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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

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.

metadat 4y ago
The thing is, wine "quality" is entirely subjective. I've not found much correlation between price and whether I will like it or not. The only safe bet is that if it tastes too strongly of vinegar, probably people won't like it as much. But some European wines (Spain and Italy) intentionally produce wine with a non-negligible amount of vinegar taste. I know of a single maker that only puts out wines that I consider good or at least okay: Heitz. Heitz is pricey though, and a $6 bottle of Barefoot or Charles Shaw two buck chuck can be just as good or better than a huge assortment of $50 or $300 bottles of swill. In my experience.
- namdnay 4y ago
  > wine quality is entirely subjective I wouldn’t go that far… there are many wines that everyone agrees are foul. La Villageoise for example? There’s a reason it’s 2E/L 6USD is what, 5.80E a bottle? That’s already a lot more comfortable
- fullshark 4y ago
  I'd be shocked if you thought there's was actually no correlation if you're thinking of a price range from $5 to $100+. The worst wines by far I've had have been the ultra cheap stuff. Once you get above like $20 or whatever your personal threshold is though the variance is much smaller in terms of quality I'd say.
  - metadat 4y ago
    You do make a good point; the worst of the worst tend to be the ultra cheapies. With that said, there are unbounded arrays of cheap and expensive selections that all taste like shit (again, in my opinion - others likely perceive them differently). I've met plenty of people who happily drink something I consider 100% not palatable or suitable for human consumption.
    - fullshark 4y ago
      Yeah bad (as in unappealing to my palate) expensive wines are bad in an entirely different unique, "expensive tasting" way.
- sbf501 4y ago
  > The thing is, wine quality is entirely subjective. The article says it isn't. And I agree. Go buy a two-buck chuck at Trader Joe's, and a $50 Chateauneuf de Pape from 2018. One is an acrid, acidic fruit punch, the other is a balanced soft tannin delight. I guarantee your palette can tell the difference, or your money back. :)
  - metadat 4y ago
    Agreed, they have different qualities. Still, characteristics don't automatically translate to people preferring the expensive one because it's "better", it's only "different". Individual taste preferences introduce a high degree of variance.
    - sbf501 4y ago
      Of course, some people love velveeta. But if that's all you've ever had... I thought the smiley face on my comment was a dead giveaway.
  - radicaldreamer 4y ago
    The chuck is the "delight"
    - sbf501 4y ago
      When I want the cool refreshing taste of fruity vinegar I buy this: https://www.amazon.com/Pok-Som-Drinking-Vinegar-5x4-Oz/dp/B076CSXHZV https://www.amazon.com/Pok-Som-Drinking-Vinegar-5x4-Oz/dp/B0... Fight me. :)
- csa 4y ago
  > a $6 bottle of Barefoot can be just as good or better than $50 or $300 bottles of swill As someone who has blind tasted many wines… - I can see not being able to tell a difference between $50 bottles and $300 bottles, and even preferring the less expensive option. Some of the tastes can be very subtle, and sometimes the more expensive wines need to be cellared before they really start to shine. - I honestly don’t think I have ever had a $50 plus bottle of wine that I would not have preferred over Barefoot, which has approximately zero taste markers of a wine made to taste good. - There are inexpensive wines (sub-$8) that can hold their own versus $20-30 bottles, but that almost always involves generous use of oak chips and an audience that doesn’t mind the imbalanced flavor profile. Most people don’t mind the imbalance, especially since the wines are usually inexpensive, high alcohol, and taste better than wine at a similar price point. - Folks who can’t differentiate wine taste may be “non-tasters”. I dislike this term of art, but it’s folks who have fewer taste buds per unit area of their tongue. Tell-tale signs are people who salt everything and/or use hot sauce to an extreme level. - For folks on a budget who want to drink decent wine, Trader Joe’s Reserve wines ~$10 a bottle) punch way above their weight. These are basically $20-30 retail bottles of wine that needed to be cleared at the winery cellars quickly to make space for a new vintage. “Shiners” is the term of art for these bottles pre-labeling.
  - jb_s 4y ago
    Not speaking for everyone but I'm pretty sure a lot of people who love extreme hot sauces, it's not so much the flavour but that they just want to feel something for once :o
  - 2devnull 4y ago
    “honestly don’t think I have ever had a $50 plus bottle of wine that I would not have preferred over Barefoot, which has approximately zero taste markers of a wine made to taste good.” I can’t believe that. I’ve never had barefoot and probably never will but there’s a lot of totally undrinkable, maybe even semi-poisonous, expensive wine. It’s not even rare. If you buy from a good merchant this is less of a problem but still, expensive wines go bad, and some were never good to begin with.
    - 4y ago
- 13415 4y ago
  Anything related to taste and smell is partly subjective, partly intersubjective. The sense of smell varies from person to person due to genetic differences, different learned tastes, partial anosmia, etc. This is also the reason why one like a perfume and another one hates it. The chromatograph can analyze a substance objectively but every nose smells it a bit differently.
- jasmer 4y ago
  Yea I think probably most people can tell the difference between $6, $20 and $50 and then struggle beyond that (and beyond that it is very subjective). But for 'crap' 'ok' and 'good' and 'good+' categories I think it's actually fairly straight forward.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
KineticLensman 4y ago
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.
- betaby 4y ago
  It is a tradition there? What is the name of that wine?
  - KineticLensman 4y ago
    Yes, it is a tradition (see other comments here). > What is the name of that wine? Sorry, I just don't remember after all this time. Although IIRC the label's picture had a peasant sort of character who appeared to be holding a glass at arm's length (or at least that's how we interpreted it)
- nradov 4y ago
  When my grandparents lived in Croatia in the pre-WW2 years they used to mix a little wine into their water because the water quality was bad. I guess the wine killed the germs, or at least masked the taste of the water.
- foobarian 4y ago
  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.
  - metadat 4y ago
    Does the alcohol by volume content end up diluted proportionally to something like 2-7% vs the usual 12-14%?
  - hnick 4y ago
    Do they do red wine and coke over there too? Fairly common in some parts of the world, I'd guess it works well with cheap wine (never tried).
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
I think the article gets at that pretty well: > 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.
- TulliusCicero 4y ago
  I feel like the difference between cheap tasty pizza vs expensive tasty pizza is that I usually feel a lot worse after eating the cheap stuff. Physically worse, not emotionally worse because I cheaped out of something.
BashiBazouk 4y ago
There is. My father was really in to California wines in the 70's and 80's. From my freshmen year of high school in the early 80's I was always served a glass of wine with dinner. A couple of years in to this my friends and I hit our peak drinking phase. One would come up with a gallon jug of Gallo or some off brand box of wine. I would take a sip and just no. I can't drink this, it's awful. Now beer I could drink some of the worst, 40's of old English 800 for example, but wine, ya it at least had to be palatable before I would touch the stuff. My friends thought I was a snob...
- rpmisms 4y ago
  How to keep your kids from binge drinking: imbue them with good taste. Binge drinking will become too expensive

metadat 4y ago

The thing is, wine "quality" is entirely subjective. I've not found much correlation between price and whether I will like it or not. The only safe bet is that if it tastes too strongly of vinegar, probably people won't like it as much. But some European wines (Spain and Italy) intentionally produce wine with a non-negligible amount of vinegar taste. I know of a single maker that only puts out wines that I consider good or at least okay: Heitz. Heitz is pricey though, and a $6 bottle of Barefoot or Charles Shaw two buck chuck can be just as good or better than a huge assortment of $50 or $300 bottles of swill. In my experience.

namdnay 4y ago
> wine quality is entirely subjective I wouldn’t go that far… there are many wines that everyone agrees are foul. La Villageoise for example? There’s a reason it’s 2E/L 6USD is what, 5.80E a bottle? That’s already a lot more comfortable
fullshark 4y ago
I'd be shocked if you thought there's was actually no correlation if you're thinking of a price range from $5 to $100+. The worst wines by far I've had have been the ultra cheap stuff. Once you get above like $20 or whatever your personal threshold is though the variance is much smaller in terms of quality I'd say.
- metadat 4y ago
  You do make a good point; the worst of the worst tend to be the ultra cheapies. With that said, there are unbounded arrays of cheap and expensive selections that all taste like shit (again, in my opinion - others likely perceive them differently). I've met plenty of people who happily drink something I consider 100% not palatable or suitable for human consumption.
  - fullshark 4y ago
    Yeah bad (as in unappealing to my palate) expensive wines are bad in an entirely different unique, "expensive tasting" way.
sbf501 4y ago
> The thing is, wine quality is entirely subjective. The article says it isn't. And I agree. Go buy a two-buck chuck at Trader Joe's, and a $50 Chateauneuf de Pape from 2018. One is an acrid, acidic fruit punch, the other is a balanced soft tannin delight. I guarantee your palette can tell the difference, or your money back. :)
- metadat 4y ago
  Agreed, they have different qualities. Still, characteristics don't automatically translate to people preferring the expensive one because it's "better", it's only "different". Individual taste preferences introduce a high degree of variance.
  - sbf501 4y ago
    Of course, some people love velveeta. But if that's all you've ever had... I thought the smiley face on my comment was a dead giveaway.
- radicaldreamer 4y ago
  The chuck is the "delight"
  - sbf501 4y ago
    When I want the cool refreshing taste of fruity vinegar I buy this: https://www.amazon.com/Pok-Som-Drinking-Vinegar-5x4-Oz/dp/B076CSXHZV https://www.amazon.com/Pok-Som-Drinking-Vinegar-5x4-Oz/dp/B0... Fight me. :)
csa 4y ago
> a $6 bottle of Barefoot can be just as good or better than $50 or $300 bottles of swill As someone who has blind tasted many wines… - I can see not being able to tell a difference between $50 bottles and $300 bottles, and even preferring the less expensive option. Some of the tastes can be very subtle, and sometimes the more expensive wines need to be cellared before they really start to shine. - I honestly don’t think I have ever had a $50 plus bottle of wine that I would not have preferred over Barefoot, which has approximately zero taste markers of a wine made to taste good. - There are inexpensive wines (sub-$8) that can hold their own versus $20-30 bottles, but that almost always involves generous use of oak chips and an audience that doesn’t mind the imbalanced flavor profile. Most people don’t mind the imbalance, especially since the wines are usually inexpensive, high alcohol, and taste better than wine at a similar price point. - Folks who can’t differentiate wine taste may be “non-tasters”. I dislike this term of art, but it’s folks who have fewer taste buds per unit area of their tongue. Tell-tale signs are people who salt everything and/or use hot sauce to an extreme level. - For folks on a budget who want to drink decent wine, Trader Joe’s Reserve wines ~$10 a bottle) punch way above their weight. These are basically $20-30 retail bottles of wine that needed to be cleared at the winery cellars quickly to make space for a new vintage. “Shiners” is the term of art for these bottles pre-labeling.
- jb_s 4y ago
  Not speaking for everyone but I'm pretty sure a lot of people who love extreme hot sauces, it's not so much the flavour but that they just want to feel something for once :o
- 2devnull 4y ago
  “honestly don’t think I have ever had a $50 plus bottle of wine that I would not have preferred over Barefoot, which has approximately zero taste markers of a wine made to taste good.” I can’t believe that. I’ve never had barefoot and probably never will but there’s a lot of totally undrinkable, maybe even semi-poisonous, expensive wine. It’s not even rare. If you buy from a good merchant this is less of a problem but still, expensive wines go bad, and some were never good to begin with.
  - 4y ago
13415 4y ago
Anything related to taste and smell is partly subjective, partly intersubjective. The sense of smell varies from person to person due to genetic differences, different learned tastes, partial anosmia, etc. This is also the reason why one like a perfume and another one hates it. The chromatograph can analyze a substance objectively but every nose smells it a bit differently.
jasmer 4y ago
Yea I think probably most people can tell the difference between $6, $20 and $50 and then struggle beyond that (and beyond that it is very subjective). But for 'crap' 'ok' and 'good' and 'good+' categories I think it's actually fairly straight forward.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

KineticLensman 4y ago

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.

betaby 4y ago
It is a tradition there? What is the name of that wine?
- KineticLensman 4y ago
  Yes, it is a tradition (see other comments here). > What is the name of that wine? Sorry, I just don't remember after all this time. Although IIRC the label's picture had a peasant sort of character who appeared to be holding a glass at arm's length (or at least that's how we interpreted it)
nradov 4y ago
When my grandparents lived in Croatia in the pre-WW2 years they used to mix a little wine into their water because the water quality was bad. I guess the wine killed the germs, or at least masked the taste of the water.
foobarian 4y ago
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.
- metadat 4y ago
  Does the alcohol by volume content end up diluted proportionally to something like 2-7% vs the usual 12-14%?
- hnick 4y ago
  Do they do red wine and coke over there too? Fairly common in some parts of the world, I'd guess it works well with cheap wine (never tried).

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

I think the article gets at that pretty well: > 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.

TulliusCicero 4y ago
I feel like the difference between cheap tasty pizza vs expensive tasty pizza is that I usually feel a lot worse after eating the cheap stuff. Physically worse, not emotionally worse because I cheaped out of something.

BashiBazouk 4y ago

There is. My father was really in to California wines in the 70's and 80's. From my freshmen year of high school in the early 80's I was always served a glass of wine with dinner. A couple of years in to this my friends and I hit our peak drinking phase. One would come up with a gallon jug of Gallo or some off brand box of wine. I would take a sip and just no. I can't drink this, it's awful. Now beer I could drink some of the worst, 40's of old English 800 for example, but wine, ya it at least had to be palatable before I would touch the stuff. My friends thought I was a snob...

rpmisms 4y ago
How to keep your kids from binge drinking: imbue them with good taste. Binge drinking will become too expensive