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Is wine fake?

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Re: Is wine fake?

#481

Post by randomcarbloke »

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…

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

for industrial climate control on wines? if you remove the improved drinkability that comes with age, and the scarcity and desireability of well-known chateaux it absolutely does.

There are companies that specialise in storing wine portfolios and you'd be amazed at how much they charge, wine in bottles takes up a lot of room and is really heavy.

Re: Is wine fake?

#482

Post by tuyiown »

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.

When that happens, buy the coca cola !

You can find proper wine at 4-5€ at the producer, 3.5€ is probably the strict absolute minimum where you can find honest wine direct from producer. Any thing below is just fermented garbage, the grappes that otherwise would spoil the wine, it just happen to have sugar to be fermented, I don't know how the hell how they are pre-processed, just stay away from it.

Re: Is wine fake?

#483

Post by Tepix »

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?

Indeed. When i was there i noticed that even wine from California is more expensive in California than it is in Europe.

Re: Is wine fake?

#484

Post by vkazanov »

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.

Hm.

Russia and Balkans and the austro-hungarian region preferring sweeter wines is a centuries old culture and a wine making tradition. The same goes for Georgian wines.

Vodka with wine... is that even a joke?

Re: Is wine fake?

#485

Post by vram22 »

yojo wrote: post #350
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.…

Taste is almost definitionally subjective and culturally mediated. There are trends in flavors, and the ability of a vintner to match those trends is indistinguishable from producing “better” wine. If you take the drink outside of its reference culture and try to measure how “good” different examples are, you’re going to get nonsense out. Food and drink don’t exist in a vacuum. To the extent that you live and partici…

>Taste is almost definitionally subjective and culturally mediated.

Yup.

"De gustibus non est disputandum"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_gustibus_non_est_disputan...

But it's fun to dispute about, anyway :)

Re: Is wine fake?

#486

Post by scruti »

rendall wrote: post #437

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.

Just don't even think about using a decent wine for this. Just the cheapest you can find in the supermarket. BTW, we call it "kalimotxo".

Re: Is wine fake?

#487

Post by Tepix »

TremendousJudge wrote: post #32
bell-cot wrote: post #11

Is there anything which involves both... (1) lots of subtle and subjective judgement calls (2) humans yearning to show off their wealth / sophistication / status ...which is NOT fake or widely-faked?

Text editor choice. Those are definitely, completely, for sure real.

If i use Visual Studio but with vim keybindings, am i faking it? ;-)

Re: Is wine fake?

#488

Post by vidarh »

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.

When I was 18, I went on a short exchange to a little town in the south of France, and the first day there our hosts took us to get lunch. To our great surprise they picked up a number of bottles of wine to drink in the middle of the school day. We asked them why. Their answer was "beer is too expensive".

Re: Is wine fake?

#489

Post by antirez »

10% of market and wine experts are real. The rest is overpriced wines of doubtful quality, fake prices just to give prestige, and so forth. As a rule of thumb, spending 20-50 euros per bottle you can drink italian top wines (French wines are more costly). If you are spending 350 euros for a bottle of Sassicaia or paying a Bordeaux 800 euros, you are probably misleaded by the market. It's not that a top quality Bordeaux is not a great wine, but after the 30/40 euros the quality gain is only marginal and non linear at all, so sometimes a cheaper wine of a less famous maker is going to be better than a wine you pay a lot. 90% of trained customers (the ones that did some kind of 3 months course) can't tell great wines from mediocre wines apart.

Bonus: want to drink a top quality italian wine spending just 30 euros? Buy a couple of bottles of Passorosso by Franchetti. Etna Red, Sicily. Drink it together with some top quality French pinot noir and tell me if it's not on par.

Re: Is wine fake?

#490

Post by BiteCode_dev »

masklinn wrote: post #445
antognini wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

So that’s why it happened. I’d heard about the event but not the reason so I always assumed it had been some sort of contamination, or related to wine preservation. But no it was straight up devs bypass?

Adding sugar to wine is considered a great offense, and is not only illegal in France, but a disagrace. Still, some winemaker wake up in the middle of the night to do it in secret because it's hard to get a sweet taste or more alcohol naturally. Therefor, the anti-freeze workaround is not surprising.
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