I live in (WA) wine country... I've heard so many stories over the years about ways to adulterate wine. The key is, drink what you like, don't get hung up on price tag or varietal. If at all possible, find the off-the-beaten-path wineries where you can get to know the owners / winemakers. Half the fun is getting the behind-the-scenes story and appreciating one season to the next. It's easy to forget that wine is fundamentally an agricultural product delivered through an industrial process. When you get down and dirty with the winemaker, the grape pickers, the cellar rats, etc it's a different perspective than the $500 bottle at the Michelin-starred restaurant.
Is Wine Fake? (2022)
21–30 of 31 posts
Re: Is Wine Fake? (2022)
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 biochemist…
“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
Nobody's asking you to trust anything; you can just take some few minutes to read. It's not my responsibility to show you how to Google; you're just being willfully ignorant.
Re: Is Wine Fake? (2022)
#23I like wine, i’ll drink, but short of it being terrible, i’ve never been able to form a preference for any one type, i certainly couldn’t tell a quality difference between a bottle that costs 15 and one that costs 150
I think the prices much above $15 have more to do with things that have or should have a rare taste rather than a better taste in some sense that is market neutral.
Rare taste, unusual combinations, extremely smooth character or historical value are some of the marks for why people pay extra for wine.
There's fantastic cheap wine out there, just like you don't have to spend on wagyu beef to get perfectly good steak.
Re: Is Wine Fake? (2022)
#24I'm from Argentina where wine is relatively cheap and I think many can distinguish a Malbec from a Cauvernet Sauvignon, but it's really difficult to distinguish in the same varietal
Only to the untrained taste.
I've helped a sommelier friend study for her exams. In wine school you get taught about how different climates and methods in winemaking gives the wine product its character.
With relatively little training it's easy to spot young wine, old wine, wine that passed through oak, defects like Bret, and other properties.
Re: Is Wine Fake? (2022)
#25I'm from Argentina where wine is relatively cheap and I think many can distinguish a Malbec from a Cauvernet Sauvignon, but it's really difficult to distinguish in the same varietal
Only to the untrained taste. I've helped a sommelier friend study for her exams. In wine school you get taught about how different climates and methods in winemaking gives the wine product its character. With relatively little training it's easy to spot young wine, old wine, wine that passed through oak, defects like Bret, and other properties.
almost any serious research in this field suggest that is completely false, and that even highly trained "experts" are incredibly bad at wine tasting, are inconsistent in their ratings, and fail to identify fakes, white wine with red food coloring, etc. It seems like you've fallen for the wine industry propaganda.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-ta...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-econ...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-econ...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-econ...
Re: Is Wine Fake? (2022)
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
“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
Nobody's asking you to trust anything; you can just take some few minutes to read. It's not my responsibility to show you how to Google; you're just being willfully ignorant.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-ta...
All of the peer reviewed articles linked suggest that "wine tasting experts" can't differentiate or produce any sort of reliable results, or detect flavors consistently.
Re: Is Wine Fake? (2022)
#27As 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 t…
I can't help but picture you as Doug Levison.
Re: Is Wine Fake? (2022)
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody's asking you to trust anything; you can just take some few minutes to read. It's not my responsibility to show you how to Google; you're just being willfully ignorant.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-ta... All of the peer reviewed articles linked suggest that "wine tasting experts" can't differentiate or produce any sort of reliable results, or detect flavors consistently.
Except that's not what the article says, and it explicitly notes some of the scientifically identified chemicals involved in producing certain flavors.
"Scores aren't meaningful, past a certain baseline" seems pretty well supported. "Context plays a statistically discernable role in our perception of taste" seems pretty well supported. "Wine experts can't tell any wine from any other" is nonsense and while that's an exaggeration it does seem like you're treading closer to that position than can be supported.
Re: Is Wine Fake? (2022)
#29What an article about nothing. Sommeliers always do blind tastings. Taste and texture descriptors are extremely well understood. Expert winemakers can tell you a lot about the qualities of grapes, climate, and process through blind taste. This meme that wine is fake really needs to stop. You have no reason to care even one iota about subtleties of expensive wine, but you really don’t need much training to tell good w…
> but you really don’t need much training to tell good wine from bad wine.
The studies in the article suggest otherwise.
Re: Is Wine Fake? (2022)
#30As 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 t…
I can't help but picture you as Doug Levison.
If that's the same Levison I'm thinking of then I'd reckon that's elevating me a bit too much, in reality I'm rather low key.
BTW, I drink precious little wine these days, those good wines really did screw up my palate. (I don't like most of the wine I can afford to buy.)