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

471–480 of 559 posts

Re: Is wine fake?

#471

Post by thih9 »

Retric wrote: post #159
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.

In antiquity it was more what we might call street food or fast casual. What really defines fast food is mass production and uniformity.

The english wikipedia [1] agrees with you.

Interestingly, I always assumed that “fast food” meant the type of food; so a hamburger, even if not made from mass produced ingredients, would always be a “fast food”.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_food

Re: Is wine fake?

#472

Post by switch007 »

charlieyu1 wrote: post #394
eloff wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can find cheaper than £6 but you probably don’t want to drink it

Eg £4 https://www.aldi.co.uk/kooliburra-australian-chardonnay/p/04...

Re: Is wine fake?

#473

Post by 331c8c71 »

petre wrote: post #453
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…

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.

> drink sweet wines because most people there view wine as a juice that one puts in their vodka.

I haven't seen anyone mixing wine and vodka there, it's just not a thing.

Re: Is wine fake?

#475

Post by poloniculmov »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #68
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 have gotten fairly into coffee but I struggle to independently pick up these subtle notes. I'll take a sip, struggle to put any concrete words on the taste, and then read the tasting notes and (honestly) think "ah of course, yes I definitely get that". But I'm sure it's all just the power of suggestion. (An exception is some Ethiopian beans which have an unmistakable blueberry aroma and taste that they are famous f…

It's much easier to get subtle notes in cuppings than drinking brewed coffee, because the brewing method will skew the taste. You also need to train your palate, you obviously can recognise what tastes good to you, but most of us never actually worked on pinpointing those flavours.

Unfortunately, some roaster embelish those notes to drive up sales, since it's the only to differentiate between coffees, especially if you're not familiar with that particular farm/region.

Or, you can just ignore them and have fun :)) Coffee can be a rabbit whole where you can spend lots of money to get certain microlots or improving your water profile.

Re: Is wine fake?

#476

Post by SwiftyBug »

Off-topic: I was very surprised by how expensive wine is in California. I live in an European country where you can find good wine for less than 5 EUR a bottle. I couldn't find anything below 20 USD a bottle neither in San Francisco or Los Angeles. Why is wine so expensive in California if it's such a major wine producer?

Re: Is wine fake?

#477

Post by jaketheguy »

int_19h wrote: post #218
retrac wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned the secret in my mid-20s whilst brewing my own cider as a poor student. Take some decent apple juice without preservatives. Add a bit of yeast; baking yeast for bread at the supermarket will do just fine. Observe basic sanitation principles. Add some sugar, perhaps 150 g per litre of juice. Leave the concoction in a cool, dry place for a few months. A one-way seal for the CO2 release is preferable (a balloo…

I remember the USSR during Gorbachev's anti-alcohol campaign - you could walk out onto the balcony of a large apartment building, and see hands waving at you from most other balconies. Not people's hands, mind you - it was rubber gloves, used as a one-way seal on top of large glass bottles used to brew fruit wine. The fruit itself varied depending on what people had access to and the season - I've seen apple, plum, c…

There's an entire book (most likely more than one) dedicated to various method of making alcohol at home. My chemistry teacher in high school had one. Among the methods were fruits, vegetables, plastic bags, and some types of wood. Obviously, the resulting alcohol wouldn't taste like 20yo whiskey, and will probably kill you a bit faster, but the methods were solid.

Re: Is wine fake?

#478

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

jeffrallen wrote: post #462
chrisseaton wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A joke in the UK is that the unofficial slogan of Pepsi is 'yeah fine whatever mate' because when you order Coca-Cola in a pub and they (for some reason) stock Pepsi instead they always have to ask 'is Pepsi ok?'.

That shit is so vile, the response should be, "yeah, nah, I'll take a cider".

is it? i used to not care but now it'll give me pause. might just stick with water over pepsi

Re: Is wine fake?

#479

Post by danielfoster »

SwiftyBug wrote: post #476

Off-topic: I was very surprised by how expensive wine is in California. I live in an European country where you can find good wine for less than 5 EUR a bottle. I couldn't find anything below 20 USD a bottle neither in San Francisco or Los Angeles. Why is wine so expensive in California if it's such a major wine producer?

Increased taxes and the higher cost of operating in California. Check Trader Joe’s— they have a great selection of budget wines.

I hate buying wine in the US generally because the markup is so high. A 5 euro bottle in the EU could easily cost $20 in the US.

Re: Is wine fake?

#480

Post by VintageCool »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #258
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…

> 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?

Most people prefer the stuff they're accustomed to, and they probably buy $20 wines much more often than expensive wines.
Post reply on HN