6 ms·

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 bo

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.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Yeah, I was thinking of the ubiquity of "street food hot dogs" which are now basically gone (Costco still has hot dogs, however, and baseball stadiums are required to have hot dogs).
        jacobr1 4y ago
        How much of that is health code enforcement rather than demand?
  - Retric 4y ago
    In antiquity it was more what we might call street food or fast casual. What really defines fast food is mass production and uniformity.
    - thih9 4y ago
      The english wikipedia [1] agrees with you. Interestingly, I always assumed that “fast food” meant the type of food; so a hamburger, even if not made from mass produced ingredients, would always be a “fast food”. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_food https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_food
      - bombcar 4y ago
        It’s a weird thing - people in the USA know what you mean by fast food and somehow McDonald’s under a heat lamp counts (rarer now but still found) but burgers at the gas station under a heat lamp don’t count.
    - randomdata 4y ago
      > In antiquity it was more what we might call street food In context, though, the original commenter considered things like street hotdog vendors to be fast food. That is not unlike the kind of delivery you would find in antiquity, even if the actual food product differed. > What really defines fast food is mass production and uniformity. Technically, what really defines a term is how it is used in a certain context and how it works towards reaching a shared understanding, which was achieved with the original use of fast food found in this thread. You are right that the definition that emerged here does not align with definitions found in other contexts, but those other contexts are irrelevant to this particular context.
      - Retric 4y ago
        From this post I assumed they agreed with me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33705493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33705493 > It’s a weird thing - people in the USA know what you mean by fast food and somehow McDonald’s under a heat lamp counts (rarer now but still found) but burgers at the gas station under a heat lamp don’t count.
  - jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
    White Castle essentially formalized a prior trend of burger vendors at sporting events, state fairs, etc. These were really simple cheap meaty snacks with little more than the patty and maybe some onions cooked on a griddle and slapped on whatever roll they could get from a local baker. In that sense the WC slider is still fairly true to the original thing. But, I think it's a bit rich to call it the origin of fast food. Modern fast food in terms of what we think of as technology and business model is a bit broader than that. And just "food you get fast" is obviously far older. The original "fast food" in that sense was getting bread from a baker.
    - randomdata 4y ago
      > But, I think it's a bit rich to call it the origin of fast food. Particularly when we just got finished talking about fast food in antiquity. I suppose that explains why nobody said such a thing.
      - jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
        I made a specific response then expanded to a general point. What point does your comment make other than bickering?
        randomdata 4y ago
        Why would there be a point? If there was a point it would be presented to the real world where it would provide value, not a meaningless text box on a website made to provide entertainment. What is to be gained from looking for something that doesn't exist?
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.

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.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Yeah, I was thinking of the ubiquity of "street food hot dogs" which are now basically gone (Costco still has hot dogs, however, and baseball stadiums are required to have hot dogs).
      - jacobr1 4y ago
        How much of that is health code enforcement rather than demand?
- Retric 4y ago
  In antiquity it was more what we might call street food or fast casual. What really defines fast food is mass production and uniformity.
  - thih9 4y ago
    The english wikipedia [1] agrees with you. Interestingly, I always assumed that “fast food” meant the type of food; so a hamburger, even if not made from mass produced ingredients, would always be a “fast food”. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_food https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_food
    - bombcar 4y ago
      It’s a weird thing - people in the USA know what you mean by fast food and somehow McDonald’s under a heat lamp counts (rarer now but still found) but burgers at the gas station under a heat lamp don’t count.
  - randomdata 4y ago
    > In antiquity it was more what we might call street food In context, though, the original commenter considered things like street hotdog vendors to be fast food. That is not unlike the kind of delivery you would find in antiquity, even if the actual food product differed. > What really defines fast food is mass production and uniformity. Technically, what really defines a term is how it is used in a certain context and how it works towards reaching a shared understanding, which was achieved with the original use of fast food found in this thread. You are right that the definition that emerged here does not align with definitions found in other contexts, but those other contexts are irrelevant to this particular context.
    - Retric 4y ago
      From this post I assumed they agreed with me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33705493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33705493 > It’s a weird thing - people in the USA know what you mean by fast food and somehow McDonald’s under a heat lamp counts (rarer now but still found) but burgers at the gas station under a heat lamp don’t count.
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
  White Castle essentially formalized a prior trend of burger vendors at sporting events, state fairs, etc. These were really simple cheap meaty snacks with little more than the patty and maybe some onions cooked on a griddle and slapped on whatever roll they could get from a local baker. In that sense the WC slider is still fairly true to the original thing. But, I think it's a bit rich to call it the origin of fast food. Modern fast food in terms of what we think of as technology and business model is a bit broader than that. And just "food you get fast" is obviously far older. The original "fast food" in that sense was getting bread from a baker.
  - randomdata 4y ago
    > But, I think it's a bit rich to call it the origin of fast food. Particularly when we just got finished talking about fast food in antiquity. I suppose that explains why nobody said such a thing.
    - jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
      I made a specific response then expanded to a general point. What point does your comment make other than bickering?
      - randomdata 4y ago
        Why would there be a point? If there was a point it would be presented to the real world where it would provide value, not a meaningless text box on a website made to provide entertainment. What is to be gained from looking for something that doesn't exist?

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.