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One of my professors in grad school was really into wine and every couple of years he would put on an after-hours wine tasting class for a semester. One of the

One of my professors in grad school was really into wine and every couple of years he would put on an after-hours wine tasting class for a semester. One of the points he made was that there are absolutely wines which are objectively better and worse and that experts can reliably tell them apart. He had met enough experts who could identify a vineyard and vintage blind to know there was something to it. But sitting on top of that there is a frothy market that is driven by fads, speculation, and hype. He was of the opinion that generally speaking the quality of a typical wine increases monotonically with price up until around the $40 range with the big steps around the $5, $10, and $20 price points. But above $50 or so, you're no longer paying for higher quality, per se. It's more that you are paying for a unique flavor profile and reliability. But unless you're seeking out that particular flavor profile, you can get a bottle that is just as good for $30-40 (and occasionally even cheaper). And above a few hundred dollars it's all just fads, speculation, and hype. (He liked to say that the people who buy those wines have "more money than sense.") They're good wines, but you can get a bottle that is just as good for a fraction of the price.

SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
> "more money than sense." I've always enjoyed "more dollars than cents" for the dual meaning if you know the phrase is supposed to be "sense".
2devnull 4y ago
Wine makers can easily pick out flaws of different sorts. Wine tasters and wine makers do not taste wines in the same way based on my experience. Some flaws, like Bret, can improve the score of wines given by tasters for certain styles, but wine makers generally scoff at such flaws.
- noughtme 4y ago
  > Some flaws, like Bret I cannot wait for the current trend of brettanomyces contaminated "natural" wines to die.
  - barrkel 4y ago
    Bret and the weird hay / mousey flavour from natural wines are different things. I too am not a fan of natural wines largely because of the additional flavours, but normal sulphite-laden wine can come with a dose of bret and it's different - I particularly enjoy it in some Cote Rotie producers, where it comes out as a hint of smokey bacon.
  - cthalupa 4y ago
    Many natural wines do not contain any brett. I would agree that brett can be a contaminant in wine, if that is not what you are going for, but much like how brett has long been the backbone of some trappist and all lambic Belgian beers, there is a case to be made for it in wine - even in fine wines. If the popularity of brett in beers is anything to go by, you're going to be disappointed. And I hope you are - as much as I love a purely sach ferment, there's lots to love about other yeast and bacteria taking part in the fermentation process, too.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  If you're dealing in goods of non-obvious quality, where total supply volume >> total demand volume, markets get weird. See: beauty products, wine, art There are people who can discern quality reliably... but those people are an extremely small portion of the total market. Consequently, things that are not quality (chiefly, marketing and price) start to become dominant features.
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
  Lol, the somme I dated loved bretty flavors, much to my (playful) annoyance.
wmil 4y ago
> He was of the opinion that generally speaking the quality of a typical wine increases monotonically with price up until around the $40 range with the big steps around the $5, $10, and $20 price points. I'm always amused when I hear this, because I live in Ontario. Our alcohol laws are set up to heavily favour local wines. Of course Ontario reds are consistently both more expensive and worse than foreign wines. Higher price doesn't mean higher quality here.
- nier 4y ago
  How does red wine from Ontario end up more expensive than the one from abroad when the laws are set up to favor the wine from Ontario?
  - danielfoster 4y ago
    Without more information, I would assume that even with preferential tax treatment Ontario wine could be more expensive due to economies of scale. Production must be vastly lower compared to California, France, etc.
    - AS37 4y ago
      Yes. Ontario's production is less than 3% of California's.
  - extragood 4y ago
    I'd guess cost of labor is a major factor. If you buy any California wine, for instance, it was picked by a migrant worker. Times haven't changed much since Grapes of Wrath, other than it's typically Latino workers rather than Dust Bowl refugees.
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      That still wouldn't be a law giving local wines a competitive advantage.
    - kodachrome64 4y ago
alfalfasprout 4y ago
This is IMO where I've arrived at too. Some wine really sucks. Some wine is incredible. I've definitely been surprised by some <$20 bottles but in general $50+ wines are not going to have the same flaws that are common in cheaper bottles. With that said... I've had some terrible bottles of $100+ wine from well regarded wineries.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  IMO after $50/bottle, Napa Valley and some French wines take a huge drop in quality. The higher-end wines are trading more on marketing and branding than on the culinary experience.
acchow 4y ago
> But unless you're seeking out that particular flavor profile It's not just seeking out a particular flavor profile. If you want to experience something novel for your mouth and you've been drinking only $20 bottles for years, you will never encounter anything new. But if you try $100 bottles, you're much more likely to accidentally discover something new (whether you like it or not is subjective) Continuously searching for new experiences is an expensive hobby.
- SergeAx 4y ago
  > But if you try $100 bottles, you're much more likely to accidentally discover something new You would get the same effect with $5 bottles, wouldn't you?
  - shakow 4y ago
    Something new *and pleasant ;)
    - t-3 4y ago
      If it's produced in the same region, the good stuff is usually less than $20, and most often less than $10. It's not usually worth it to pay for travel, IMO.
      - gerdesj 4y ago
        You and your parents have all described wine in terms of $. I've tasted a dollar and it tastes like a pound but I would not try to drink it. Why not describe your experience with the good stuff. We lack decent language to describe taste but we have loads of language for experience and feelings. Lots of people here are pontificating (me too) about wine but so often the discussion ends up with bottle price and not what is actually important.
- Tenoke 4y ago
  I don't see how that follows. There's an enormous amount of different $20 bottles. There's probably enough different ones every year that if you try to you can have a different wine every single time you drink and still spend < $30 (to factor in shipping from further) per bottle - though going so hard on exploration without exploitation of the ones you find you like seems suboptimal anyway.
nitwit005 4y ago
But, there is the usual trick there. How do you transform your wine from a $5 wine to a $10 wine? Raise the price by $5. The assumption of quality is something exploitable.
- girvo 4y ago
  There’s a better trick: chuck it in a blender for 30 seconds. Really softens the shitty flavours some cheap wines have haha
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    This is literally true, and it's why decanters exist. If you oxidize a wine, it mellows out the sharpness by letting some of the protein break down.
    - girvo 4y ago
      Yep! Whenever I get a bottle that is too harsh I do it. Works great, much to the amusement of my partner
CPLX 4y ago
I disagree. There’s a pretty stark difference between $50 wine and like genuine top quality wine. The problem is that it’s just highly inconsistent for a variety of reasons, including the fact that even if you trust the label you have no idea if that 20 year old bottle was left in the sun for awhile, and so on. Plus there’s personal taste, etc. So you can spend a lot and get something underwhelming. In short, it’s complicated. With that said, having gone for a full day tasting at Mouton Rothschild, and a couple other similar spots like Caymus, Y’quem, etc, I can say with complete confidence that there’s a level of quality thats simply not going to be reached with $50 bottles.
Bayart 4y ago
It's common wisdom in France. If you're paying more than 20 euros for a bottle, it's probably already too much. And it's very common for people to buy in bulk at the favour of seasonal discounts or from the producer. If you want to look smart at a dinner party, bring a bottle of something nobody's ever heard about that's remarkably cheap for what you get.
- int_19h 4y ago
  This depends on the specific kind of wine you're looking for, surely? It would be hard to find icewine for 20 euros, I'd think.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
    - User23 4y ago
      You could get some really nice local red table wines in Baden-Württemberg for 3-4 Euro for a 750 ml bottle last time I was there. German wine in the USA is just mass market Rieslings and maybe an ice wine and nothing else. We’d always joke that they save the good stuff for themselves.
  - atkailash 4y ago
    And 8 euro wine at Monoprix is better than some >$20 I’ve had in the US. My guess is in France competition is so high and it’s easily sourced that prices don’t necessarily correlate as closely to quality as it does in some other markets.
    - exitb 4y ago
      That has also rung true to me in the Mediterranean. But it does make you wonder if the wine is actually so good, or it just tastes better on vacation.
    - School-Cotton 4y ago
      The US also has very high taxes on wine compared to the wine-producing countries of Europe (which AFAIK subsidize it). Similar to how a pack of cigarettes costs $15 in NYC and $6 in Raleigh, NC.
coldtea 4y ago
>One of the points he made was that there are absolutely wines which are objectively better and worse and that experts can reliably tell them apart. He had met enough experts who could identify a vineyard and vintage blind to know there was something to it. Identifying a specific wine is easy, even non experts can learn to do it. What experts have shown to fail is telling good wines from bad wines, cheapo wines from expensive wines, and so on, in blind tests. There they are not asked to identify a label and vintage they already known and are familiar with (because they drank it before), but to detect quality.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > There they are not asked to identify a label and vintage they already known and are familiar with (because they drank it before), but to detect quality. No, they are asked to detect price.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    Nope, quality. Including the very basic quality of being able to tell one apart from another: (...) some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific. The first experiment took place in 2005. The last was in Sacramento earlier this month. Hodgson's findings have stunned the wine industry. Over the years he has shown again and again that even trained, professional palates are terrible at judging wine. "The results are disturbing," says Hodgson from the Fieldbrook Winery in Humboldt County, described by its owner as a rural paradise. "Only about 10% of judges are consistent and those judges who were consistent one year were ordinary the next year. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-economics/article/abs/an-analysis-of-the-concordance-among-13-us-wine-competitions/0133849E8FD76B5D20A13C9F720EE102 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-econ... https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-economics/article/abs/how-expert-are-expert-wine-judges/A9F356BC73B3E38F8DF81C7D70F80D10 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-econ... https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-economics/article/abs/an-examination-of-judge-reliability-at-a-major-us-wine-competition/15EF999FBAC63C5FB6DCF1C2F4BB6655 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-econ... Heck, they can't even distinguish wine with artificial coloring from actual red wine: http://www.daysyn.com/Morrot.pdf http://www.daysyn.com/Morrot.pdf
TulliusCicero 4y ago
> the quality of a typical wine increases monotonically with price up until around the $40 range with the big steps around the $5, $10, and $20 price points. How does this jive with the studies showing that, if anything, regular people have a slight preference for cheaper wines?
- dontknowwhyihn 4y ago
  I find cheap wines to be excessively sweet, and it wouldn’t surprise me if regular people just like the taste of sugar in their food.
- cycrutchfield 4y ago
  Regular people also likely prefer junk food to healthy food. The former is laden with sugar, fat, and salt and is engineered to appeal to the vast majority of people. It doesn’t mean that junk food is quality food.
  - Godel_unicode 4y ago
    And bad junk food. Try making a high quality chocolate truffle with really nice dark chocolate and put it on the plate with snickers bars. You’ll have all the good stuff left at the end.
- thrwy_918 4y ago
  Perhaps regular people, many of whom don't drink much wine, prefer simple, unchallenging flavors that can often be found in cheap wine. Theres nothing wrong with this, but I don't think it necessarily means that wine "quality" doesn't exist.
- moehm 4y ago
  "Quality" is a loose term, preference is totally subjective. Most people mix those things up, but there aren't equal. You don't automatically like the "better" wine, or better food. But the trend is the more people know about X (where X = wine in this case), they like "better" X. Where "better" and "quality" has to be defined first. Typically, if you go down the path of wine education, you first learn a definition of what makes a wine good. WSET [0] e.g. mentions balance, complexity, faults, finish etc as part of what makes a wine "good" (by their definition). If you want to be certified by WSET (Level 3), you have to pass a tasting exam, where you have to examine wines according to their scheme. Regular people aren't trained in wine or sensory evaluation, thus "quality" means less to them and cheaper wines are often easier to drink, or people are more familiar with them so they like them more (see "mere-exposure effect" [1]). tl;dr: Liking a wine != the wine is "good". But mixing up those two things make no sense. [0] https://www.wsetglobal.com/ https://www.wsetglobal.com/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect
analog31 4y ago
I have sometimes speculated that the purpose of the $50 bottles is to make you think that you're being sensible by buying a $20 bottle, when really the $10 bottle is just fine. A few people will certainly buy the $50 bottle, but the real money is in upsale at the lower end.
- dmix 4y ago
  Reminds me of the loss leader strategy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader A retail shop will put TVs on sale for 50% off but only keep 5 in stock. They advertise it everywhere, 100 people show up looking for cheap TVs, find it's out-of-stock and buy one of the expensive ones that are only 5-10% off.
  - glxxyz 4y ago
    You're describing Bait and switch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait-and-switch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait-and-switch
    - technothrasher 4y ago
      Right, that's bait and switch. A loss leader would be you selling milk at a loss in order to get people into the store and then get them to buy the high margin cookies as well.
    - dmix 4y ago
      I know the difference, that's still how it works in practice
  - ketralnis 4y ago
    That's not a loss leader, and in fact depending on the jurisdiction might actually be illegal[0]. Loss leaders are intended to be actually sold. A loss leader might be Costco hot dogs or cheap razor handle for which replacement cartridges are the true profit centre [0]: https://portal.ct.gov/DCP/Common-Elements/Consumer-Facts-and-Contacts/Rainchecks https://portal.ct.gov/DCP/Common-Elements/Consumer-Facts-and... https://consumered.georgia.gov/ask-ed/2015-09-08/do-stores-have-offer-rain-check-if-advertised-item-not-available https://consumered.georgia.gov/ask-ed/2015-09-08/do-stores-h... http://www.ossh.com/firearms/caag.state.ca.us/consumers/general/rainchecks.htm http://www.ossh.com/firearms/caag.state.ca.us/consumers/gene...
wgj 4y ago
It looks like no one has said this yet. Many of the higher price/quality wines are expected to be cellared for a certain number of years after release. Opened too soon, they will have too much tannin and/or acidity. It costs money to keep wines under the correct conditions. One thing that drives up the price of a bottle is whether someone else already did this for you. A 2014 Bordeaux right now, on average, will cost a lot more than a 2020 of the same wine.
- SanjayMehta 4y ago
  What happens if I buy a 2022 wine today and store it for 5 years? Will it be the same as buying the same vintage in 2027 from the wine seller? I guess what I'm asking is if there's some special storage requirements which can't be met at home?
  - janitor_monkey 4y ago
    If you store it in the shelf it will become vinegar.
  - wgj 4y ago
    You can cellar your own wine. Lots of people do it, but cellar conditions matter and it's an expensive hobby. It's nice to not need to know five years in advance what you will feel like drinking tonight. Optionality is worth something. But yes, with care a hobbyist can do better than how some retail wine is kept. Edit: The main points are 1) cool (~55F/13C), 2) dark, 3) not too dry (70% humidity is usually recommended. This is to protect the cork), and 4) store on its side, also to protect the cork from drying out. Five years is a long time. Most retail wines are made to drink now though. If it's on the shelf it's ready.
  - Retric 4y ago
    Depends on what your location and budget is. Storing wine outside or at room temperature doesn’t age it the same way a wine cellar in France would. In general you want ~53-57 Fahrenheit and 50-80% humidity depending on what exactly you want to happen. Unfortunately, simply digging a hole in your back yard only gets it to the average temperature of your area which may be quite different to that hypothetical wine cellar in France. In the end keeping even a fairly large room at whatever temperature and humidity level you desire isn’t that difficult, assuming you have the space and budget.
jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
I dated a sommelier with a physics degree for some time and this matches what I learned from her. She had the lesser certificate not the crazy Master one, but still her own kit for doing blind tastings and could reliably identify appellation and varietal if not the vintage and vineyard. Not perfect but right enough to know it wasn't chance. For most people you really don't need to go above $20 for a wine that's world class in terms of quality. At the higher price points most of what you're buying into is the story and exclusivity. There are things you can taste but as you say, it's arguable if these are actually virtues beyond those two features, and it's doubtful if it outweighs the cost unless you have a lot of disposable income.
staticautomatic 4y ago
I worked in the wine industry for a handful of years and wholeheartedly agree.
bnralt 4y ago
> One of the points he made was that there are absolutely wines which are objectively better and worse and that experts can reliably tell them apart. He had met enough experts who could identify a vineyard and vintage blind to know there was something to it. But sitting on top of that there is a frothy market that is driven by fads, speculation, and hype. I'm sure there are people that can identify different tastes. I question whether or not those tastes are a sign of objective quality, or just something they've been conditioned to think of as good. An interesting test would be of people who have never tasted wine before, and have no sense of what a "good wine" is supposed to taste like. But in my experience, most people who aren't used to alcohol will simply find all wine distasteful. You can actually see this in action when you see different cultures interact. For instance, the baijiu has a similar position in Chinese society as wine does in the West. There's an enormous price range, and a complex range of flavors and aromas. But almost every Westerner I've met found the taste abhorrent when they first tried it (though a small few eventually were able to develop a taste for it). So though people in different cultures can acclimate themselves to what is currently considered to be good in their culture, I don't think that's the same thing as a certain taste being objectively good.
- FpUser 4y ago
  I tasted some sparkling wines that to me were way better than Dom Perignon. And Pino Noir (forgot particular brand) I get for 20 Canadian pesos again tasted to me way better that some wine I bought for $120 to check why the fuck does it cost so much. So yes I am pretty sure that some wine is objectively better than sulfuric acid but the rest is just a matter of individual taste. It does not matter that the tester can distinguish between 2 buttles of the same wine and tell the year it's been produced.
  - hoorible 4y ago
    What’s the exchange rate on Canadian pesos?
    - FpUser 4y ago
      Use your imagination if Google is not helphul
qaq 4y ago
It would depend on wines you like. I am fine drinking $12 new zealand sauvignon blanc but can't say I've had anything in $40 range that I liked as much as Montrachet.
stcredzero 4y ago
One of the points he made was that there are absolutely wines which are objectively better and worse and that experts can reliably tell them apart. This is certainly true for whiskeys. One of the ways to objectively tell better whiskeys from worse ones, is to learn how to detect acetone! The less that's in there, the better!
olalonde 4y ago
> One of the points he made was that there are absolutely wines which are objectively better and worse and that experts can reliably tell them apart. He had met enough experts who could identify a vineyard and vintage blind to know there was something to it. But sitting on top of that there is a frothy market that is driven by fads, speculation, and hype. Sounds like crypto.
Alex3917 4y ago
> But above $50 or so, you're no longer paying for higher quality, per se. You can't walk into a grocery store and buy a tree-ripened banana no matter how much money you're willing to pay. This is sort of the proper way to think about high-end wines, as a vehicle that enables one to do something like this, but obviously with grapes.
gerdesj 4y ago
I largely agree with you (and your prof) but I lose interest at about £25 but I will drop this: A violin (1) can be played to produce two notes at once and a third note will be heard. Since around 1715 that extra, third note was noted and then thought to be an artifact of our ears or something. Recently someone got all scientific and studied the effect. It turns out all or most violins produce the third note but the oldest instruments produce a louder third note. More study needed. There is a really dodgy analogy here but I can't help conflate a violin's "vintage" with a vin's (err ... wine's) vintage. Sound and music is phenomenally complicated but quite well understood compared to taste although there is a lot of research and results coming up there. My point is that I don't think that the (say) £/$100 bottle of wine is quite in the same league as the mad cables, especially the digital ones that cost silly money. A £100,000 Strad is capable of making a different noise to your common or garden £10,000 violin. For example, you note people capable of identifying a source and year for a wine because that's how we classify the stuff, along with some really awful attempts to put taste into words and of course you note the silly cable buyer equivalent. However, there are way more factors involved. I also think the whole tasting thing needs a massive overhaul. Notes of peach and cut grass and all that bollocks is a bit unimaginative and frankly daft. I've never "drunk" grass, let alone cut grass - yes I understand that smell and taste are quite often synonymous but there is way more to it than that. I have eaten peaches but there is also a huge variety of flavours there that a wine buff overlooks - there is no such thing as a canonical "peach". I'm not sure how it would work but perhaps we need a taste language that is not completely dependent on other tastes and smells. We might also need an analogy for volume too - mild and punchy are simply rubbish as a scale! I know that industry is churning out a vast number of clever flavours and smells but I think that the language is being left behind. (1) https://www.newscientist.com/article/2344992-phantom-notes-played-by-violins-turn-out-to-be-a-real-sound/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2344992-phantom-notes-p...
poulsbohemian 4y ago
I live in wine country. Used to have winemakers in the school PTA, so I got to know some of these folks... I'd completely agree with your professor. I'm not a "serious" wine drinker, but with a couple pointers you can pretty quickly start telling the difference in quality. One of our favorite "party tricks" is to set a budget ($10, $15, $20, etc) and buy a handful of bottles - turns out there's a lot of very enjoyable wines at those price points. Very important to understand varietals - some wines are meant to drink young, others will absolutely change over time for better or worse. Also, often at higher price points you are paying for scarcity - if only a few thousands bottles are being made, they gotta sell at $50+ / bottle to even begin to come close to profitable. If you get to know winemakers, there are a lot of games that go on to doctor grapes. The chemistry and know-how are commendable. You also start to realize there are wine makers who are making wines they like, but that may not hold mass-market appeal. I had a private tasting with a guy who spent years in Napa and now does custom white-label work. I thought his stuff was absolute garbage - not at all to my tastes - but he's in demand because he knows how to do all the magic to pull out certain attributes that some wine drinkers may enjoy. And that's the real key - drink what you like, at a price point you feel comfortable spending, and it's totally ok if you bought it because it had a cute label. The company you keep matters just as much as the quality of what's in the bottle.
- alfiedotwtf 4y ago
  This seem to be along the same as what I've found with coffee. I've talked to a lot of specialty roasters, and they personally fly around the world to meet with farmers and work together towards growing certain profiles.
- CSSer 4y ago
  I had the privilege to get a behind the scenes tour of a winery once because a friend’s family were the owners. They had some pretty sophisticated lab equipment. You could drop in a sample and it could tell you all sorts of things about its chemical makeup (magic to me because I never took much Chemistry). I asked them what sample attribute had the highest correlation with sales and without even hesitating they told me it was sugar content. They said their best selling wine was also their sweetest. They even said it was a pretty strong correlation that held all the way down the line from sweet, citrusy varietals to tannin-rich, cottony varietals. I think I was even told they could sometimes observe the effect from year to year if one vintage crop happened to be a little more or less sweet than the last year. Now, for the record, I take the same approach you and GP mentioned here. I happen to prefer pretty dry wines too, but I’ve gotta admit knowing this shook me a little.
abandonliberty 4y ago
In a similar vein, Best of Panama does a coffee auction where the highest rated coffee sold this year for $2000/lb. It's something like this each year, with a huge premium on first place. https://auction.bestofpanama.org/en/lots/auction/auction-2022 https://auction.bestofpanama.org/en/lots/auction/auction-202...
- Foobar8568 4y ago
  Look at Ninety Plus producer, these $2000 /lb looks like a bargain. More seriously coffee can be as expensive as wine, and frankly speaking, for good reason. The difference between farms, fermentation process, roasting skills for a se varietal /region produces large differences, like for wine.
prvit 4y ago
> They're good wines, but you can get a bottle that is just as good for a fraction of the price. I hear these things, but nobody will tell me what I should drink if I want a cheaper 2010 Mouton Rothschild. Or a cheaper Krug, people will recommend $50 Champagnes but generally not ones that actually pursue a similar style.
- kevincox 4y ago
  > It's more that you are paying for a unique flavor profile and reliability.
  - prvit 4y ago
    Sure, but people generally agree that some flavor profiles are better than others.

SV_BubbleTime 4y ago

> "more money than sense." I've always enjoyed "more dollars than cents" for the dual meaning if you know the phrase is supposed to be "sense".

2devnull 4y ago

Wine makers can easily pick out flaws of different sorts. Wine tasters and wine makers do not taste wines in the same way based on my experience. Some flaws, like Bret, can improve the score of wines given by tasters for certain styles, but wine makers generally scoff at such flaws.

noughtme 4y ago
> Some flaws, like Bret I cannot wait for the current trend of brettanomyces contaminated "natural" wines to die.
- barrkel 4y ago
  Bret and the weird hay / mousey flavour from natural wines are different things. I too am not a fan of natural wines largely because of the additional flavours, but normal sulphite-laden wine can come with a dose of bret and it's different - I particularly enjoy it in some Cote Rotie producers, where it comes out as a hint of smokey bacon.
- cthalupa 4y ago
  Many natural wines do not contain any brett. I would agree that brett can be a contaminant in wine, if that is not what you are going for, but much like how brett has long been the backbone of some trappist and all lambic Belgian beers, there is a case to be made for it in wine - even in fine wines. If the popularity of brett in beers is anything to go by, you're going to be disappointed. And I hope you are - as much as I love a purely sach ferment, there's lots to love about other yeast and bacteria taking part in the fermentation process, too.
ethbr0 4y ago
If you're dealing in goods of non-obvious quality, where total supply volume >> total demand volume, markets get weird. See: beauty products, wine, art There are people who can discern quality reliably... but those people are an extremely small portion of the total market. Consequently, things that are not quality (chiefly, marketing and price) start to become dominant features.
jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
Lol, the somme I dated loved bretty flavors, much to my (playful) annoyance.

wmil 4y ago

> He was of the opinion that generally speaking the quality of a typical wine increases monotonically with price up until around the $40 range with the big steps around the $5, $10, and $20 price points. I'm always amused when I hear this, because I live in Ontario. Our alcohol laws are set up to heavily favour local wines. Of course Ontario reds are consistently both more expensive and worse than foreign wines. Higher price doesn't mean higher quality here.

nier 4y ago
How does red wine from Ontario end up more expensive than the one from abroad when the laws are set up to favor the wine from Ontario?
- danielfoster 4y ago
  Without more information, I would assume that even with preferential tax treatment Ontario wine could be more expensive due to economies of scale. Production must be vastly lower compared to California, France, etc.
  - AS37 4y ago
    Yes. Ontario's production is less than 3% of California's.
- extragood 4y ago
  I'd guess cost of labor is a major factor. If you buy any California wine, for instance, it was picked by a migrant worker. Times haven't changed much since Grapes of Wrath, other than it's typically Latino workers rather than Dust Bowl refugees.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    That still wouldn't be a law giving local wines a competitive advantage.
  - kodachrome64 4y ago

alfalfasprout 4y ago

This is IMO where I've arrived at too. Some wine really sucks. Some wine is incredible. I've definitely been surprised by some <$20 bottles but in general $50+ wines are not going to have the same flaws that are common in cheaper bottles. With that said... I've had some terrible bottles of $100+ wine from well regarded wineries.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
IMO after $50/bottle, Napa Valley and some French wines take a huge drop in quality. The higher-end wines are trading more on marketing and branding than on the culinary experience.

acchow 4y ago

> But unless you're seeking out that particular flavor profile It's not just seeking out a particular flavor profile. If you want to experience something novel for your mouth and you've been drinking only $20 bottles for years, you will never encounter anything new. But if you try $100 bottles, you're much more likely to accidentally discover something new (whether you like it or not is subjective) Continuously searching for new experiences is an expensive hobby.

SergeAx 4y ago
> But if you try $100 bottles, you're much more likely to accidentally discover something new You would get the same effect with $5 bottles, wouldn't you?
- shakow 4y ago
  Something new *and pleasant ;)
  - t-3 4y ago
    If it's produced in the same region, the good stuff is usually less than $20, and most often less than $10. It's not usually worth it to pay for travel, IMO.
    - gerdesj 4y ago
      You and your parents have all described wine in terms of $. I've tasted a dollar and it tastes like a pound but I would not try to drink it. Why not describe your experience with the good stuff. We lack decent language to describe taste but we have loads of language for experience and feelings. Lots of people here are pontificating (me too) about wine but so often the discussion ends up with bottle price and not what is actually important.
Tenoke 4y ago
I don't see how that follows. There's an enormous amount of different $20 bottles. There's probably enough different ones every year that if you try to you can have a different wine every single time you drink and still spend < $30 (to factor in shipping from further) per bottle - though going so hard on exploration without exploitation of the ones you find you like seems suboptimal anyway.

nitwit005 4y ago

But, there is the usual trick there. How do you transform your wine from a $5 wine to a $10 wine? Raise the price by $5. The assumption of quality is something exploitable.

girvo 4y ago
There’s a better trick: chuck it in a blender for 30 seconds. Really softens the shitty flavours some cheap wines have haha
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  This is literally true, and it's why decanters exist. If you oxidize a wine, it mellows out the sharpness by letting some of the protein break down.
  - girvo 4y ago
    Yep! Whenever I get a bottle that is too harsh I do it. Works great, much to the amusement of my partner

CPLX 4y ago

I disagree. There’s a pretty stark difference between $50 wine and like genuine top quality wine. The problem is that it’s just highly inconsistent for a variety of reasons, including the fact that even if you trust the label you have no idea if that 20 year old bottle was left in the sun for awhile, and so on. Plus there’s personal taste, etc. So you can spend a lot and get something underwhelming. In short, it’s complicated. With that said, having gone for a full day tasting at Mouton Rothschild, and a couple other similar spots like Caymus, Y’quem, etc, I can say with complete confidence that there’s a level of quality thats simply not going to be reached with $50 bottles.

Bayart 4y ago

It's common wisdom in France. If you're paying more than 20 euros for a bottle, it's probably already too much. And it's very common for people to buy in bulk at the favour of seasonal discounts or from the producer. If you want to look smart at a dinner party, bring a bottle of something nobody's ever heard about that's remarkably cheap for what you get.

int_19h 4y ago
This depends on the specific kind of wine you're looking for, surely? It would be hard to find icewine for 20 euros, I'd think.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
  - User23 4y ago
    You could get some really nice local red table wines in Baden-Württemberg for 3-4 Euro for a 750 ml bottle last time I was there. German wine in the USA is just mass market Rieslings and maybe an ice wine and nothing else. We’d always joke that they save the good stuff for themselves.
- atkailash 4y ago
  And 8 euro wine at Monoprix is better than some >$20 I’ve had in the US. My guess is in France competition is so high and it’s easily sourced that prices don’t necessarily correlate as closely to quality as it does in some other markets.
  - exitb 4y ago
    That has also rung true to me in the Mediterranean. But it does make you wonder if the wine is actually so good, or it just tastes better on vacation.
  - School-Cotton 4y ago
    The US also has very high taxes on wine compared to the wine-producing countries of Europe (which AFAIK subsidize it). Similar to how a pack of cigarettes costs $15 in NYC and $6 in Raleigh, NC.

coldtea 4y ago

>One of the points he made was that there are absolutely wines which are objectively better and worse and that experts can reliably tell them apart. He had met enough experts who could identify a vineyard and vintage blind to know there was something to it. Identifying a specific wine is easy, even non experts can learn to do it. What experts have shown to fail is telling good wines from bad wines, cheapo wines from expensive wines, and so on, in blind tests. There they are not asked to identify a label and vintage they already known and are familiar with (because they drank it before), but to detect quality.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> There they are not asked to identify a label and vintage they already known and are familiar with (because they drank it before), but to detect quality. No, they are asked to detect price.
- coldtea 4y ago
  Nope, quality. Including the very basic quality of being able to tell one apart from another: (...) some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific. The first experiment took place in 2005. The last was in Sacramento earlier this month. Hodgson's findings have stunned the wine industry. Over the years he has shown again and again that even trained, professional palates are terrible at judging wine. "The results are disturbing," says Hodgson from the Fieldbrook Winery in Humboldt County, described by its owner as a rural paradise. "Only about 10% of judges are consistent and those judges who were consistent one year were ordinary the next year. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-economics/article/abs/an-analysis-of-the-concordance-among-13-us-wine-competitions/0133849E8FD76B5D20A13C9F720EE102 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-econ... https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-economics/article/abs/how-expert-are-expert-wine-judges/A9F356BC73B3E38F8DF81C7D70F80D10 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-econ... https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-economics/article/abs/an-examination-of-judge-reliability-at-a-major-us-wine-competition/15EF999FBAC63C5FB6DCF1C2F4BB6655 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-econ... Heck, they can't even distinguish wine with artificial coloring from actual red wine: http://www.daysyn.com/Morrot.pdf http://www.daysyn.com/Morrot.pdf

TulliusCicero 4y ago

> the quality of a typical wine increases monotonically with price up until around the $40 range with the big steps around the $5, $10, and $20 price points. How does this jive with the studies showing that, if anything, regular people have a slight preference for cheaper wines?

dontknowwhyihn 4y ago
I find cheap wines to be excessively sweet, and it wouldn’t surprise me if regular people just like the taste of sugar in their food.
cycrutchfield 4y ago
Regular people also likely prefer junk food to healthy food. The former is laden with sugar, fat, and salt and is engineered to appeal to the vast majority of people. It doesn’t mean that junk food is quality food.
- Godel_unicode 4y ago
  And bad junk food. Try making a high quality chocolate truffle with really nice dark chocolate and put it on the plate with snickers bars. You’ll have all the good stuff left at the end.
thrwy_918 4y ago
Perhaps regular people, many of whom don't drink much wine, prefer simple, unchallenging flavors that can often be found in cheap wine. Theres nothing wrong with this, but I don't think it necessarily means that wine "quality" doesn't exist.
moehm 4y ago
"Quality" is a loose term, preference is totally subjective. Most people mix those things up, but there aren't equal. You don't automatically like the "better" wine, or better food. But the trend is the more people know about X (where X = wine in this case), they like "better" X. Where "better" and "quality" has to be defined first. Typically, if you go down the path of wine education, you first learn a definition of what makes a wine good. WSET [0] e.g. mentions balance, complexity, faults, finish etc as part of what makes a wine "good" (by their definition). If you want to be certified by WSET (Level 3), you have to pass a tasting exam, where you have to examine wines according to their scheme. Regular people aren't trained in wine or sensory evaluation, thus "quality" means less to them and cheaper wines are often easier to drink, or people are more familiar with them so they like them more (see "mere-exposure effect" [1]). tl;dr: Liking a wine != the wine is "good". But mixing up those two things make no sense. [0] https://www.wsetglobal.com/ https://www.wsetglobal.com/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect

analog31 4y ago

I have sometimes speculated that the purpose of the $50 bottles is to make you think that you're being sensible by buying a $20 bottle, when really the $10 bottle is just fine. A few people will certainly buy the $50 bottle, but the real money is in upsale at the lower end.

dmix 4y ago
Reminds me of the loss leader strategy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader A retail shop will put TVs on sale for 50% off but only keep 5 in stock. They advertise it everywhere, 100 people show up looking for cheap TVs, find it's out-of-stock and buy one of the expensive ones that are only 5-10% off.
- glxxyz 4y ago
  You're describing Bait and switch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait-and-switch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait-and-switch
  - technothrasher 4y ago
    Right, that's bait and switch. A loss leader would be you selling milk at a loss in order to get people into the store and then get them to buy the high margin cookies as well.
  - dmix 4y ago
    I know the difference, that's still how it works in practice
- ketralnis 4y ago
  That's not a loss leader, and in fact depending on the jurisdiction might actually be illegal[0]. Loss leaders are intended to be actually sold. A loss leader might be Costco hot dogs or cheap razor handle for which replacement cartridges are the true profit centre [0]: https://portal.ct.gov/DCP/Common-Elements/Consumer-Facts-and-Contacts/Rainchecks https://portal.ct.gov/DCP/Common-Elements/Consumer-Facts-and... https://consumered.georgia.gov/ask-ed/2015-09-08/do-stores-have-offer-rain-check-if-advertised-item-not-available https://consumered.georgia.gov/ask-ed/2015-09-08/do-stores-h... http://www.ossh.com/firearms/caag.state.ca.us/consumers/general/rainchecks.htm http://www.ossh.com/firearms/caag.state.ca.us/consumers/gene...

wgj 4y ago

It looks like no one has said this yet. Many of the higher price/quality wines are expected to be cellared for a certain number of years after release. Opened too soon, they will have too much tannin and/or acidity. It costs money to keep wines under the correct conditions. One thing that drives up the price of a bottle is whether someone else already did this for you. A 2014 Bordeaux right now, on average, will cost a lot more than a 2020 of the same wine.

SanjayMehta 4y ago
What happens if I buy a 2022 wine today and store it for 5 years? Will it be the same as buying the same vintage in 2027 from the wine seller? I guess what I'm asking is if there's some special storage requirements which can't be met at home?
- janitor_monkey 4y ago
  If you store it in the shelf it will become vinegar.
- wgj 4y ago
  You can cellar your own wine. Lots of people do it, but cellar conditions matter and it's an expensive hobby. It's nice to not need to know five years in advance what you will feel like drinking tonight. Optionality is worth something. But yes, with care a hobbyist can do better than how some retail wine is kept. Edit: The main points are 1) cool (~55F/13C), 2) dark, 3) not too dry (70% humidity is usually recommended. This is to protect the cork), and 4) store on its side, also to protect the cork from drying out. Five years is a long time. Most retail wines are made to drink now though. If it's on the shelf it's ready.
- Retric 4y ago
  Depends on what your location and budget is. Storing wine outside or at room temperature doesn’t age it the same way a wine cellar in France would. In general you want ~53-57 Fahrenheit and 50-80% humidity depending on what exactly you want to happen. Unfortunately, simply digging a hole in your back yard only gets it to the average temperature of your area which may be quite different to that hypothetical wine cellar in France. In the end keeping even a fairly large room at whatever temperature and humidity level you desire isn’t that difficult, assuming you have the space and budget.

jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago

I dated a sommelier with a physics degree for some time and this matches what I learned from her. She had the lesser certificate not the crazy Master one, but still her own kit for doing blind tastings and could reliably identify appellation and varietal if not the vintage and vineyard. Not perfect but right enough to know it wasn't chance. For most people you really don't need to go above $20 for a wine that's world class in terms of quality. At the higher price points most of what you're buying into is the story and exclusivity. There are things you can taste but as you say, it's arguable if these are actually virtues beyond those two features, and it's doubtful if it outweighs the cost unless you have a lot of disposable income.

staticautomatic 4y ago

I worked in the wine industry for a handful of years and wholeheartedly agree.

bnralt 4y ago

> One of the points he made was that there are absolutely wines which are objectively better and worse and that experts can reliably tell them apart. He had met enough experts who could identify a vineyard and vintage blind to know there was something to it. But sitting on top of that there is a frothy market that is driven by fads, speculation, and hype. I'm sure there are people that can identify different tastes. I question whether or not those tastes are a sign of objective quality, or just something they've been conditioned to think of as good. An interesting test would be of people who have never tasted wine before, and have no sense of what a "good wine" is supposed to taste like. But in my experience, most people who aren't used to alcohol will simply find all wine distasteful. You can actually see this in action when you see different cultures interact. For instance, the baijiu has a similar position in Chinese society as wine does in the West. There's an enormous price range, and a complex range of flavors and aromas. But almost every Westerner I've met found the taste abhorrent when they first tried it (though a small few eventually were able to develop a taste for it). So though people in different cultures can acclimate themselves to what is currently considered to be good in their culture, I don't think that's the same thing as a certain taste being objectively good.

FpUser 4y ago
I tasted some sparkling wines that to me were way better than Dom Perignon. And Pino Noir (forgot particular brand) I get for 20 Canadian pesos again tasted to me way better that some wine I bought for $120 to check why the fuck does it cost so much. So yes I am pretty sure that some wine is objectively better than sulfuric acid but the rest is just a matter of individual taste. It does not matter that the tester can distinguish between 2 buttles of the same wine and tell the year it's been produced.
- hoorible 4y ago
  What’s the exchange rate on Canadian pesos?
  - FpUser 4y ago
    Use your imagination if Google is not helphul

qaq 4y ago

It would depend on wines you like. I am fine drinking $12 new zealand sauvignon blanc but can't say I've had anything in $40 range that I liked as much as Montrachet.

stcredzero 4y ago

One of the points he made was that there are absolutely wines which are objectively better and worse and that experts can reliably tell them apart. This is certainly true for whiskeys. One of the ways to objectively tell better whiskeys from worse ones, is to learn how to detect acetone! The less that's in there, the better!

olalonde 4y ago

Alex3917 4y ago

> But above $50 or so, you're no longer paying for higher quality, per se. You can't walk into a grocery store and buy a tree-ripened banana no matter how much money you're willing to pay. This is sort of the proper way to think about high-end wines, as a vehicle that enables one to do something like this, but obviously with grapes.

gerdesj 4y ago

I largely agree with you (and your prof) but I lose interest at about £25 but I will drop this: A violin (1) can be played to produce two notes at once and a third note will be heard. Since around 1715 that extra, third note was noted and then thought to be an artifact of our ears or something. Recently someone got all scientific and studied the effect. It turns out all or most violins produce the third note but the oldest instruments produce a louder third note. More study needed. There is a really dodgy analogy here but I can't help conflate a violin's "vintage" with a vin's (err ... wine's) vintage. Sound and music is phenomenally complicated but quite well understood compared to taste although there is a lot of research and results coming up there. My point is that I don't think that the (say) £/$100 bottle of wine is quite in the same league as the mad cables, especially the digital ones that cost silly money. A £100,000 Strad is capable of making a different noise to your common or garden £10,000 violin. For example, you note people capable of identifying a source and year for a wine because that's how we classify the stuff, along with some really awful attempts to put taste into words and of course you note the silly cable buyer equivalent. However, there are way more factors involved. I also think the whole tasting thing needs a massive overhaul. Notes of peach and cut grass and all that bollocks is a bit unimaginative and frankly daft. I've never "drunk" grass, let alone cut grass - yes I understand that smell and taste are quite often synonymous but there is way more to it than that. I have eaten peaches but there is also a huge variety of flavours there that a wine buff overlooks - there is no such thing as a canonical "peach". I'm not sure how it would work but perhaps we need a taste language that is not completely dependent on other tastes and smells. We might also need an analogy for volume too - mild and punchy are simply rubbish as a scale! I know that industry is churning out a vast number of clever flavours and smells but I think that the language is being left behind. (1) https://www.newscientist.com/article/2344992-phantom-notes-played-by-violins-turn-out-to-be-a-real-sound/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2344992-phantom-notes-p...

poulsbohemian 4y ago

I live in wine country. Used to have winemakers in the school PTA, so I got to know some of these folks... I'd completely agree with your professor. I'm not a "serious" wine drinker, but with a couple pointers you can pretty quickly start telling the difference in quality. One of our favorite "party tricks" is to set a budget ($10, $15, $20, etc) and buy a handful of bottles - turns out there's a lot of very enjoyable wines at those price points. Very important to understand varietals - some wines are meant to drink young, others will absolutely change over time for better or worse. Also, often at higher price points you are paying for scarcity - if only a few thousands bottles are being made, they gotta sell at $50+ / bottle to even begin to come close to profitable. If you get to know winemakers, there are a lot of games that go on to doctor grapes. The chemistry and know-how are commendable. You also start to realize there are wine makers who are making wines they like, but that may not hold mass-market appeal. I had a private tasting with a guy who spent years in Napa and now does custom white-label work. I thought his stuff was absolute garbage - not at all to my tastes - but he's in demand because he knows how to do all the magic to pull out certain attributes that some wine drinkers may enjoy. And that's the real key - drink what you like, at a price point you feel comfortable spending, and it's totally ok if you bought it because it had a cute label. The company you keep matters just as much as the quality of what's in the bottle.

alfiedotwtf 4y ago
This seem to be along the same as what I've found with coffee. I've talked to a lot of specialty roasters, and they personally fly around the world to meet with farmers and work together towards growing certain profiles.
CSSer 4y ago
I had the privilege to get a behind the scenes tour of a winery once because a friend’s family were the owners. They had some pretty sophisticated lab equipment. You could drop in a sample and it could tell you all sorts of things about its chemical makeup (magic to me because I never took much Chemistry). I asked them what sample attribute had the highest correlation with sales and without even hesitating they told me it was sugar content. They said their best selling wine was also their sweetest. They even said it was a pretty strong correlation that held all the way down the line from sweet, citrusy varietals to tannin-rich, cottony varietals. I think I was even told they could sometimes observe the effect from year to year if one vintage crop happened to be a little more or less sweet than the last year. Now, for the record, I take the same approach you and GP mentioned here. I happen to prefer pretty dry wines too, but I’ve gotta admit knowing this shook me a little.

abandonliberty 4y ago

In a similar vein, Best of Panama does a coffee auction where the highest rated coffee sold this year for $2000/lb. It's something like this each year, with a huge premium on first place. https://auction.bestofpanama.org/en/lots/auction/auction-2022 https://auction.bestofpanama.org/en/lots/auction/auction-202...

Foobar8568 4y ago
Look at Ninety Plus producer, these $2000 /lb looks like a bargain. More seriously coffee can be as expensive as wine, and frankly speaking, for good reason. The difference between farms, fermentation process, roasting skills for a se varietal /region produces large differences, like for wine.

prvit 4y ago

> They're good wines, but you can get a bottle that is just as good for a fraction of the price. I hear these things, but nobody will tell me what I should drink if I want a cheaper 2010 Mouton Rothschild. Or a cheaper Krug, people will recommend $50 Champagnes but generally not ones that actually pursue a similar style.

kevincox 4y ago
> It's more that you are paying for a unique flavor profile and reliability.
- prvit 4y ago
  Sure, but people generally agree that some flavor profiles are better than others.