16 ms·
A “Sideways” supply response in California winegrapes
- ardit33 5y agoI agree, this movie was a huge hit back in the day and it is still a great watch. I also think Pinot is superior (both the white or the red variety). Chardonay and Merlo are every day staple, but Pino is just a tad better. I think once more people tried Pinot (Noir or Grigio), they just stuck with it because it is good.
- josefrichter 5y agoWhat happened to your T key, sir?
- ardit33 5y agoHaha, thanks
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nemo44x 5y agoPinot is awful except for higher end bottles. It’s the only grape I can for sure identify a bottle that’s under $30. Merlot, although best in cab blends, can be had at high quality for < $15. Pinot is just so sensitive and fragile. Merlot is a drinkers wine.
- jandrewrogers 5y agoWhere are you getting your Pinot Noir from? I routinely buy e.g. Alsatian Pinot Noir for maybe $15 that is very good. With some effort, you might be able to find some hidden gems in Oregon loosely in that price range. While the US produces excellent wine, Europe usually wins the price/quality battle.
- nemo44x 5y agoI’ve had it from nearly everywhere from Willamette Valley to Burgundy and I can consistently place the Pinot on first taste. Pinot that happens to around < 30 or 25 just has a bad taste to be. Bitter and burnt tasting. I’m not some snob who judges wine on price either! I mainly drink cabs that are < 15. I think Pinot is really hard to grow so we end up with a lot of mediocre stuff. But it has a good enough reputation that the meh stuff still sells at lower price points. I also prefer bigger reds like cabs. Give me Bordeaux. Easy grape to grow and for the money you get a great wine.
- sjg007 5y agoYou can taste the wildfires in most of the recent west coast pinots.
- andrewfromx 5y agoThis is fantastic. I remember this movie well and I agree with this data.
- sanedigital 5y agoMy favorite part of all this is that Giamatti’s character actually loves Merlot, it’s just that he’s adverse to drinking it because it reminds him of his ex-Wife. The Chateau Petrus that the two had saved (that he ultimately drinks out of a fast food cup at the end) is a 100% Merlot wine. Your average movie-goer and wine-drinker doesn’t know that context, and so all they remember is “I am not drinking any f*cking Merlot!” [Edit: others were kind enough to remind me that the saved wine is actually Cheval Blanc, a 55-40-5 Cab Franc, Merlot, and Cab Sauv blend. It’s been awhile since I’ve thought out talked about this movie.]
- readams 5y agoHe had a 1961 Cheval Blanc, which is not 100% but is a primarily Merlot blend.
- sanedigital 5y agoAh yep, thank you for the refresher. It’s been awhile since I’ve thought about this. The point still stands!
- kcarter80 5y agoI'm not sure it does. Merlot isn't even the primary varietal in that wine.
- plugger 5y agoIn the book it was Petrus which is 100% Merlot. They approached the chateau to see if they'd green light the use of Petrus as his unicorn bottle. The chateau refused, and they instead landed on Cheval Blanc. I've always been left wondering if the "I am not drinking any fucking Merlot" line was a direct result of the snub by Petrus.
- sanedigital 5y agoIn most years it’s at least 40% of the blend. If you’re saving a wine that’s 40% Merlot and you hate Merlot, that’s on you.
- wrs 5y agoThe effect may be even bigger than it looks, because the “control” varietal, Cabernet Sauvignon, is often blended with Merlot, so they are presumably somewhat correlated.
- throwaway81523 5y ago> Repeated studies have shown that “wine experts,” when administered blind tests, are unable to distinguish between cheap and expensive bottles, or different varieties of the same color wine, or even whether the wine they’re drinking is red or white. In the end it’s all just fermented grape juice. As an American I am angry that they make red wine and white wine, but no blue wine. That damn unpatriotic California wine industry. I will drink Windex instead, and that will show them. It all tastes the same anyway. /g
- josefrichter 5y agoThey do make blue wine, even in California. For example Blaufränkisch can be found in California too. There are many other varieties called “blue”, many of them also I Cali I guess. And in fact, in my language Pinot Noir is actually not “black” but “blue”.
- csdvrx 5y agoI would love to buy a light blue wine - make it the same color as the flag and you've got my money! There're already blue potatoes, so cmon wine industry, please make it happen!
- tasha0663 5y agoWell, there's always blue mad dog. https://www.md2020wine.com/bottles/ https://www.md2020wine.com/bottles/ Disclaimer: enjoy responsibly and may god have mercy on your soul.
- addaon 5y agoUnfortunately bumwines [1] (last updated in 2003?) mentions the "new" blue flavor, but doesn't fully review it. [1] http://www.bumwine.com/ http://www.bumwine.com/
- mynegation 5y agoI cannot believe these are produced unironically.
- josefrichter 5y agoThat’s so sad that people care more about how they’ll look, instead of just drinking whatever they like.
- silisili 5y agoWine is very much a social status. You gift it. You keep a "good" bottle around for company. Stupid, but how the world works. My wife and I, we just like and prefer the sweet $8 pink sweet barefoot wine. Despite having no guests, we don't touch the 'good stuff.' For no other reason than we don't like it.
- burrows 5y agoDoes “sad” refer to an emotion? If so, don’t all emotions require a human? Then who feels sad because of or about this purported fact? Or are you saying, “I don’t like it when people care about how they’ll be seen so much that they can’t do whatever they like.”?
- Talanes 5y agoWhen someone calls a situation sad, the author is the human experiencing the emotion. It's a pretty common English phrase construction.
- josefrichter 5y ago
- owlninja 5y agoI took the comment as meaning people are worried about what others will think of their choice of wine.
- o_____________o 5y agoIn the best cases "it's sad that ..." means "seeing this makes me feel pity for them", and in the worst is used to belittle someone, as in "your behavior is pathetic"
- TomVDB 5y ago
- spatley 5y agoLove that graph how art culture and commerce intermix. It is probably likely that merlot was getting a bit last year's style and this only served to accelerate that. As far as I am concerned they are both lovely grapes and saying that merlot is better than pino noir is like saying that green pants are better than red pants. They are different, sure and some might like one over the other, but "better"?
- burrows 5y agoWhat about someone saying, “I like red pants better than green pants.”?
- tasha0663 5y ago20 ships? Bring me my brown pants.
- josefrichter 5y agoThere’s no “better”. There’s a reason why most French and Italian wines don’t even mention the variety anywhere. Sancere, Bordeaux, Chablis, Beaujolais, Prosecco, Chianti,… Most people don’t know what variety are they, coz it’s not important really.
- sanedigital 5y agoExcept it is important, since each of those regions has very strict laws regarding what is and isn’t allowed in the bottle. Sancerre is 100% Sauvignon Blanc, red Bordeaux some blend of six permitted grapes, Cab and Merlot being the primary ones (subregions have laws regarding which subset is allowed), Chablis is 100% Chardonnay, Beaujolais is 100% Gamay, Chianti is at least 70% Sangiovese. Wines from these regions aren’t labeled varietally because they don’t need to be. New World wines don’t have that luxury.
- donavanm 5y agoI agree with the thrust of your argument but do note that rouge sancerre is definitely a thing (and I quite like it).
- nkozyra 5y agoIt looks a bit like Pinot Noir was already on a pretty clear upswing, could this not just be a correlation with trends in wine in general - dryer, less sweet/bodied reds? It would be interesting to see a comparison to whites - are Chardonnays and Pinot Gris also on an upward trend?
- silverdrake11 5y agoIt's more plausible to me that the movie was a product of its times rather than the cause of the trend. Maybe there was more interest in wine during that time, and more discussion about the different types. It would explain why a movie centered around wine was developed and became a box office success.
- robocat 5y agoThe book Sideways by Rex Pickett was released in 2004, and obviously written before that. Presumably the rant against Merlot is in the book, so perhaps it is less likely to just be a product of the times.
- Beldin 5y agoSideways is about wine roughly as much as Fight Club is about grown men fighting each other in a club.
- sanedigital 5y agoPretty much any red wine you’d be drinking is 100% dry—there’s no residual sugar left in the bottle after fermentation. If by “sweet” you mean “fruity” the Cab v. Pinot comparison kind of rules that out, since American Merlot sits about halfway between Pinot and Cab in terms of being fruit-forward, as well as with any other descriptors that might classify as “body”, such as alcohol and tannin.
- lisper 5y agoThat's not true. A lot of low-end (by which I mean "inexpensive", not "low quality") and some mid-range cabs and Zinfandels are made with a little bit of residual sugar. JAM and Barefoot cabernet are two examples.
- aaron695 5y ago
- buryat 5y agoMerlot is subpar so no wonder it's been dropping since people discovered better grapes
- SantalBlush 5y agoMaddox, author of The Best Page in the Universe, wrote about exactly this phenomenon shortly after the movie came out. [1] Warning: It's Maddox, so it's crass. >In the movie, Giamatti's character is a wine aficionado who drinks Pinot Noir in favor of Merlot, a wine that he despises. Now every idiot who has seen the movie has suddenly become a wine expert, and Pinot sales have shot through the roof. NPR interviewed a guy who said, and I quote: "I used to drink merlot, and after I saw the movie, they say 'don't drink merlot,' so [now] I'm drinking pinot noir... " [1] http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=sideways http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=sideways
- tschwimmer 5y agoIt's somewhat quaint that in 2021 Maddox can still be described as "crass." He sure was at the time of publishing, but the internet has taken a decided turn towards the impolite since then.
- spchampion2 5y agoA lot of Americans really only knew about "red" and "white" wines back then (and frankly still do). Red was very often a cheap merlot, while white was a cheap chardonnay. I recall so many (so many!) terrible merlots and chardonnays from that era, that I was entirely put off of both for about a decade. Only recently have I started asking for either of them again, and I've found the quality has definitely improved. On the flip side, a lot of pinots have gotten lousy in the interim. But drink what you like. Giamatti's character was so troubled in that film, and his advice was definitely questionable.
- mathattack 5y agoThey absolutely didn’t shy from the alcoholism. I went with French Merlots for a while after the movie so it wouldn’t look like I was ordering one.
- AdmiralAsshat 5y agoI recently watched Vampire in Brooklyn (1995) for the first time, and there's a laughable exchange where Eddie Murphy says, "I brought red wine", and Angela Bassett says something like, "My favorite!" American wine palette has come a long way since then
- sdenton4 5y agoA long way, indeed. In 2019, even zombies drink chardonnay. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRbjGwdcGxs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRbjGwdcGxs
- mbg721 5y agoOne of the better Columbo episodes, "Any Old Port In A Storm", features Donald Pleasence as a California winery owner with some telling descriptions of American wine culture in the 70s.
- brandonmenc 5y ago> and frankly still do Oh, come on. Even budget grocery stores separate their wines by region and grape. Just about every American who drinks wine has their favorites, even if it just goes as far as something like "I like Malbec because it's less dry."
- jayd16 5y agoI find it odd how quickly the planting changes if Sideways is truly the cause. Shouldn't it be more of a lagging indicator?
- Ensorceled 5y agoIf your vineyard has cases of unsold merlot at the end of a couple of seasons, you can change pretty quickly. The graph shows plantings are flat for a couple of years before the vineyards actually started switching, they just weren't planting new merlot grapes.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mattmaroon 5y agoWell, merlot is a blending grape and that’s been wine industry “wisdom” for a long time, the book and movie just taught randos what the experts already believed. People outside of the US largely don’t drink it straight. Americans just glommed onto it because it sounded French. Pinot is quite drinkable as the main/sole grape. Of course, drink what you like. But the industry was hardly “broken” (If anything Id bet it was accelerated) just altered.
- smackeyacky 5y agoI got thrown out of a hoighty-toighty Napa winery once for jokingly asking for a bottle of "Night Train" (note, I only knew it from watching "The Blues Brothers"). I'm a bit surprised that movie had such a large effect, Merlot isn't necessarily a hugely popular wine here but I sometimes prefer it over a Cabernet Sauvignon or a Shiraz since a lot of wine makers here have followed a bit of a trend for "full bodied" (aka sledgehammer) wines from those varieties. It's a bit like the megalitres of India Pale Ale that is virtually undrinkable because the brewers are in a competition to see how much they can destroy the overall flavour with hops. ...so try the Merlot (esp. Australian merlot). It's tasty, affordable and won't leave you feeling like you lost a fight the next day.
- gunshai 5y agoI hear you on the beer front, there is so much bad beer especially IPA. I'm starting to stick to the stuff that has consistent quality. I've just had too much horse shit thinking I'm trying something "different".
- ethbr0 5y agoI realized I'd finally become "that guy" when my mom came to visit and I took her to a pool hall / microbrewery. She looks at the menu and asks, "Oh, do they have any IPAs? That's what everyone's drinking in {insert hometown}." "Mom... IPAs are kind of overdone now. There's lots of other, more interesting types of beer." Waiter arrives. My mother, "Do you have any IPAs you would recommend?" Waiter replies, "We have some good ones, but if you want my opinion, IPAs are kind of overdone. We have lots of more interesting beers."
- Pxtl 5y agoOkay yeah they're overdone but I would expect a microbrewery to have something hoppy on tap they could offer. I went to a lot of trouble to acquire a taste for those evil things you're not getting away with not serving me one at a hipster bar.
- 5y ago
- bloodyplonker22 5y agoAfter Russ Hanneman yelled "These are not the doors of a billionaire" and raged off in his 4-door Maserati on Silicon Valley while playing Crazy Town music, Maserati Quattroporte sedan sales plunged as well.
- rasz 5y agoTo be fair since eighties Maserati was seen as a car for rich people who dont know any better but like the name because it sounds like Ferrari.
- rexreed 5y agoThere's no evidence of this. Maserati sales are low enough that there is no causative effect for something like mentioned above. Have any stats to back that up?
- Gatsky 5y agoMy theory: Alcoholic drinks have the basic problem that they are generally unpalatable to most people, especially the first time you try them. The alcohol industry has a high advertising to sales ratio [1], presumably because they always need to remind people that it is cool and fun to drink hand sanitiser. Thus one movie can easily shift consumer behaviour, because nobody really ‘likes’ merlot or any grape the same way they may like fried chicken or coke (which seem impervious to bad press). (I am not advocating for prohibition or anything like that by the way. Clearly many people enjoy wine, beer and spirits in moderation, although often this follows ingrained sociocultural norms.) [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/470961/ad-spend-to-sales-distilled-and-blended-liquor-usa/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/470961/ad-spend-to-sales... Data for other industries here: http://www.rab.com/research/10014.pdf http://www.rab.com/research/10014.pdf
- jffry 5y agoI will have to hard disagree with your theory that we must all need to be constantly reminded it's fun to drink "hand sanitizer", whatever that's supposed to mean. Alcohol seems quite popular and has been quite popular for literally millenia, no massive advertising campaigns needed. The alcohol industry is highly competitive, and saturating consumers with ads can certainly influence their choice of which alcohol to buy. And lest you accuse me of being a lightweight, I regularly enjoy in moderation something actually not that far off from hand sanitizer - cask strength whisky, weighing in at 60+% ABV. Because it is undiluted out of the barrel, it provides an incredibly intense flavor and aroma that I do not need to be tricked into liking.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Gatsky 5y agoYeah I also enjoy alcohol. I think it is a bit more complicated than you make out. The popularity for millenia is really when the only competing beverage was water, and even clean water was hard to get until recently. In recent times, soft drinks and juices have usurped the ubiquity of wine at the dinner table in France for example (https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21929287 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21929287). Out of interest, what did you think about the whisky the very first time you tried it? Do you think it is likely that without all the notions out there about whisky to do with cachet, heritage, masculinity etc that you would have kept drinking it? That is my point. This is all quite aside from your current experience of drinking whisky, which is of course entirely legitimate and enjoyable of itself. I like beer now but the first time I had it I couldn't get one mouthful down.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y agoThis is a great example of the incredible power of memes. We would see this gain strength later. For better and for worse.
- jszymborski 5y agoI always love how on the show Flaked[0], Will Arnett's character lifts Giametti's speech on Pinots and why he loves[1] them down to the word, and there is zero nod to it in the show. If you didn't know the speech was from Sideways you'd think Arnett's character is deeply eloquent, and if you did happen to see Sideways recently, you see him for the fraud he is. [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4973548/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4973548/ [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCS1Gnwbtp0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCS1Gnwbtp0
- Sosh101 5y agoGot a link to the Flaked scene?
- jszymborski 5y agoI wish :( couldn't find it on YouTube.
- WalterBright 5y agoI buy whatever's on sale.
- tomcam 5y agoI buy Mtn Dew with real sugar, unfortunately
- EnderWT 5y agoThe study mentioned in the article may be new but the effect was already known in 2009. https://winesvinesanalytics.com/features/article/61265/The-Sideways-Effect https://winesvinesanalytics.com/features/article/61265/The-S...
- serverlessmom 5y agoI like how the article says the film is about one guy touring wine country. I feel like the author just loathes Thomas Hayden Church and will, at any opportunity, erase him from history.
- thomasfromcdnjs 5y agoIs it not possible that Merlot was already on the way out, and the movie was just portraying an already in progress cultural trend at the time?
- eternauta3k 5y agoAKA correlation does not imply causation
- NaturalPhallacy 5y agoIf you any further evidence that Hollywood is very good at brainwashing people...
- goto11 5y agoIf anything, it shows that Hollywood is really bad at brainwashing, since the point of the movie was completely different.
- apples_oranges 5y agoIn case there's any doubt: Could advertising possibly work?
- tomcam 5y agoWhat strikes me about that movie now is that it depicts a Napa Valley that doesn’t really exist anymore. It represents the tail end of a time when you could drive around and get tiny, free wine samples at small, uncomplicated places where the restaurant was almost tacked on if it existed at all. Now you go on tightly scheduled bus tours where the samples appear to be $30 each or so. I don’t drink it all and never did (my wife is an aficionado) but there was a lovely air about the less formal version of Napa from that time.
- istillwritecode 5y agoIt actually took place in the Santa Ynez valley, not the Napa valley.
- tomcam 5y agoOops, thanks for the correction
- mynameishere 5y agoThe bartender in the movie mentioned a bus tour and the associated difficulties.
- dia80 5y agoI'm always a bit put off by the "experts can't tell the difference between these two things!", in this case red and white wine. On closer inspection one usually finds an element of deception, here the white wine is coloured red and then experts describe it as a red on tasting. This makes sense from a Bayesian point if view... What are the experts priors? What's more likely? That their nose is off today or someone is trying to decieve them by dying white wine red? I would guess it's the former. There must be a large publication bias is well, "experts can differentiate white from red wine" is hardly going to get much attention. To make this a fair trial I think you need to blindfold them rather than "trick" them.
- root_axis 5y agoThe article states that the studies were blind.
- dejv 5y agoMy pet peeve with all of those studies is who they consider as an expert. It is usually adhoc random group of enology students. There is great video of guy trying to reconstruct red wine from whites + coloring and serving it to master of wine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN83j5ZOUm0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN83j5ZOUm0 And there are a lot of other tricks and blind tasting sessions in his channel. This is how expert taster works.
- rasz 5y ago>There is great video of guy trying to reconstruct red wine from whites + coloring and serving it to master of wine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN83j5ZOUm0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN83j5ZOUm0 Whats the point of a wine? looking at it or tasting it? Dude recognized its colored before even tasting it, or rather strictly without tasting it. Would he be able to do this without looking at it?
- darkwater 5y agoBut the looks and the smells are part of the drinking experience as the flavors (unless you just want to get drunk).
- jb1991 5y ago> Repeated studies have shown that “wine experts,” when administered blind tests, are unable to distinguish between cheap and expensive bottles, or different varieties of the same color wine, or even whether the wine they’re drinking is red or white. In the end it’s all just fermented grape juice. Wow that’s surprising.
- nwallin 5y agoIt's actually false. Ish. Well, sort of. There was a famous study that asked its test subjects to describe the wine that they were drinking. There are certain words that are typically associated with red wines and certain words that are typically associated with white wines. They used red dyes to dye white wine red and a different chemical to turn the red wine the color of white wine. The administrators of the study found that the words used to describe the white wines died red aligned more closely with the descriptors used to describe red wines, and the words used to describe the red wines bleached white were more closely aligned with the descriptors used to describe white wines. Conclusion: wine experts can't tell the different between white wine and red wine. The problem: The "experts" were 18-22 year old college students who had just taken a class on wine tasting. They weren't actually experts, they were just people who had been taught the right words to say to pass the tests. They were taught what words to say. Then you tested to see whether they said them. There was another famous study where its test subjects were given a sampling of wines, with each wine having a short blurb about it, which included the price of the wine. The prices were fake. They were then asked to rate each wine. The administrators found that the fake price stated on the blurb was correlated with the rating. Conclusion: wine experts can't tell the different between expensive wine and cheap wine. The problem: the only thing you've actually proven is confirmation bias. Those two studies are quoted a lot. You'll quite often see those two particular quotes, wine experts can't tell the difference between red and white wine, and wine experts can't tell the difference between expensive and cheap wine. You don't see studies that show that wine experts can't tell the difference between merlot and cab franc, or the difference between stainless steel and oak aging on a chardonnay. You don't see those studies because those studies don't exist.
- jillesvangurp 5y agoWell you are not much of an expert if you can't tell a Riesling from a Cote du Rhone. One would be a freshly tasting, dry (i.e. not sweet) German white wine and the other a rather heavy red wine. I'm not an expert by any means but I've consumed plenty of both to be able to tell the difference by hangover alone. I guess there are a few grape varieties that are used for red and white wines that might pose some more tricky edge cases. E.g. pinot noir (a grape type) white wine is actually made with the same grapes as the red variety. The juice is actually color less; the skin has color. I guess it depends on how you process the grapes on what color wine you end up producing. And they'd obviously share a few of the same flavors because it is the same base ingredients that are used.
- dmode 5y agoThe much bigger impact of Sideways was that it led to a complete transformation of California wine industry. From a mom and pop, ragtag industry with free tasting from the barrel, it is now the epitome of luxury. But Napa, and now Central Coast is getting transformed. 10 years back, there were so many free tasting shops. Now, average tasting fee is $50. Wineries have become architectural splendors, and single varietal reds cost $60 or more. I have recently started going to Paso a lot more, hoping to rediscover the old Napa and Sonoma. But Paso is well on its way to become another luxury destination. The new tasting rooms at Booker and Epoch Vineyards were stunning, and wines start at $70
- scelerat 5y agoThankfully you can still get a perfectly good bottle of wine for under $10 at TJ’s
- base698 5y agoThe Paso airport, which is untowered, routinely has Citation jets in the pattern making traffic calls. Seems it's definitely been luxury for a bit. I'm more familiar with Santa Ynez and the Pinots from Sideways. The only Paso wine I've had has been Justin, which seems to be a large producer since it's in Costco.
- Wiseacre 5y agoThere were several wineries with free tastings in Sonoma when I went before COVID. And that was during a busy holiday season.
- sjg007 5y agoThey are actually not allowed to charge a tasting fee. I think they get away with it by charging for the glasses.
- dont__panic 5y agoI'm a big fan of the Finger Lakes region of NYS for this reason -- Napa Valley is just too fancy for me at this point. The Columbia River Valley up in Washington/Oregon is a good compromise between "too fancy" and "too low-brow" in my opinion -- a nice mix of wineries doing all kinds of weird stuff up there.
- kinleyd 5y agoCount me in among the flakes who went for Pinot Noir (and, um, still do) because of Sideways.
- werber 5y agoI know of this movie, but haven’t seen it and I don’t drink wine, but I know that when I’m asked to bring wine that people do not mean merlot from buying it from a Costco or whatever before. Fascinating that a movie I heard of, had such a profound impact on an industry.
- Kosirich 5y agoReminds me of a story from few (5 maybe) years ago when The Economist reported that USA milk producers had to throw X amount (X being in tons) of milk due to a sudden shift of preference to another yogurt type, driven by social networks.
- sgt101 5y agoIn other news Philip the Bold broke the Burgundy Wine industry. In 1395. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_the_Bold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_the_Bold
- LeonB 5y ago> In 1395, Philip the Bold outlawed cultivation of the Gamay grape in favour of Pinot Noir in an early example of agricultural regulation related to wine quality
- barrkel 5y agoThat's great! Gamay is my least favourite red grape; it's a very rare Beaujolais that I can stand drinking, it needs to be well made to have enough perfume to be tolerable.
- barrkel 5y ago> They’re [Merlot vs Pinot] just two different types of grapes, with marginally different flavor profiles This is completely incorrect as any habitual wine drinker can tell you. Wines made from the two grapes look very different - Pinot is translucent, Merlot has a lot of colour - and taste quite different, though the specifics of the taste difference are dependent on the wine making technique.
- mattlondon 5y agoInteresting that there are a lot of comments here about trends in Napa & elsewhere, tastes, what people prefer etc. Perhaps it was just a funny line with no deeper-wider-meaning or commentary? Someone so entitled and so obsessed with the details that a "normal" person would not notice - a wine geek or wine nerd if you will - getting worked up about something so totally inconsequential to most people. It is funny. I could totally imagine a line from some HN-favourite tech satire. "And if they use cherry MX reds in there, we're just going to use cherry MX reds ok? I'm not going to fucking use cherry MX reds!" Substitute keyboard switches for vi/emacs, tabs/spaces, 80 chars/120 chars etc.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- quartz 5y ago> At any rate we’re 17 years out from the movie now, long enough for the pendulum of consumer preference to start swinging the opposite way: Merlot is back on the menu. Crud. Underpriced Merlot has been the best thing ever for the last decade!
- misiti3780 5y agoIf anyone here liked the movie (which was great), the book is even better! There are a lot of funny scenes that didnt make it to the movie like when the two characters get shot at by some local hunting wild hogs at night + more sex.