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Is wine fake?

asteriskmag.com

501–510 of 559 posts

Re: Is wine fake?

#501
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

Once you take into account duty, VAT, packaging, transport and supermarket markup a £5 bottle of wine leaves maybe 25p for the wine producer. That's why the quality/price relationship is so non-linear at the bottom end. 20% more on the bottle price is 400% more to the producer.

https://www.decanter.com/learn/tax-wine-much-pay-uk-ask-deca...

Re: Is wine fake?

#502
I blind-tasted wine competitively at an international level and it is pretty commonplace to identify region/sub-region/year/grape across 10 wines blind with ~80% accuracy. In fact, many tastings go further than this and you identify chateau/year from 10 wines from the same region - i.e. the Oxbridge teams mentioned there also do a blind tasting competition specifically on left bank Bordeaux. It's relatively straightforward to train yourself to do this. Note that the physical properties of the wine play heavily into this too (colour, reflection in light, viscosity are proxies for alcohol, age, grape, treatment). Additionally, having the requisite knowledge of "this wine would never be served this old, this wasn't a good year in this region because of x weather, this region only grows x,y,z" means you can deduce a lot from quite little information.

I do think people overfit on the colour piece though; you could definitely find some reds and whites which, if tasted without seeing the colour and at the same temperature, would be challenging to tell apart, more-so than differentiating between country/grape/region. I'm not sure what this really proves, apart from being counterintuitive.

That said, there is a lot of bullshit in market of people who buy and sell expensive wine (more so than the professional tasters and vineyards, who are usually genuine enthusiasts). Lots of cheaper wines may be more enjoyable, and wine flavour profiles are often full of weird signalling about what constitutes quality, i.e. "tasting note x is considered desirable/refined/distinguished, ergo it tastes better", which is nonsense and snobbery. Without any bias you might think expensive and old bordeaux tastes like an old boot, but if you've been trained that those specific flavour profiles are distinguished and desirable ('hints of leather and earth').

Re: Is wine fake?

#503
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are zero subjective calls there, however. My choices are objectively correct and laid down by God Himself, all others are ontologically evil.

>My choices are objectively correct and laid down by God Himself, all others are ontologically evil. Hello fellow spaces over tabs person

spaces at the start of the line, tabs between function arguments

Re: Is wine fake?

#505
post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Unless they are in Burgundy. 10million an acre for some nicer, but not top, parcels are not uncommon.

Napoleonic inheritance laws resulted in the continued subdivision of Burgundy landholdings, so that some wines come from tiny plots. There are lots of tiny wine producers in Burgundy. I'm surprised that plots appear on the market at all; I supposed that nearly all plots were kept in the family.

Re: Is wine fake?

#506

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…

> They're good wines, but you can get a bottle that is just as good for a fraction of the price.

I hear these things, but nobody will tell me what I should drink if I want a cheaper 2010 Mouton Rothschild.

Or a cheaper Krug, people will recommend $50 Champagnes but generally not ones that actually pursue a similar style.

Re: Is wine fake?

#507
post #506

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…

> They're good wines, but you can get a bottle that is just as good for a fraction of the price. I hear these things, but nobody will tell me what I should drink if I want a cheaper 2010 Mouton Rothschild. Or a cheaper Krug, people will recommend $50 Champagnes but generally not ones that actually pursue a similar style.

> It's more that you are paying for a unique flavor profile and reliability.

Re: Is wine fake?

#508

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?

I guess that hinges on what you mean by "quality". I suspect that by definition, "quality" means that experts like it. So experts prefer expensive wines more often than "regular people".

I'm "regular people". I drink a lot of wine, nearly always a £5.00 Australian red. I've very rarely drunk an expensive wine that impressed me. Someone served me some amazing Burgundy, back in the late 80s...

Re: Is wine fake?

#509

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?

During prohibition in the U.S., people developed a taste for shitty wine (or to be more objective about it, dangerously low quality wine). I.e., the stuff that someone would make relatively quickly, hidden out in some bathtub hidden from the authorities, with very little quality control. When prohibition lifted, that was the taste American wine-drinkers had for wine. It was a low brow, low quality, sweet-tasting alco…

> people who drop an ice cube into their red wine

I don't know if this is still the custom; but when I was a kid in France, families would serve wine to their children. They'd serve it half-and-half with water. So children would presumably grow up with an appreciation of watered wine.

Re: Is wine fake?

#510
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…

There have been a lot of blind wine tastings done and the results are always interesting. Sometimes cheap bottles score as high, or higher than vintages. Other times people can spot the cheap "carton" wine easily. My wife and I love to cook, have discussed opening our own restaurant, have eaten at lots of very expensive "haute cuisine" restaurants and have tasted lots of wines. Part of the "problem" is that taste is…

> The real question, in my opinion, is whether a high-priced bottle is "worth it" by as near-objective standards as possible.

This really resonates with me. In day-to-day life "worth it" depends a lot on the person, and especially their financial standing.

I like to try to think of an unbiased "worth it" as plotting cost vs value of everything in the category on a scatter plot. Things that are "worth it" are above the average curve (and the curve is going up at higher prices).

Basically "this option provides more value than most other options of same or lower cost".

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