5 ms·

There's a vineyard in that area, Sobon Estates, that has a unique feature. If you look up into the vineyard from the winery, there's a dividing line between vol

by dws 3y ago

There's a vineyard in that area, Sobon Estates, that has a unique feature. If you look up into the vineyard from the winery, there's a dividing line between volcanic soil and alluvial soil. The same varietal of grape produces a noticeably different wine depending on which side of the line it was grown on.

lisper 3y ago
Do they actually market their wines that way? I thought it would make an interesting comparison, but when I looked on their web site I didn't see any indication of which wine came from which type of soil. (I'm a wine aficionado who happens to believe that most wine marketing is BS. I'm particularly skeptical of terroir, so a chance to do a proper controlled experiment would be really interesting.)
- colechristensen 3y ago
  My position on wine BS is that it comes from two sources: 1. Lack of a robust language to describe taste and smell 2. Variation between people in taste and smell sensitivity levels for individual flavor/smell compounds. It’s like how it would be difficult to talk about color if there were thousands of different kinds of colorblindness and everybody was randomly one kind. You have to train yourself for a very long time to isolate and identify the many many different flavored compounds and then when you do there isn’t any universal language to have a conversation about them. The terroir business is similar. Clearly fruit grown in very different places tastes very different, anybody can experience this. When it comes to the fine details though the signal to noise goes way down because of the same lack of language and taste consistency. Add on the people trying to appear like they know what they’re talking about and you get this mass of nonsense which is very loosely connected with reality.
  - jojobas 3y ago
    The same professional taster will at times assign different ratings and features to five glasses poured from the same bottle, and they consistently give typical red wine characteristics to white wine with added odourless tasteless dye. It's 90% bullshit science and 10% basic measurable characteristics. Interesting how in the beer industry it's much less bullshity, with multiple characteristics objectively measured both at raw materials stage (hops alpha/beta acid content, essential oil etc, yeast alcohol limit , malt diastatic power) and different stages of beer production (wort specific gravity, fermentation progress etc).
  - eszed 3y ago
    Agree with everything you say. Wine experts do try to use a common vocabulary, but it's a bit of the competing standards problem [relevant XKCD goes here]. Most of the wine training I received working in the restaurant industry was vocab words to generate up-sells, and most amateur wine snobs don't know enough not to fall for it. I did have a fascinating experience, a bit more than twenty years ago, which pulled back a curtain onto a more interesting reality. I was working in private dining for a winery, one of the perks of which was getting to take home quite a bit of wine and food. One time I got offered the leftovers from a vertical tasting - that's every vintage of a particular wine - from their top-end estate-grown bottling. It was 15-20 bottles, I can't remember exactly, all half to three-quarters full. Anyway, we decided to do it properly, and tasted them all blind. (I mean, how often do you get a chance to do that with close to five retail figures of wine? Most of us were in wine or food or associated industries, anyway, so it was going to be a good story, and bragging rights, if nothing else.) I think there were six or eight of us - me, my flatmate, the three girls from next door, and a couple of hangers on - and we all (without conferring) agreed on the three best vintages. Some of us ranked them ABC, some BCA, etc, but it was those three in all cases. I went back to work a few days later, and told the wine maker 1) Thank you, and 2) you might be interested to know, blah blah blah. His immediate response? Oh, yeah, it was years ABC, wasn't it? Which it exactly was. So, there's a lot of wine bullshit, but not all of it is.
    - fragmede 3y ago
      Xkcd 927
    - lisper 3y ago
      Thirty years ago I started a wine-tasting group with the person who is now my wife. There were twelve of us, and one day we did a blind tasting of six California cabs, with Barefoot on the low end ($3/bottle at the time) and Silver Oak at the high end ($50). Everyone in the room ranked the Barefoot first or second, and everyone ranked the Silver Oak dead last. That experience knocked the wine snobbery out of me for good. It's possible we just got a bad bottle, but I don't think so. I think a dry full-bodied wine is just an acquired taste which none of us had yet acquired. Thirty years on I like Silver Oak better than I did then, but I can list a dozen wines I like better that cost half as much. There is no such thing as a good wine in any absolute sense except in a few very broad brushstrokes. Beyond that it's all a matter of personal taste.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    I think there’s a third source, which is that it gets you drunk. We like to pretend it doesn’t, and that we can hold our alcohol or that were supposed to spit it out when doing a tasting, but let's be real. Alcohol does a number on your senses and thought patterns, and any conclusions drawn from subjective experiences while intoxicated are automatically suspect.
    - Turing_Machine 3y ago
      > Alcohol does a number on your senses When I was a poor undergrad (and my friends were mostly poor undergrads), we'd buy (say) a six pack or twelve pack of good beer, and (say) a case of a budget brand. After you've had a few of the good beers, the cheap stuff doesn't taste nearly as bad. (note that I said as bad. I'm not claiming that it actually became good) It turns out that this is a very old strategy. From the Bible: 'Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now.'
      - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
        The Bible does have the odd nugget of Wisdom. Funny how we don't get into wars over this one. It's universal. John 2:10 New Living Translation (NLT) “A host always serves the best wine first,” he said. “Then, when everyone has had a lot to drink, he brings out the less expensive wine. But you have kept the best until now!” Backstory. Jesus's Mom invited him to a kicking party, and it was a major drag not having enough wine, so Jesus was like 'hold my beer, I've got this', turned water in the 'good stuff', and they partied all night. Mary, the original MILF, even God couldn't resist.
    - BashiBazouk 3y ago
      I've always wondered why I have never seen that marketed or recommended as it's a real thing. This is great first bottle, but that wine over there is just a fantastic third bottle. I wouldn't start off with it but...
- dws 3y ago
  I don't know it they market this way. I learned it at the winery, from someone who clearly loved the wine. It was a, "Try these two. Taste the difference?" thing, followed by the story. And then you walk outside the tasting room, look up at the hill, and see it.
- prawn 3y ago
  It's not that it's bullshit, it's more that it's possible that you are not able to discern or inclined to care or a combination. And it is perfectly reasonable and something that everyone does for most things they consume or use - beer, food, films, cars, sound, furnishings, etc. For countless categories, you can keep it practical or you can delve further. With a film, you can just watch things and like or not like them, or you can pay close attention to particular directors or techniques in structuring a story or presenting a visual. I do think though that if you have even a passing interest in wine, and are likely to drink wine through your adult life, that a quick course to become familiar with it unlocks something in what you get from it - identifying varieties, faults, etc.
  - lisper 3y ago
    > it's possible that you are not able to discern or inclined to care or a combination I definitely care. I started a wine tasting group thirty years ago with the person who is now my wife, and today we have several hundred bottles in our cellar. We're not hard-core winos, but we definitely enjoy it, and know our way around a wine list. It's possible that there's something wrong with my taste buds, though I can definitely tell the difference between different wines. I'm no master somme, but I've tried a lot of different wines from a lot of different places over a lot of different years. From what I've been able to glean from my data, the difference in regional flavors has a lot more to do with wine making technique and climate than terroir, which is why I would welcome the opportunity to do a controlled experiment.
    - prawn 3y ago
      Further, perhaps quite a lot of marketing is certainly exaggerated and I wonder how wine gets singled out. Think about how feminine hygiene products are marketed with frolicking white-dressed women, or cars tearing across the landscape, Apple tech, sports drinks, fashion. Here are some phrases from just one particular hiking shoe! Mud Contragrip® outsole with chevron lugs EnergyCell midsole Moulded Ortholite sockliner Sensifit™ system cradles the foot Advanced Chassis insert !
    - werdnapk 3y ago
- hammock 3y ago
  In your experience, what makes you so skeptical of terroir? As a naive enthusiast, it makes sense to me that drainage, at the very least, would impact the way the fruits grow , and fruit yield, impacting the final product thusly. A large watermelon and small watermelon from the same vine/garden have different flavor
  - lisper 3y ago
    Yes, I agree that theoretically it kind of makes sense, but I've gathered a lot of data over the years and the best predictor of quality that I've found is the wine maker. We've had it happen a number of times now that a wine that we really liked suddenly started tasting different, and it turned out that the wine maker had changed. So this is a confounding factor. I really like California reds, but mostly from Napa, Sonoma and Paso Robles. Is that because of the terroir? Or the climate? Or the varietals? Or because there's a community of wine makers that all copy each other? It's really hard to tease these apart.

by dws 3y ago

lisper 3y ago

Do they actually market their wines that way? I thought it would make an interesting comparison, but when I looked on their web site I didn't see any indication of which wine came from which type of soil. (I'm a wine aficionado who happens to believe that most wine marketing is BS. I'm particularly skeptical of terroir, so a chance to do a proper controlled experiment would be really interesting.)

colechristensen 3y ago
My position on wine BS is that it comes from two sources: 1. Lack of a robust language to describe taste and smell 2. Variation between people in taste and smell sensitivity levels for individual flavor/smell compounds. It’s like how it would be difficult to talk about color if there were thousands of different kinds of colorblindness and everybody was randomly one kind. You have to train yourself for a very long time to isolate and identify the many many different flavored compounds and then when you do there isn’t any universal language to have a conversation about them. The terroir business is similar. Clearly fruit grown in very different places tastes very different, anybody can experience this. When it comes to the fine details though the signal to noise goes way down because of the same lack of language and taste consistency. Add on the people trying to appear like they know what they’re talking about and you get this mass of nonsense which is very loosely connected with reality.
- jojobas 3y ago
  The same professional taster will at times assign different ratings and features to five glasses poured from the same bottle, and they consistently give typical red wine characteristics to white wine with added odourless tasteless dye. It's 90% bullshit science and 10% basic measurable characteristics. Interesting how in the beer industry it's much less bullshity, with multiple characteristics objectively measured both at raw materials stage (hops alpha/beta acid content, essential oil etc, yeast alcohol limit , malt diastatic power) and different stages of beer production (wort specific gravity, fermentation progress etc).
- eszed 3y ago
  Agree with everything you say. Wine experts do try to use a common vocabulary, but it's a bit of the competing standards problem [relevant XKCD goes here]. Most of the wine training I received working in the restaurant industry was vocab words to generate up-sells, and most amateur wine snobs don't know enough not to fall for it. I did have a fascinating experience, a bit more than twenty years ago, which pulled back a curtain onto a more interesting reality. I was working in private dining for a winery, one of the perks of which was getting to take home quite a bit of wine and food. One time I got offered the leftovers from a vertical tasting - that's every vintage of a particular wine - from their top-end estate-grown bottling. It was 15-20 bottles, I can't remember exactly, all half to three-quarters full. Anyway, we decided to do it properly, and tasted them all blind. (I mean, how often do you get a chance to do that with close to five retail figures of wine? Most of us were in wine or food or associated industries, anyway, so it was going to be a good story, and bragging rights, if nothing else.) I think there were six or eight of us - me, my flatmate, the three girls from next door, and a couple of hangers on - and we all (without conferring) agreed on the three best vintages. Some of us ranked them ABC, some BCA, etc, but it was those three in all cases. I went back to work a few days later, and told the wine maker 1) Thank you, and 2) you might be interested to know, blah blah blah. His immediate response? Oh, yeah, it was years ABC, wasn't it? Which it exactly was. So, there's a lot of wine bullshit, but not all of it is.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    Xkcd 927
  - lisper 3y ago
    Thirty years ago I started a wine-tasting group with the person who is now my wife. There were twelve of us, and one day we did a blind tasting of six California cabs, with Barefoot on the low end ($3/bottle at the time) and Silver Oak at the high end ($50). Everyone in the room ranked the Barefoot first or second, and everyone ranked the Silver Oak dead last. That experience knocked the wine snobbery out of me for good. It's possible we just got a bad bottle, but I don't think so. I think a dry full-bodied wine is just an acquired taste which none of us had yet acquired. Thirty years on I like Silver Oak better than I did then, but I can list a dozen wines I like better that cost half as much. There is no such thing as a good wine in any absolute sense except in a few very broad brushstrokes. Beyond that it's all a matter of personal taste.
- fragmede 3y ago
  I think there’s a third source, which is that it gets you drunk. We like to pretend it doesn’t, and that we can hold our alcohol or that were supposed to spit it out when doing a tasting, but let's be real. Alcohol does a number on your senses and thought patterns, and any conclusions drawn from subjective experiences while intoxicated are automatically suspect.
  - Turing_Machine 3y ago
    > Alcohol does a number on your senses When I was a poor undergrad (and my friends were mostly poor undergrads), we'd buy (say) a six pack or twelve pack of good beer, and (say) a case of a budget brand. After you've had a few of the good beers, the cheap stuff doesn't taste nearly as bad. (note that I said as bad. I'm not claiming that it actually became good) It turns out that this is a very old strategy. From the Bible: 'Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now.'
    - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
      The Bible does have the odd nugget of Wisdom. Funny how we don't get into wars over this one. It's universal. John 2:10 New Living Translation (NLT) “A host always serves the best wine first,” he said. “Then, when everyone has had a lot to drink, he brings out the less expensive wine. But you have kept the best until now!” Backstory. Jesus's Mom invited him to a kicking party, and it was a major drag not having enough wine, so Jesus was like 'hold my beer, I've got this', turned water in the 'good stuff', and they partied all night. Mary, the original MILF, even God couldn't resist.
  - BashiBazouk 3y ago
    I've always wondered why I have never seen that marketed or recommended as it's a real thing. This is great first bottle, but that wine over there is just a fantastic third bottle. I wouldn't start off with it but...
dws 3y ago
I don't know it they market this way. I learned it at the winery, from someone who clearly loved the wine. It was a, "Try these two. Taste the difference?" thing, followed by the story. And then you walk outside the tasting room, look up at the hill, and see it.
prawn 3y ago
It's not that it's bullshit, it's more that it's possible that you are not able to discern or inclined to care or a combination. And it is perfectly reasonable and something that everyone does for most things they consume or use - beer, food, films, cars, sound, furnishings, etc. For countless categories, you can keep it practical or you can delve further. With a film, you can just watch things and like or not like them, or you can pay close attention to particular directors or techniques in structuring a story or presenting a visual. I do think though that if you have even a passing interest in wine, and are likely to drink wine through your adult life, that a quick course to become familiar with it unlocks something in what you get from it - identifying varieties, faults, etc.
- lisper 3y ago
  > it's possible that you are not able to discern or inclined to care or a combination I definitely care. I started a wine tasting group thirty years ago with the person who is now my wife, and today we have several hundred bottles in our cellar. We're not hard-core winos, but we definitely enjoy it, and know our way around a wine list. It's possible that there's something wrong with my taste buds, though I can definitely tell the difference between different wines. I'm no master somme, but I've tried a lot of different wines from a lot of different places over a lot of different years. From what I've been able to glean from my data, the difference in regional flavors has a lot more to do with wine making technique and climate than terroir, which is why I would welcome the opportunity to do a controlled experiment.
  - prawn 3y ago
    Further, perhaps quite a lot of marketing is certainly exaggerated and I wonder how wine gets singled out. Think about how feminine hygiene products are marketed with frolicking white-dressed women, or cars tearing across the landscape, Apple tech, sports drinks, fashion. Here are some phrases from just one particular hiking shoe! Mud Contragrip® outsole with chevron lugs EnergyCell midsole Moulded Ortholite sockliner Sensifit™ system cradles the foot Advanced Chassis insert !
  - werdnapk 3y ago
hammock 3y ago
In your experience, what makes you so skeptical of terroir? As a naive enthusiast, it makes sense to me that drainage, at the very least, would impact the way the fruits grow , and fruit yield, impacting the final product thusly. A large watermelon and small watermelon from the same vine/garden have different flavor
- lisper 3y ago
  Yes, I agree that theoretically it kind of makes sense, but I've gathered a lot of data over the years and the best predictor of quality that I've found is the wine maker. We've had it happen a number of times now that a wine that we really liked suddenly started tasting different, and it turned out that the wine maker had changed. So this is a confounding factor. I really like California reds, but mostly from Napa, Sonoma and Paso Robles. Is that because of the terroir? Or the climate? Or the varietals? Or because there's a community of wine makers that all copy each other? It's really hard to tease these apart.