201–210 of 559 posts
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How does red wine from Ontario end up more expensive than the one from abroad when the laws are set up to favor the wine from Ontario?
I'd guess cost of labor is a major factor. If you buy any California wine, for instance, it was picked by a migrant worker. Times haven't changed much since Grapes of Wrath, other than it's typically Latino workers rather than Dust Bowl refugees.
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> The best wine I've ever drank Do you remember what this was called, or specifically where? If I'm ever there I'd love to find this!
Quinta dos Guimarães, from Santa Bárbara do Monte Verde. It's super hard to find and they might be defunct, it's been quite a few years.
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In Croatia many years ago, we ordered the cheapest bottle on the wine list. It was disgusting. The locals were amazed that we didn't know to water it down before drinking.
It's typical to drink watered down wine with routine/non-fancy/on-the-road meals. The locals call it 'gemišt' which is a germanism (gemischt = mixed). The wine used for this is bottom of the barrel, since it's a shame to waste good wine for this purpose.
I am no wine guru but I do know one thing for sure. There is definitely such a thing as bad wine. If paying a little more would guarantee not having a terrible bottle, that would make me pretty happy. In the real world I've not found that to be true though.
> There can be objectively bad pizza — burnt, cold, mushy — but there isn’t really any objective best pizza. Fancier and more complicated pizzas can be more expensive, not because they’re better, but because they’re more interesting. Maybe wine is the same way.
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…
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>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. Please don’t make the mistake of thinking “I like to cook” means “I would like to run a restaraunt”. They’re two completely different things.
Can you elaborate on this? I'm sure there's more to it and it could be great to know what some of the specifics are, but it also seems like someone who likes to cook is going to need to be present for a good restaurant
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The restaurant industry is brutal, low margin, and cut-throat. There's long hours and extremely hard work, and customers who don't give a shit about you. If you have a successful restaurant, it's probably because you have a good location (modulo those Michelin-starred gems in out-of-the-way small towns). So the landlord will do their best to extract any surplus value you generated through your skill and ingenuity. I'…
> the landlord will do their best to extract any surplus value you generated through your skill and ingenuity It sounds like you're describing landlord behavior where they don't simply arrive at a target rent and happily collect it, but attempt to actively monitor revenue of businesses renting from them and then ride the line between capturing that in rent increases below the line where it's worth it to the tenant no…
Commercial landlords, especially of restaurants, have way more pricing power because the tenants can't just move. Their customers expect them to be there, or there's a ton of existing foot traffic - location, location, location. And usually tenants put their own money into renovating the space for their needs.
> In 2001 Frédérick Brochet of the University of Bordeaux asked 54 wine experts to test two glasses of wine [...] that one had been coloured red with a flavourless dye. Well, red wine is red because it's colored by the skin of the grapes. I guess the critique is that the tasters were inconsistent, they used [very] different language for the wine(s). Which is definitely interesting. But not that surprising :) > "jammy…
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…
It's common wisdom in France. If you're paying more than 20 euros for a bottle, it's probably already too much. And it's very common for people to buy in bulk at the favour of seasonal discounts or from the producer. If you want to look smart at a dinner party, bring a bottle of something nobody's ever heard about that's remarkably cheap for what you get.
> suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less This is me. Every time I decide to splurge on a bottle of wine I don't like it. Sticking with my 3 liter boxes of costco cabernet.