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There have been a lot of blind wine tastings done and the results are always interesting. Sometimes cheap bottles score as high, or higher than vintages. Other

There have been a lot of blind wine tastings done and the results are always interesting. Sometimes cheap bottles score as high, or higher than vintages. Other times people can spot the cheap "carton" wine easily. My wife and I love to cook, have discussed opening our own restaurant, have eaten at lots of very expensive "haute cuisine" restaurants and have tasted lots of wines. Part of the "problem" is that taste is subjective and can be influenced through suggestion. So the atmosphere, the price, the meal pairing can all affect a person's appreciation of the glass. I remember an episode of Penn & Teller's Bullshit where they had a "water sommelier" at a restaurant who would upsell customers on speciality bottles of water and they were all filled with the same tap water from the same garden hose at the back of the restaurant. The results were fascinating. Subjects swore they tasted different from one another. The real question, in my opinion, is whether a high-priced bottle is "worth it" by as near-objective standards as possible. In other words, given two bottles of different prices, all else being equal, would the average person prefer the taste of one over the other? That varies widely from one wine to another. My wife and I have enjoyed a good vintage but we are also perfectly content with a $15 bottle from a local vineyard here in Ontario, which is our "go to." I'm equally partial to a $15 Rothschild Merlot or Pinot Noir and I wonder if the truly exceptional wines that I've tasted at restaurants were more about the environment, the food pairing, the company and the occasion than they were about the flavour in isolation.

p1necone 4y ago
The secret is that a lot of cheap wine is pretty darn good. I imagine there's somewhat of a correlation between price and quality, especially at the absolute bottom end of the pricing scale. But it's a very loose correlation.
- bombcar 4y ago
  This is a huge secret across so many different markets; it's insane. The one we may be most familiar with is computers, of course - even a bargain-basement computer today is an absolute beast compared to 10+ years ago. Entire classes of "cheap foods" have disappeared because we are so rich we can make everything "good" - meaning the bargain-basement stuff is now often higher-quality than midrange stuff of 20/50/100 years ago. Hot dogs are a decent example, they're all now "meat" and many are "pure beef" when they used to be the disastrous remains of who knows what. And even they are being destroyed by just how cheap hamburger is - the original fast food was hot dogs and that's almost entirely gone now.
  - randomdata 4y ago
    > the original fast food was hot dogs and that's almost entirely gone now. Curious about this history. According to Wikipedia, fast food was common during antiquity, while the hotdog wasn't invented until the 1400s. White Castle seems to be recognized as the origin of modern day fast food and it opened as a hamburger joint.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Fair enough, maybe not the originallest, but some of the now hamburger chains started out as hot dog chains, of which there's one? left IIRC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl%27s_Jr.#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl%27s_Jr.#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_dog
      - randomdata 4y ago
        Isn't present day Carl's Jr. just Hardee's by another name? Hardee's began as a burger joint as well. According to research from the University of Guelph, hotdogs are comparatively uncommon in fast food because hotdogs are harder to cook consistently and have a shorter window of enjoyability which makes them less suited to fast food than hamburgers.
        dragonwriter 4y ago
        > Isn’t present day Carl’s Jr. just Hardee’s by another name? The corporate parent of Carl’s Jr. bought Hardee’s in 1997, but Carl’s stayed pretty much the same.
        fiddlerwoaroof 4y ago
        I think Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. were bought by the same company and then evolved towards each other.
        bombcar 4y ago
        Carl's Jr was 'transferred' to CKE (Carl Karcher Enterprises) which then acquired Hardees, and Hardees became Carl's Jr in everything but name (as far as I can tell). What was interesting is the absolute numbers: The "merger" created a chain of 3,828 restaurants – 3,152 Hardee's outlets in 40 states and 10 foreign countries and 676 Carl's Jr. outlets primarily in California.
- kube-system 4y ago
  Above $60, you’re mostly paying for name, provenance, or prestige rather than taste.
  - surement 4y ago
    Just because you don't know how to appreciate well-made things doesn't mean that they're strictly ostentatious.
    - taneq 4y ago
      How’d you get ‘strictly’ from ‘mostly’?
      - surement 4y ago
        added it in after reading my comment but not re-reading the parent
    - triceratops 4y ago
      "Ostentation - pretentious and vulgar display, especially of wealth and luxury" To a person who can't tell the difference between cheap and expensive wine, expensive wine is "strictly ostentatious" by definition.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      You can absolutely get a top quality wine for <$60. Even the fancy 18th century European wineries that sell $10,000 bottles of wine will tell you this. Scarcity is the number one factor that determines the price of an expensive wine. A good quality wine from a recent vintage will cost less than an equally desirable wine from an older vintage, simply because people haven't drank most of it yet.
      - surement 4y ago
        you can get great wine for under $60 but not top quality > Scarcity is the number one factor that determines the price of an expensive wine. just because something is rare doesn't mean it's good; a random rock on a beach is one of a kind but you couldn't sell it for a penny > good quality wine from a recent vintage will cost less than an equally desirable wine from an older vintage, simply because people haven't drank most of it yet. no, if it's less expensive it's because there is work involved in cellaring a wine and that adds value
- voldacar 4y ago
  It really depends a lot on the region. For example, price and quality don't correlate that much in Burgundy. It's easy to spend a few hundred dollars on a mediocre bottle.
- hef19898 4y ago
  Yep, there is correlation between my perceived quality and price, et the very cheap end of wine. It gets less pronounced the more expensive it gets so, and above certain threshold it is a lot of branding. So, I think the biggest problem with all those blind wine tastings is that they equate price with quality. Because those two are, as goes for everything in life, only ever so loosely related.
- ghaff 4y ago
  VERY rarely I do a premium wine tasting in California wine country. And, yeah, I kinda get it. There are subtle differences in some of the high-end wines as opposed to midrange stuff. But I'm actually happy with even the better box wines (however crappy the low-end stuff is) and I'd much rather spend disposable income on a better bottle of whisky or a better cheese.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    That better bottle of whiskey can get you into some of the same kind of trouble. :)
- pas 4y ago
  Also big brands usually deliver on consistency. Making the same (or very similar) wine year from year on the order or hundreds of thousands of bottles ... yeah, that takes some skill, and favorable location doesn't hurt either :) For example see the big wineries in New Zealand. But usually if you want something that's exceptional you have to spend a lot on throwing away the unexceptional parts. Not every year will be good, and even if the weather was good there's still no guarantee the wine will be amazing. Yet the costs are there. That's why there's a very hefty premium on brands that only deliver the top-top-top quality. (Obviously they sell the grapes/wine that did not make it under a different brand, but sssh.)
  - fiddlerwoaroof 4y ago
    I assume the big brands get part of the way there by mixing old and new wine, though.
    - davidgay 4y ago
      > I assume the big brands get part of the way there by mixing old and new wine, though. I don't think they can - wine is usually sold by vintage year. "Origin" is usually weaker (e.g., 50% of grapes must be from the declared origin) and my understanding is that is where you can "adjust" year-to-year.
      - fiddlerwoaroof 4y ago
        Some of the cheap brands (Barefoot for one) don’t have a vintage. So I think they can do a solera-type system for their wines.
    - jacobr1 4y ago
      Not mixing between years, but you can mix between different vineyards of the same year. As long as the wine comes from the same region you can keep the branding. There are plenty of contract vineyards that sell to different wineries to enable these mixes.
- taneq 4y ago
  Very true. I live in a wine region and an $8 bottle from the local booze shop can sometimes be found in restaurants on the other side of the world for $50+. Is not just that cheap wine is often as good as expensive wine, sometimes it’s exactly the same thing.
  - 78124781 4y ago
    I once met a local winemaker from a tiny winery in a foreign country who was proud to say that their wine was being served a restaurant in the US. I asked them how much they thought the wine would be priced at given that it was their entry-level wine. The winemaker estimated $20-25. We looked it up--it was $60.
    - jacobr1 4y ago
      That is standard restaurant markup over retail: 200-300%. So a $20 wine you get a wineshop should be priced $60-80 in a restaurant. One secret is that most nicer restaurants allow you to bring your own wine, provided you pay a "corkage" fee of usually $10-40. So if the wine is say, $30 retail + $20 corkage, you are better off than paying $90-120 for the same bottle at the restaurant.
- lvass 4y ago
  Absolutely true in South america. I've had a ton of different sub-$5 wines. In my experience, if you randomly buy 20 bottles of $5 wines, one is better than a $100 bottle, plus you also get some 5 great wines, 10 good ones and the rest works for cooking. The best wine I've ever drank cost less than $3 and was produced in a tropical (21 South), 800m altitude region of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Never assume wine is bad because it's cheap or from somewhere.
  - davnicwil 4y ago
    > The best wine I've ever drank Do you remember what this was called, or specifically where? If I'm ever there I'd love to find this!
    - lvass 4y ago
      Quinta dos Guimarães, from Santa Bárbara do Monte Verde. It's super hard to find and they might be defunct, it's been quite a few years.
      - davnicwil 4y ago
        thank you!
    - jacobr1 4y ago
      One of the big differences in this category (cheap wines) is consistently. You can genuinely find great wines, but there is much greater variance in the quality year to year, or within variety of the same winery. In other words, the following year might be a crap wine, good, or in-between.
- jcadam 4y ago
  Quantity has its own quality :) ...except Franzia, which sucks. For those among us who have recently been laid off - Bota Box Nighthawk Black is a decent/drinkable red if you're on a budget.
  - scrumbledober 4y ago
    I recently picked up exactly this, not caring much what I got since it was destined for a pot of mulled wine. I had some of it and was pretty surprised how delicious it was untainted by spices and honey and brandy
- Agingcoder 4y ago
  Not a lot, but quite a bit. Winemakers have told me that they can't sell everything cheaply, and not only for basic economic reasons : if it's too cheap, lots of people won't buy it! As to the matter of price, most of my wine tasting friends (including some with proper wine collections) are perfectly ok paying 5-10 euros for a bottle, as long as they like the wine - some of them have even made it a specialty to find good and cheap wine. At the other end, I was once served wine without knowing what it was at a friend's place. I took a sip, then something happened in my head, and I started crying (I cry when food is really good) . I still remember that particular bottle, and the, well, infinite landscape that had suddenly opened in my mind (I know it sounds utterly ridiculous , but this is how it felt). No other wine has had the same effect on me, and it turns out the bottle was worth about 400 euros!
  - emmo 4y ago
    How do people react when you cry after taking a sip of wine?
    - Agingcoder 4y ago
      Well, it happens very rarely (I don't cry unless whatever I'm having is extremely good). When it happens, people find it quite amusing, and it usually starts a conversation about the pleasures of life.
ramesh31 4y ago
>My wife and I love to cook, have discussed opening our own restaurant, have eaten at lots of very expensive "haute cuisine" restaurants and have tasted lots of wines. Please don’t make the mistake of thinking “I like to cook” means “I would like to run a restaraunt”. They’re two completely different things.
- kube-system 4y ago
  Potentially that may have been the content of their discussion.
- wwweston 4y ago
  Can you elaborate on this? I'm sure there's more to it and it could be great to know what some of the specifics are, but it also seems like someone who likes to cook is going to need to be present for a good restaurant
  - deadbunny 4y ago
    Think of the distance between "I like playing video games" and "I want to work for an AAA developer".
    - wwweston 4y ago
      "I like playing video games" would be analogous to "I like dining out." "I like making video games" would be analogous "I like to cook." Of course "I like making video games" might not mean "I want to work for an AAA developer", but the reasons why would probably be different than those you wouldn't want to make a commercial indie title / open your own restaurant.
      - mod 4y ago
        As a video game player, developer (non-game), bar/restaurant owner, and a person who likes to cook: I think the distance between them is about the same, as the GP noted. It's not analogous, but they didn't make that claim. I have only cooked less than 1% of the time the restaurant has been open. Also "enjoying cooking" has nothing to do with enjoying a commercial kitchen. Pretty sure literally at all. I feel compelled to put out quality food, but I do not enjoy it at all when I'm not cooking at home.
retrac 4y ago
I learned the secret in my mid-20s whilst brewing my own cider as a poor student. Take some decent apple juice without preservatives. Add a bit of yeast; baking yeast for bread at the supermarket will do just fine. Observe basic sanitation principles. Add some sugar, perhaps 150 g per litre of juice. Leave the concoction in a cool, dry place for a few months. A one-way seal for the CO2 release is preferable (a balloon works) but is not strictly required; leave the cap on loose. Carefully pour off the result into a new vessel. Let this settle for another month. A very palatable drink results at about 4 - 5% alcohol by volume. People figured this out thousands of years ago. And they did not have plastic bottles, germ theory, or infinite hot water on tap. It's trivial to make an alcoholic beverage. The rest is finesse. And posturing.
- tomcam 4y ago
  Next time I'm in the pen expect a call from me for that recipe
  - shrubble 4y ago
    Obligatory Pruno link from Modern Drunkard magazine (some profanity) : https://drunkard.com/11-03-jailhouse-3/ https://drunkard.com/11-03-jailhouse-3/
    - Firmwarrior 4y ago
      haha, that was a great read > I expelled all my breath and sucked down another glass. Vinegary, yeasty, with a rusty shank of an aftertaste. I was feeling a slight buzz, but I didn’t think I could stomach another glass. It was booze all right, but two glasses was my non-incarcerated limit.
    - erik 4y ago
      I hadn't read that before, thanks for sharing it! I had expected your link to be the classic Steve, Don't Eat It! Prison wine story. So here is the obligatory link to that: http://www.thesneeze.com/2005/steve-dont-eat-it-vol-8.php http://www.thesneeze.com/2005/steve-dont-eat-it-vol-8.php
Zamicol 4y ago
"Penn & Teller's Bullshit": https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=295904514122934 https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=295904514122934
spockz 4y ago
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?
- coding123 4y ago
  whoa that is weird. When I taste wine these days, I can ONLY taste vinegar. I'm not even sure why that is.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    Some people have hypersensitivity to some particular taste. I'm oversensitive to bitterness, and basically can't drink beer at all, and only the sweetest wines (late harvest, icewine and similar) are actually enjoyable.
  - wikibob 4y ago
    Have you had Covid lately? It can severely affect taste and smell.
    - coding123 4y ago
      Nah, this has been going on for about 15 years for me. I haven't tried wine recently because to me it tastes so bad.
      - spockz 4y ago
        Apparently any corona virus can wreck havoc with your taste. But it is all very unclear.
- gspencley 4y ago
  The phenomenon of one flavour "colouring" another is perfectly normal. So that in that sense it is "common." I've not heard too many people say that food will "ruin" wine for them, though. Wine "pairing" is a whole thing. Certain wines go better with certain foods. A good sommelier is expected to be an expert in wine pairings and will recommend wines based on your food order. The principle is what chefs think of as "balancing" flavours. There are 5 recognized basic flavours: salt, sweet, acidity (sourness), bitterness and "umami" (savoury). When learning to cook creatively aspiring chefs will think about balancing these flavours, as each will affect your perception of the other. Salt will "neutralize" / "tame" bitterness, sweetness will do the same for acidity / sourness and vice versa. If what you find is that your wines taste sour after eating a food, then you are probably sensitive to sweetness and / or sourness. Most people can experience what you are describing by eating a bite of something really sweet, like cheesecake, and then tasting a dry wine. It will taste VERY sour as a result because your taste buds have just been desensitized to sweetness based on the really sweet food that you just ate, so the sweetness in the wine will not be perceived, leaving only the acidity. It just sounds like in your case this phenomenon has been dialed up to 11.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
> subjective and can be influenced through suggestion. So the atmosphere, the price, the meal pairing can all affect... Music is a massive factor [1] [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/effects-of-music-on-sales-2011-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/effects-of-music-on-sales-20...
kevincox 4y ago
> The real question, in my opinion, is whether a high-priced bottle is "worth it" by as near-objective standards as possible. This really resonates with me. In day-to-day life "worth it" depends a lot on the person, and especially their financial standing. I like to try to think of an unbiased "worth it" as plotting cost vs value of everything in the category on a scatter plot. Things that are "worth it" are above the average curve (and the curve is going up at higher prices). Basically "this option provides more value than most other options of same or lower cost".

p1necone 4y ago

The secret is that a lot of cheap wine is pretty darn good. I imagine there's somewhat of a correlation between price and quality, especially at the absolute bottom end of the pricing scale. But it's a very loose correlation.

bombcar 4y ago
This is a huge secret across so many different markets; it's insane. The one we may be most familiar with is computers, of course - even a bargain-basement computer today is an absolute beast compared to 10+ years ago. Entire classes of "cheap foods" have disappeared because we are so rich we can make everything "good" - meaning the bargain-basement stuff is now often higher-quality than midrange stuff of 20/50/100 years ago. Hot dogs are a decent example, they're all now "meat" and many are "pure beef" when they used to be the disastrous remains of who knows what. And even they are being destroyed by just how cheap hamburger is - the original fast food was hot dogs and that's almost entirely gone now.
- randomdata 4y ago
  > the original fast food was hot dogs and that's almost entirely gone now. Curious about this history. According to Wikipedia, fast food was common during antiquity, while the hotdog wasn't invented until the 1400s. White Castle seems to be recognized as the origin of modern day fast food and it opened as a hamburger joint.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Fair enough, maybe not the originallest, but some of the now hamburger chains started out as hot dog chains, of which there's one? left IIRC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl%27s_Jr.#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl%27s_Jr.#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_dog
    - randomdata 4y ago
      Isn't present day Carl's Jr. just Hardee's by another name? Hardee's began as a burger joint as well. According to research from the University of Guelph, hotdogs are comparatively uncommon in fast food because hotdogs are harder to cook consistently and have a shorter window of enjoyability which makes them less suited to fast food than hamburgers.
      - dragonwriter 4y ago
        > Isn’t present day Carl’s Jr. just Hardee’s by another name? The corporate parent of Carl’s Jr. bought Hardee’s in 1997, but Carl’s stayed pretty much the same.
      - fiddlerwoaroof 4y ago
        I think Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. were bought by the same company and then evolved towards each other.
        bombcar 4y ago
        Carl's Jr was 'transferred' to CKE (Carl Karcher Enterprises) which then acquired Hardees, and Hardees became Carl's Jr in everything but name (as far as I can tell). What was interesting is the absolute numbers: The "merger" created a chain of 3,828 restaurants – 3,152 Hardee's outlets in 40 states and 10 foreign countries and 676 Carl's Jr. outlets primarily in California.
kube-system 4y ago
Above $60, you’re mostly paying for name, provenance, or prestige rather than taste.
- surement 4y ago
  Just because you don't know how to appreciate well-made things doesn't mean that they're strictly ostentatious.
  - taneq 4y ago
    How’d you get ‘strictly’ from ‘mostly’?
    - surement 4y ago
      added it in after reading my comment but not re-reading the parent
  - triceratops 4y ago
    "Ostentation - pretentious and vulgar display, especially of wealth and luxury" To a person who can't tell the difference between cheap and expensive wine, expensive wine is "strictly ostentatious" by definition.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    You can absolutely get a top quality wine for <$60. Even the fancy 18th century European wineries that sell $10,000 bottles of wine will tell you this. Scarcity is the number one factor that determines the price of an expensive wine. A good quality wine from a recent vintage will cost less than an equally desirable wine from an older vintage, simply because people haven't drank most of it yet.
    - surement 4y ago
      you can get great wine for under $60 but not top quality > Scarcity is the number one factor that determines the price of an expensive wine. just because something is rare doesn't mean it's good; a random rock on a beach is one of a kind but you couldn't sell it for a penny > good quality wine from a recent vintage will cost less than an equally desirable wine from an older vintage, simply because people haven't drank most of it yet. no, if it's less expensive it's because there is work involved in cellaring a wine and that adds value
voldacar 4y ago
It really depends a lot on the region. For example, price and quality don't correlate that much in Burgundy. It's easy to spend a few hundred dollars on a mediocre bottle.
hef19898 4y ago
Yep, there is correlation between my perceived quality and price, et the very cheap end of wine. It gets less pronounced the more expensive it gets so, and above certain threshold it is a lot of branding. So, I think the biggest problem with all those blind wine tastings is that they equate price with quality. Because those two are, as goes for everything in life, only ever so loosely related.
ghaff 4y ago
VERY rarely I do a premium wine tasting in California wine country. And, yeah, I kinda get it. There are subtle differences in some of the high-end wines as opposed to midrange stuff. But I'm actually happy with even the better box wines (however crappy the low-end stuff is) and I'd much rather spend disposable income on a better bottle of whisky or a better cheese.
- tptacek 4y ago
  That better bottle of whiskey can get you into some of the same kind of trouble. :)
pas 4y ago
Also big brands usually deliver on consistency. Making the same (or very similar) wine year from year on the order or hundreds of thousands of bottles ... yeah, that takes some skill, and favorable location doesn't hurt either :) For example see the big wineries in New Zealand. But usually if you want something that's exceptional you have to spend a lot on throwing away the unexceptional parts. Not every year will be good, and even if the weather was good there's still no guarantee the wine will be amazing. Yet the costs are there. That's why there's a very hefty premium on brands that only deliver the top-top-top quality. (Obviously they sell the grapes/wine that did not make it under a different brand, but sssh.)
- fiddlerwoaroof 4y ago
  I assume the big brands get part of the way there by mixing old and new wine, though.
  - davidgay 4y ago
    > I assume the big brands get part of the way there by mixing old and new wine, though. I don't think they can - wine is usually sold by vintage year. "Origin" is usually weaker (e.g., 50% of grapes must be from the declared origin) and my understanding is that is where you can "adjust" year-to-year.
    - fiddlerwoaroof 4y ago
      Some of the cheap brands (Barefoot for one) don’t have a vintage. So I think they can do a solera-type system for their wines.
  - jacobr1 4y ago
    Not mixing between years, but you can mix between different vineyards of the same year. As long as the wine comes from the same region you can keep the branding. There are plenty of contract vineyards that sell to different wineries to enable these mixes.
taneq 4y ago
Very true. I live in a wine region and an $8 bottle from the local booze shop can sometimes be found in restaurants on the other side of the world for $50+. Is not just that cheap wine is often as good as expensive wine, sometimes it’s exactly the same thing.
- 78124781 4y ago
  I once met a local winemaker from a tiny winery in a foreign country who was proud to say that their wine was being served a restaurant in the US. I asked them how much they thought the wine would be priced at given that it was their entry-level wine. The winemaker estimated $20-25. We looked it up--it was $60.
  - jacobr1 4y ago
    That is standard restaurant markup over retail: 200-300%. So a $20 wine you get a wineshop should be priced $60-80 in a restaurant. One secret is that most nicer restaurants allow you to bring your own wine, provided you pay a "corkage" fee of usually $10-40. So if the wine is say, $30 retail + $20 corkage, you are better off than paying $90-120 for the same bottle at the restaurant.
lvass 4y ago
Absolutely true in South america. I've had a ton of different sub-$5 wines. In my experience, if you randomly buy 20 bottles of $5 wines, one is better than a $100 bottle, plus you also get some 5 great wines, 10 good ones and the rest works for cooking. The best wine I've ever drank cost less than $3 and was produced in a tropical (21 South), 800m altitude region of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Never assume wine is bad because it's cheap or from somewhere.
- davnicwil 4y ago
  > The best wine I've ever drank Do you remember what this was called, or specifically where? If I'm ever there I'd love to find this!
  - lvass 4y ago
    Quinta dos Guimarães, from Santa Bárbara do Monte Verde. It's super hard to find and they might be defunct, it's been quite a few years.
    - davnicwil 4y ago
      thank you!
  - jacobr1 4y ago
    One of the big differences in this category (cheap wines) is consistently. You can genuinely find great wines, but there is much greater variance in the quality year to year, or within variety of the same winery. In other words, the following year might be a crap wine, good, or in-between.
jcadam 4y ago
Quantity has its own quality :) ...except Franzia, which sucks. For those among us who have recently been laid off - Bota Box Nighthawk Black is a decent/drinkable red if you're on a budget.
- scrumbledober 4y ago
  I recently picked up exactly this, not caring much what I got since it was destined for a pot of mulled wine. I had some of it and was pretty surprised how delicious it was untainted by spices and honey and brandy
Agingcoder 4y ago
Not a lot, but quite a bit. Winemakers have told me that they can't sell everything cheaply, and not only for basic economic reasons : if it's too cheap, lots of people won't buy it! As to the matter of price, most of my wine tasting friends (including some with proper wine collections) are perfectly ok paying 5-10 euros for a bottle, as long as they like the wine - some of them have even made it a specialty to find good and cheap wine. At the other end, I was once served wine without knowing what it was at a friend's place. I took a sip, then something happened in my head, and I started crying (I cry when food is really good) . I still remember that particular bottle, and the, well, infinite landscape that had suddenly opened in my mind (I know it sounds utterly ridiculous , but this is how it felt). No other wine has had the same effect on me, and it turns out the bottle was worth about 400 euros!
- emmo 4y ago
  How do people react when you cry after taking a sip of wine?
  - Agingcoder 4y ago
    Well, it happens very rarely (I don't cry unless whatever I'm having is extremely good). When it happens, people find it quite amusing, and it usually starts a conversation about the pleasures of life.

ramesh31 4y ago

>My wife and I love to cook, have discussed opening our own restaurant, have eaten at lots of very expensive "haute cuisine" restaurants and have tasted lots of wines. Please don’t make the mistake of thinking “I like to cook” means “I would like to run a restaraunt”. They’re two completely different things.

kube-system 4y ago
Potentially that may have been the content of their discussion.
wwweston 4y ago
Can you elaborate on this? I'm sure there's more to it and it could be great to know what some of the specifics are, but it also seems like someone who likes to cook is going to need to be present for a good restaurant
- deadbunny 4y ago
  Think of the distance between "I like playing video games" and "I want to work for an AAA developer".
  - wwweston 4y ago
    "I like playing video games" would be analogous to "I like dining out." "I like making video games" would be analogous "I like to cook." Of course "I like making video games" might not mean "I want to work for an AAA developer", but the reasons why would probably be different than those you wouldn't want to make a commercial indie title / open your own restaurant.
    - mod 4y ago
      As a video game player, developer (non-game), bar/restaurant owner, and a person who likes to cook: I think the distance between them is about the same, as the GP noted. It's not analogous, but they didn't make that claim. I have only cooked less than 1% of the time the restaurant has been open. Also "enjoying cooking" has nothing to do with enjoying a commercial kitchen. Pretty sure literally at all. I feel compelled to put out quality food, but I do not enjoy it at all when I'm not cooking at home.

retrac 4y ago

I learned the secret in my mid-20s whilst brewing my own cider as a poor student. Take some decent apple juice without preservatives. Add a bit of yeast; baking yeast for bread at the supermarket will do just fine. Observe basic sanitation principles. Add some sugar, perhaps 150 g per litre of juice. Leave the concoction in a cool, dry place for a few months. A one-way seal for the CO2 release is preferable (a balloon works) but is not strictly required; leave the cap on loose. Carefully pour off the result into a new vessel. Let this settle for another month. A very palatable drink results at about 4 - 5% alcohol by volume. People figured this out thousands of years ago. And they did not have plastic bottles, germ theory, or infinite hot water on tap. It's trivial to make an alcoholic beverage. The rest is finesse. And posturing.

tomcam 4y ago
Next time I'm in the pen expect a call from me for that recipe
- shrubble 4y ago
  Obligatory Pruno link from Modern Drunkard magazine (some profanity) : https://drunkard.com/11-03-jailhouse-3/ https://drunkard.com/11-03-jailhouse-3/
  - Firmwarrior 4y ago
    haha, that was a great read > I expelled all my breath and sucked down another glass. Vinegary, yeasty, with a rusty shank of an aftertaste. I was feeling a slight buzz, but I didn’t think I could stomach another glass. It was booze all right, but two glasses was my non-incarcerated limit.
  - erik 4y ago
    I hadn't read that before, thanks for sharing it! I had expected your link to be the classic Steve, Don't Eat It! Prison wine story. So here is the obligatory link to that: http://www.thesneeze.com/2005/steve-dont-eat-it-vol-8.php http://www.thesneeze.com/2005/steve-dont-eat-it-vol-8.php

Zamicol 4y ago

"Penn & Teller's Bullshit": https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=295904514122934 https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=295904514122934

spockz 4y ago

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?

coding123 4y ago
whoa that is weird. When I taste wine these days, I can ONLY taste vinegar. I'm not even sure why that is.
- int_19h 4y ago
  Some people have hypersensitivity to some particular taste. I'm oversensitive to bitterness, and basically can't drink beer at all, and only the sweetest wines (late harvest, icewine and similar) are actually enjoyable.
- wikibob 4y ago
  Have you had Covid lately? It can severely affect taste and smell.
  - coding123 4y ago
    Nah, this has been going on for about 15 years for me. I haven't tried wine recently because to me it tastes so bad.
    - spockz 4y ago
      Apparently any corona virus can wreck havoc with your taste. But it is all very unclear.
gspencley 4y ago
The phenomenon of one flavour "colouring" another is perfectly normal. So that in that sense it is "common." I've not heard too many people say that food will "ruin" wine for them, though. Wine "pairing" is a whole thing. Certain wines go better with certain foods. A good sommelier is expected to be an expert in wine pairings and will recommend wines based on your food order. The principle is what chefs think of as "balancing" flavours. There are 5 recognized basic flavours: salt, sweet, acidity (sourness), bitterness and "umami" (savoury). When learning to cook creatively aspiring chefs will think about balancing these flavours, as each will affect your perception of the other. Salt will "neutralize" / "tame" bitterness, sweetness will do the same for acidity / sourness and vice versa. If what you find is that your wines taste sour after eating a food, then you are probably sensitive to sweetness and / or sourness. Most people can experience what you are describing by eating a bite of something really sweet, like cheesecake, and then tasting a dry wine. It will taste VERY sour as a result because your taste buds have just been desensitized to sweetness based on the really sweet food that you just ate, so the sweetness in the wine will not be perceived, leaving only the acidity. It just sounds like in your case this phenomenon has been dialed up to 11.

nonrandomstring 4y ago

> subjective and can be influenced through suggestion. So the atmosphere, the price, the meal pairing can all affect... Music is a massive factor [1] [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/effects-of-music-on-sales-2011-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/effects-of-music-on-sales-20...

kevincox 4y ago

> The real question, in my opinion, is whether a high-priced bottle is "worth it" by as near-objective standards as possible. This really resonates with me. In day-to-day life "worth it" depends a lot on the person, and especially their financial standing. I like to try to think of an unbiased "worth it" as plotting cost vs value of everything in the category on a scatter plot. Things that are "worth it" are above the average curve (and the curve is going up at higher prices). Basically "this option provides more value than most other options of same or lower cost".