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Is wine fake?

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Re: Is wine fake?

#381

Post by gerdesj »

SanjayMehta wrote: post #372
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…

What happens if I buy a 2022 wine today and store it for 5 years? Will it be the same as buying the same vintage in 2027 from the wine seller? I guess what I'm asking is if there's some special storage requirements which can't be met at home?

Not all wines are the same! Some can benefit from aging but not all.

The whole idea of "sealing" wine in a bottle is to keep it and not actually change it. It's a preservation method. However, the bottle is not really completely sealed and the small air gap at the top is not empty either. The cork might allow a tiny amount of air transfer too. The remains of the wine creation process might also leave some reactive components.

When you store wine it seems that a cellar type environment with its stale and earthy air helps - hmmm I wonder why!

Challenge your tastes or whatevs. For example you might find that a really cheap bottle of white chilled to about 5C and fizzed in a Soda Stream makes quite a decent Champagne analogue.

Re: Is wine fake?

#382

Post by wikibob »

coding123 wrote: post #125
spockz wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem very experienced at wine and food, so I hope you know this. I can taste a wine and like it just fine if I haven’t eaten or drink anything else. But if I eat anything, even just the tiniest bit, the wine to me just becomes sour and I can only taste the alcohol. This completely ruined wine for me. Is this common?

whoa that is weird. When I taste wine these days, I can ONLY taste vinegar. I'm not even sure why that is.

Have you had Covid lately? It can severely affect taste and smell.

Re: Is wine fake?

#383

Post by tshaddox »

bnralt wrote: post #304
antognini wrote: post #49

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…

> 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.…

> I question whether or not those tastes are a sign of objective quality, or just something they've been conditioned to think of as good.

I mean, that’s kinda a different question right? Like it’s not “objectively good” as in “you’re objectively wrong if you don’t like it.” It’s “objectively good” as in “there are objective standards that have been agreed upon by a large group of people.”

Re: Is wine fake?

#384

Post by beiller »

I once wrote software that automatically graded wine "sweetness" based on sugar grams/L output via Spectroscopy? (I think) in a lab. After learing which wines regions / varietals produced what rating (sweet / dry / extra dry) is pretty much all I need now when picking wine. I'd say the sweetness is probably the only major difference between varietals but maybe it's just me. Extra dry is what I like best.

Re: Is wine fake?

#386

Post by water8 »

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.

No post body was provided.

Re: Is wine fake?

#387

Post by SamBam »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #335
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.…

I would personally put many things such as coffee and beer there - I've grown in cultures that have and consume them a LOT, but I'm 45 and still hate the taste of both. Acquired taste one way or another, and I never bothered acquiring it. (Interestingly enough though, two of my buddies also never had a taste for them, until in their late 20s they literally decided to "get into it". Boggles my mind if you're not caffe…

I deliberately tried to get into funky Belgian beers in my 30s.

My reasoning was: other people like these, I think they taste gross, but I'm always telling people they can learn to like things, and if I did learn to like them, I'd expand my range of possible pleasures.

I did end up liking them. Not love them, but enough to appreciate them.

I really doubt that there is anything in the world that is enjoyed by a large group of people that I couldn't eventually get myself to like. And then: how wonderful! More things you like.

Re: Is wine fake?

#388

Post by jancsika »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #258
antognini wrote: post #49

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?

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 alcoholic beverage, probably with a weird after taste.

That association apparently stalled the development of high quality vineyards in California. So it's certainly within the realm of possibility that this prohibition era impact continues to exert some influence. I still see a lot of people preferring rather sweet wines, for example.

And while I can't say for sure, something tells me the people who drop an ice cube into their red wine fit into all this somehow. :)

Re: Is wine fake?

#389

Post by voisin »

School-Cotton wrote: post #294
Bayart wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wine is far more expensive in the US than in France, for various reasons.

And Canada is 3-5x higher still.

Re: Is wine fake?

#390

Post by itbeho »

I work at a small intersection between wine and tech. Wine is not fake, but from a marketplace view can be considered as the progenitor of much of what we see today in tech. Before Silicon Valley, before Crypto, before Semiconductors... there was wine. And pretty much all of the same hype-machine rules have applied. You see wine that almost anyone would like get no traction whatsoever, and marginal swill marketed with lots of money and by influencers winning awards and notoriety.
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