimes you are paying for interesting flavor profiles that are not as easily found in moderately priced wines.

That doesn't necessarily mean better, but you might be paying for scarcity in the flavor.

Re: Is wine fake?

#455

Post by cthalupa »

triceratops wrote: post #358
selimthegrim wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you haven’t even covered the magical world of triple net leases yet

I don't actually know what that is. Like I said, I've never worked in the restaurant biz. Everything I've written is just from reading random shit online.

Triple net is a bog standard leasing agreement for commercial properties - it's nothing specific to restaurants. Basically, you pay the expenses on the building. Taxes, insurance, maintenance costs.

Re: Is wine fake?

#456

Post by tguvot »

Foobar8568 wrote: post #450
tguvot wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I played a more "advanced" version of this. There was roulette like table. you could bet on drink name/type (type of wine/whisky/rakia/vodka/etc..), country of origin and what it's made from. Dealer was pouring under table from covered bottles.

Omg I would use so many fun spirits on that one. Any aged barrel rum or tequila would make most people so confused.

closer to the end of the game, even water will make most participants confused

Re: Is wine fake?

#457

Post by Agingcoder »

emmo wrote: post #262
Agingcoder wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How do people react when you cry after taking a sip of wine?

Well, it happens very rarely (I don't cry unless whatever I'm having is extremely good). When it happens, people find it quite amusing, and it usually starts a conversation about the pleasures of life.

Re: Is wine fake?

#458

Post by edanm »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #213

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…

Speaking only for myself, I drank Coke for years because, well, of course I did, Pepsi is the "inferior" drink.

But at some point, I realized that every time a restaurant told me they only had Pepsi, instead of being annoyed, I was actually happy. Only then did I realize that I actually prefer Pepsi, and have been drinking Pepsi ever since. (I have quite a sweet tooth, so the fact that Pepsi is much sweeter means it tastes much better.)

I literally had to learn this about myself by observing my gut reaction to being told a restaurant only had Pepsi, because Coke being obviously better was so ingrained in me.

Re: Is wine fake?

#459

Post by kube-system »

cthalupa wrote: post #454
kube-system wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Above $60, you’re mostly paying for name, provenance, or prestige rather than taste.

Well, kind of. You might still be paying for taste, but not necessarily for objective quality. As many people have pointed out in these comments, sometimes you are paying for interesting flavor profiles that are not as easily found in moderately priced wines. That doesn't necessarily mean better, but you might be paying for scarcity in the flavor.

Fair enough, taste is ultimately objective.

My point is more-so that the more general consensus of quality has asymptotic diminishing returns after around that point.

Re: Is wine fake?

#460

Post by vasco »

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…

> but with a couple pointers you can pretty quickly start telling the difference in quality

Interesting, for most other things I can taste, nobody has to teach me to identify quality. Either it tastes better or it doesn't.

Post reply on HN