Is Wine Fake? (2022)

There are definitely wine snobs and wine anti-snobs out there. But in my experience, most people just set their wine price range based on household income (or the income level they want you to believe they have).

If you go into any half-decent wine shop, you'll get good recommendations if your price range is $10-15 or $100-150 (or more, I suppose). The people that work at these places are definitely not snobs.

Related:

Is wine fake? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33698094 - Nov 2022 (542 comments)

You can go look up what somms study for wine tasting, look at any national or international contest for blind tastings of wine/beer/coffee/spirits, or get a book on winemaking that shows how each descriptor corresponds to specific chemicals that are part of the winemaking process.

There's no need for "experimental" data on an entire field whose current foundation is the state of the art in food science and biochemistry.

“You can trust us bro, the earth is flat. We have an entire church system with thousands of scholars and you’re saying they’re wrong?!?”

Hmmmmmmm

As an outsider on the periphery of this 'debate' I'll offer an answer and it's somewhat complex.

There's so much BS and crap talked about wine that anyone who has a keen interest in it but only limited experience is likely to be easily led astray by the many self-styled experts who've little factual knowledge but who pontificate with erudite prose about the subject.

OK, you correctly ask, what authority entitles me to make such a presumptuous comment—what right do I have to single myself out from those just mentioned? None really—other than having made a few observations over the years as well as having tasted a few better-than-average wines.

At the risk of sounding a pretentious bastard, as bona fides I have to provide you with a known reference. Years ago I had the opportunity to taste the '45 Bordeaux First Growths—and as some would know, they were a bit better than average.

There was a time when I was in a rather elite group of wine tasters (or more correctly I was on the periphery thereof as I never felt fully part of it). Anyway, that gave me access to many wines I otherwise would never have tasted as even then many of them were worth hundreds of dollars a bottle.

That necessary intro over, my observations are:

1. There are very few truly excellent wines, they are wines that one never forgets. I could name about a dozen at most that I've tasted. One that immediately comes to mind is the '45 Haut Brion. Wines like this can never be adequately described but only remembered.

2. Wines of that caliber end up being menace for people like me because they set such a high standard that they ruin one's palate for life—everything tastes so-so after that. Unless you have a millionaire's budget forget them completely.

3. The next tier down are also excellent but still so rare and very expensive that many 'connoisseurs' will never have tasted them: Grange Hermitage, Stags Leap Cabernet, current Bordeaux First Growths, the top Burgundies—Échezeaux, etc. $1,000 is often the stating price! (Note: I can't afford these, my experience of them goes back decades when they were about 1/20th the price.)

4. The 'experts' who comment on wines for a living broadly come in two classes: those who are good and the pretenders. The good ones can be truly excellent, Hugh Johnson for instance but they're almost like hen's teeth. I've only ever known one, Len Evans https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Len_Evans_(wine), and he was brilliant, it was through him that I tasted some of the wines in my first category.

The pretenders are many and some are famous—excellent self-publicists and wine book writers. They have enough experience and knowhow and enough lingo to fool 90% of readers, but you'll usually find they just echo views of true experts like Johnson.

Let me illustrate, quite some years ago I was at an exclusive black-tie tasting of newly released top 1st, 2nd and 3rd Growth Bordeaux with an engineer colleague of mine and a winemaker friend. It was a group of about 25 of the local wine-tasting establishment and was hosted by a very well known wine writer with books to his name. And we were definitely the outsiders huddled at the far end of the table.

In short, it was a blind tasting and the aim was to pick the top most expensive wine in a lineup of about a dozen wines—a Château Lafite Rothschild. Reputations were at stake so they ummed and aahed and pontificated and the vast majority including the host failed to get the Lafite—but my engineering colleague and I did. Suffice to say, little was said but it was obvious what they were thinking 'who are those bastards at the end of the table?'.

Let me say clearly neither of us are experts—we simply didn't have wide enough experience as even back then first growth Bordeauxs were expensive. Nevertheless, in our minds the top wine was clear, there was little doubt as Lafite has a wonderful characteristic lilac-like nose to it, so it stood out like the proverbial.

This was a salient experience, whilst the Lafite was obvious to us inexperienced tasters it should have been blindingly so to these so-called experts.

Unfortunately, there's too many people who make a living out of peddling BS about wine, they fool enough people most of the time to develop a reputation as experts and it's this that causes most of the confusion.

There's plenty of reasonable-to-good wine about and it'd be best just to provide consumers with a minimal amount of information and let them decide for themselves, it'd lead to a lot less confusion.