My problem with wine is that I know what I like when I taste it, but as best I can tell, there is no language with which to express that, after "red". There's

My problem with wine is that I know what I like when I taste it, but as best I can tell, there is no language with which to express that, after "red". There's "headache flavor", which never shows up in cheap wine: it doesn't taste bad, but it means I'm going to get a headache if I drink more that 4oz of a wine tasting like that. No bottle has ever been labeled with "headache flavor". I ask wine people, and they hand wave something about tanins, but I've tasted high tanin and low tanin wine, and the flavor is completely orthogonal. Given the lack of information, I never bet a lot on a bottle. My favorite wine ever was a Consumato Nero D'Avolo from 2010 (I paid $22), but other years of that label have been wildly inconsistent, and now I can't find it any more. It was very close in flavor to a wine I had at a wine bar that they called a "California Malbec" which I've never found again, and another at a restaurant where - WTF restaurants! Whenever stumble on a wine I especially like at a restaurant, I go to Google and find out the label doesn't exist! It's some fictional house label! Not my very favorite, but something I liked with meals was Corbet Canyon Malbec, so of course they don't make it any more. Even if I had the time and money to make thorough study of this, I'd have spent a year being drunk and discovering perhaps a dozen excellent bottles - which would henceforth never be made again. Screw that. Inexpensive box wine for me. Or, just as often, an IPA. The beer people know how to produce consistent quality and have categories where the product consistently meets expectation, while still having entertaining variations between brewers.