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Trader Joe’s $2 wine became a best-seller
- the_arun 6y agoNever tried this wine. The $5.99 Pinot Noir (Russian River Valley) from Trader Joes is pretty good. But taste of wine is very personal.
- briga 6y agoI think it tastes just fine, and from my plebeian uncultured perspective it's just as good as a $20 bottle. Better, even, because you're not paying a huge mark up. I'm half convinced that wine connoisseurs are fooling themselves when they claim that they can tell the difference between cheap and expensive wines. It also doesn't take an economist to figure out why this product sells well. The only other place I've seen wine this cheap is in Italy.
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- jasonv 6y agoI care especially about a wine that has some form and doesn’t leave me with a headache the next day.
- yesenadam 6y ago> I'm half convinced that wine connoisseurs are fooling themselves when they claim that they can tell the difference between cheap and expensive wines. TL;DR Yes, it seems you're right about that. This has been put to the test many times, usually with comical results. This page[0] has some stories, e.g. : French researcher Frédéric Brochet "submitted a mid-range Bordeaux in two different bottles, one labeled as a cheap table wine, the other bearing a grand cru etiquette." Tasters described the supposed grand cru as "woody, complex, and round" and the supposed cheap wine as "short, light, and faulty." ...when Brochet served a white wine he received all the usual descriptions: "fresh, dry, honeyed, lively." Later he served the same wine dyed red and received the usual red terms: "intense, spicy, supple, deep." ...little correlation has been found between price and preference, even among wine experts, in tasting settings in which labels and prices have been concealed. Robert Hodgson, a California vintner...noticed that the results of wine competitions were surprisingly inconsistent. ...[he] approached the organizers of the California State Fair wine competition in 2005 with a proposal. In the course of their routine duties, he would sometimes present the judges with samples from the same bottle three times without their knowledge. The judges were among the top experts in the American wine industry: winemakers, sommeliers, critics and buyers as well as wine consultants and academics. The results were "disturbing"... "Over the years he has shown again and again that even trained, professional palates are terrible at judging wine." ...Hodgson continued to analyze the results of wine competitions across the state and found that the medals awarded for wine excellence "were distributed at random". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_wine_tasting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_wine_tasting
- invernomut0 6y agoI think that wine connoisseurs can distinguish between a 2$ wine and a 20$ or more wine. The problem lays in rating two wines in the same price range, in that case preferences become personal tastes because differences are very difficult to assess. When you drink very cheap wine the defects are quite easy to perceive.
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- SkyPuncher 6y agoI've noticed that a higher price tag means I'll be more likely to enjoy something out of a randomly sampled collection. However, to me it doesn't really make the wine that much better. In other words, if I were in a store with only unfamiliar wine, needing to buy something for a dinner party, I'd probably buy a step above normal. For normal occasions, there are tons of options in the $10 to $15 price range that I know I like. A $10 bottle I like is always better than a $25 bottle I don't like.
- jay2u 6y agoThere is a lot of work and craft that goes into the 20 euro bottle - especially when it comes from a small producer. It takes years to mature, there is uncertainty in the harvest, good barrels, tanks, cork, etc are expensive, lot's of knowledge and experience are required. A high-quality natural cork alone can cost 1.50$. For 2 dollars you get industrial mass production. Taste-wise it might be fine for some, but it is unlikely to be sustainable and you definitely miss the fun and artisanal part of wine. It's similar to small local organic farming vs. industrial farming for a more difficult to produce product.
- dejv 6y agoAlmost anything you find on shelves of your local supermarket is going to be heavily procesed industrial wine. The price itself will determine use of more expensive/time consuming proceses, but at the end they are all just drink products. If wine is just a drink for you than there is huge amount of good wines for $10 - $15. Nicely done, good products. For me, huge wine nerd (and also owner/winemaker of small organic winery) the wine is more like a postcard from faraway place and book of poetry at the same time. I am sure I am not going to be able to tell difference between cheap and expensive wines sometimes, but that is not a point. There is a more into wine than primary aromatics if you want to dig deep into into.
- mszcz 6y agohttps://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/connoisseur.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/connoisseur.png comes to mind ;)
- dagw 6y agoAs a wine "connoisseur" (or "nerd"), price isn't really the interesting factor. The fun part of this hobby for me isn't drinking $200 dollar bottles of wine, it's exploring the huge and changing variety of wine out there, and you can happily spend a life time doing that without spending much over $25 for a bottle. Tasting a $20 bottle of some native Slovenian grape you've never heard of can be every bit as fun and rewarding as drinking a $200 bottle of some 'name brand' wine.
- veggieburglar 6y agoOne of the most popular wines at my shop (in CA) is a Slovenian Haložan white blend. People may need to get some coaxing to get it into their glass, but you can't deny flavor and they keep coming back for more- especially as its $16 for a liter bottle.
- qalmakka 6y agoI live in Italy, and this area (like pretty much the entirety of Southern Europe) is a winemaking region. I can buy decent wines for less than 2 Euros a bottle - and I mean PDO or PGT stuff, the crappy no-brand wine is even much much less. It does not contain additives, it's just plain wine. I do not drink often so I use it mostly for cooking, but it would be definitely drinkable, and it's probably something that would cost 10 times as much on the other side of the ocean. Also, wineries sell directly to customers, so if you are really keen into drinking a lot of wine you can just go there, fill several demijohns and then bottle it yourself. My father (and his father, and my mother's father, and everyone else over a certain age) has done this every year for their entire life.
- _wldu 6y agoThis is sort of like buying milk in Wisconsin. It's cheap because it's right there. No distribution cost.
- cik 6y agoCan confirm - it's a matter of taxation. I bought bottles of wine from there while in Italy for 3EUR per bottle. The exact same bottle retailed for 35CAD in the LCBO in Toronto. Since moving to Israel I've noticed something very similar. A bottle of Red (yes, that's a brand) can be purchased in the corner store for the equivalent of $8 CDN. In Canada the same bottle was a little over $45. This is all about protecting the local wine industry through tarriffs - nothing else.
- qalmakka 6y ago> protecting the local wine industry through tarriffs Does the grapevine grow in Canada? That would be a surprising discovery.
- dagw 6y agoCanada produces a fair bit of wine. Very little of it is exported outside of North America though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_wine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_wine
- dejv 6y agoThere will be a lot of comments on how $2 wine taste good. Burger from McD taste pretty good as well, right? The problem with those cheap wines is not the taste itself, but the way they are made. The price of wine is determined by price of grapes. To achieve low price of your input you need vineyards that are hugely productive (say 10 to 20 times of those used for quality production). Even vineyards used for high quality production need a lot of chemical inputs (compared to rest of agriculture), but here we need to go even higher due to high density of grapes and zero green management. All of the vineyards are optimised for mechanical prunning, management and harvest. No problem with that and we are also seeing this trend in more and more premium wines due to rising cost of work and technological progress. At the end of growing stage we are having grapes that are not that ripe: probably not a lot of sugar, harsh tanins, lots of acids (and also structure of various acids will be on harsh acid types) and probably some rot on wines (this is normal even in high quality wines). No problem with any of those parameters: low sugars could be fixed by infusing sucrose, acid could be removed by using potasium bicarbonate, tanin structure could be improved by using artifical tanins (or tanins extracted from wood), color could be fixed by acetaldehyde (cause of headaches, together with high SO2 levels) and whole structure might be balanced by using reverse osmosis. After use of ten or maybe 50 different additive you get your $2 bottle of wine-like drink. It might even taste good.
- LordDragonfang 6y agoYour whole argument seems to boil down to "it's not natural, they add chemicals", which is a weird argument to make on a tech news site. The only additive you actually make a case against is acetaldehyde, which occurs naturally in cheap booze anyway. The details of the process are certainly interesting, it's just weird you framed them as "problem".
- rjbwork 6y agoAt the point we have all that stuff in there are we really drinking "wine", or are we drinking some kind of alcoholic mixed drink? I personally would not expect, regardless of price point, that something I buy called "wine" has anything other than grapes and yeast, with maybe a bit of added sugar or honey. After reading that article and the above comment I think I'd rather just mix some grape juice and vodka than some of that really cheap wine.
- janandonly 6y agoIs wine bullshit? https://priceonomics.com/is-wine-bullshit/ https://priceonomics.com/is-wine-bullshit/
- dehrmann 6y ago> Take color, which can trick us into tasting a nonexistent flavor in food in the same way it tricked the wine critics tasting white wine dyed red. When I put my phone in the pocket I don't usually use, I feel it vibrate in the pock it's usually in. It's freaky-disturbing.
- KMag 6y agoMany of these "wine" experiments show more general human biases, so "are humans bullshit?" would be a better question. Historically, even some physics measurements show herd mentality biases, with scientists being reluctant to publish values too far from generally accepted values.
- nestorD 6y agoIt appears that the famous, often retold, story of the experiment were experts have been deceived by simple red colorants in white wine is a significant distortion of the actual experiment : https://sciencesnopes.blogspot.com/2013/05/about-that-wine-experiment.html https://sciencesnopes.blogspot.com/2013/05/about-that-wine-e...
- raverbashing 6y agoJust pasting here the actual points because this "lol they couldn't tell White from Red" is BS > The most important is that the subjects in this experiment were not, in fact ‘wine experts’. They were undergraduate enology students. They are probably more knowledgeable about wine than the average person, but they were not in any way ‘experts’, or even ‘professionals’. > It’s simply not true that “Every single one, all 54, could not tell it was white.” as is frequently stated. Even Brochet doesn’t claim that, saying “About 2 or 3 per cent of people detect the white wine flavour”, and the paper that is frequently cited shows that indeed some people gave ‘white wine’ descriptions to the dyed-red wine. > But even more important than those errors, the study never demonstrated that people can’t tell red wine from white. And more important to me, if you're really misleading people, your results will be all over the place. If you want to know if people can tell white from red wines (they can, but just in case), do a blind test, but don't mislead them.
- ceilingcorner 6y agoWhen you lack the ability to discern the quality of a product, the least expensive one will always win.
- dehrmann 6y agoNote to self: if you put your name on a business and the business goes bankrupt, your name could go to the creditors.
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- baby 6y agoI drank 2-3€ wine all my youth, that’s how we got drunk. It’s cheap and it does the trick rose is better than red which is better than white. Cheap white is the absolute worst. Now I can tell the difference between this and a 7-8€ wine. The higher it gets the more hit or miss it is, but I can taste that some red are “cleaner”. Now that they’re 20€ or 100€ I’m not sure there’s an actual difference...
- 29athrowaway 6y agoLet's go back a few thousands of years. There were no refrigerators, and juice-production facilities were not very clean. Also, people were not aware of the existence of bacteria and germs. And given these conditions, you want to drink juice, or the best available alternative, at any arbitrary moment during the year... The solution? fermentation. Just ferment the hell out of everything and store it for years. Now you can drink juice anytime you want, it just tastes weird but it's better than nothing.
- mekkkkkk 6y agoA lot of comments are talking about whether or not an expert can distinguish between a cheap and an expensive wine. I don't understand how they possibly could. You can't taste price. Of course I understand the point of the argument, but it seems to disregard a slew of market dynamics that dictates price. It just seems very uninteresting to try to judge wine expertise by deducing price categories. Maybe I'm wrong?
- dagw 6y agoNah, you're not wrong. As a bit of wine nerd, I've never heard other wine nerds care too much about how expensive a wine is. What they care about, and love talking about, is geography and grapes and production methods. Now some of those factors do correlate with price, but everybody is very aware that a lot of expensive wine is pure marketing, and that some producers are able to make wines that punch far above their weight, price wise.
- veggieburglar 6y agoCorrect- also, in blind tasting, you're never asked to identify the price or price level of the wine. Now, as a wine professional, you do care about the price of the wine because it is an integral part of your business. However, when I taste to buy for my business, I try to evaluate the wine before knowing the price. Then I decide whether I like it and would like to sell it before going through the second evaluation phase based on price.