Critics are just people with opinions. Sometimes they can provide good justification for why whatever they're reviewing is good or bad. But not one of them is impartial enough that their opinion can be taken at face value, specially if you're not into the stuff they're pushing.
This is more obvious with film and videogame. It wouldn't matter at all if a critic I liked ever said that there's this one Adam Sandler movie that everyone should totally watch. I'm not into that crap.
Boiling what a critic says down to "good/bad" or "like/dislike" means the reader hasn't taken the time to really understand what was said-- or the critic wasn't very good.
Your friend might be too humble.
Some things you get more out of if you choose to spend time with them, but will in turn change your own sense of it, and the experience you are having.
So in some sense you actually do become "better " at tasting/listening well - or at least you become more sophisticated. Which doesn't invalidate the enjoyment that someone else can get from a more superficial engagement, at all.
I'd expect critics to have eaten enough where they can judge many things.
I do agree putting it into words so someone else could have a sense of what it would taste like and possible be able to say if they would like it.
Personally I like it.
"This critic knows more than me, and tends to like merlots, maybe he'll suggest a reason why I like it, or a new wine that I'll like as well". Of course, taste is subjective, and that may never happen, but it tends to give people an idea of what wine/vidoe-game/comic they want to try next.
On the other hand. I don't know about those wines your are talking about but throwing, for example, a 34 years old wine to compete in a blind test against a cheap modern wine is a bad idea and I might prefer the modern one too in that setting. You need to prepare a good meal or cheese to have that old wine with, a table and good people, time for the wine to breath, good glasses... a pleasure setting. Then, only then the 34 years old wine will reveal why it costs that much.
I still agree with you that there are many good wines on the low price range, and people should drink what it tastes best for them.
The wine blender idea seems terrible to me. I can't believe it will output anything good, but hey, I would try it.
I'm from a wine region in Spain, by the way.
There's a documentary called Somm that follows a few people as they prepare for the Master Sommelier exam, it's impressive how precisely they can determine the year and region of a wine.
Example tasting from the doc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKNmcCCE15E
A famous version of this was the "Pepsi challenge". It turns out that people preferred the taste of pepsi in the test conditions, but coke in other, longer testing conditions. So part of it is biochemical (e.g. the taste you experience on the first bite/sip of something is not the same as the 20th) but some is also mental. Your experience of the taste of something can change with the environment you sample it in.
The question at hand is whether a cheap/expensive wine, of the same type, would matter in the boar stew example.
Personally, I have no reason to believe that a more expensive wine would only shine under these types of conditions. I also think it's a matter of subjective taste, and there is no arguing matters of taste ;).
From the non-oenophile POV, my objection is the pretension of objectivity. "This wine is better than the other one" is a subjective statement masquerading as an objective one.
That's how it is for most everyone, I think the disconnect is that the newbie isn't aware of that and make take the "expert's" opinion out of context or too serious. And the experts can be jerks too, but I think it's more people unfamiliar with wine seem to come into contact with the jerks first for some reason and wine gets a bad knock because of that.
Is there a wine for having with bad people?
This propensity (being "fooled" by white/red of a wine) is very often cited as "proof" that wine drinkers don't know what they are talking about.
In fact, the broad taste profiles of either white or red grapes - and the difference in expression of those profiles based on temperature - can make it very difficult to discern certain reds from certain whites.
"Fooling" someone with red vs. white really isn't that interesting at all.
Another classic example is many people not being able to distinguish between the small of parmesan and vomit, how they rate the smell of either being affected by what they are told it is (in this case the key molecules that the nose picks up on are the same, or at least similar enough to activate the same receptors, so the subconscious bias caused by other verbal or environmental cues is enough to sway the perception one way or the other).
The results of such priming experiments are notoriously varied though - reproduction is often unreliable.
That turns out to be somewhat of an urban legend.
http://sciencesnopes.blogspot.com/2013/05/about-that-wine-ex...
> The results of such priming experiments are notoriously varied though - reproduction is often unreliable.
Yes, this is why it's important for everyone to just do these experiments for themselves and decide what they like, and not bother with what anyone else thinks.
This is of course the right approach to most things in life. But just because "to each their own", that doesn't imply there aren't real complexities and nuances in foods that exist only in more expensive things.
Take for example someone who eats fast food burgers every day and try to take them to eat sushi. They just won't like it.
In the case of wine (heh), sure different palates like different wines. But I think a lot of people take that and jump to the conclusion that "all wines are the same, the only difference is the palates". I don't think the conclusion is true.
At least this year, the "two-buck chuck" (which, depending on your state, usually costs around $3 now) comes in 7 different varieties: 3 different reds, 3 whites, and 1 rose.
https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/05/ranking-trade...
Given the lack of information, I never bet a lot on a bottle. My favorite wine ever was a Consumato Nero D'Avolo from 2010 (I paid $22), but other years of that label have been wildly inconsistent, and now I can't find it any more. It was very close in flavor to a wine I had at a wine bar that they called a "California Malbec" which I've never found again, and another at a restaurant where -
WTF restaurants! Whenever stumble on a wine I especially like at a restaurant, I go to Google and find out the label doesn't exist! It's some fictional house label!
Not my very favorite, but something I liked with meals was Corbet Canyon Malbec, so of course they don't make it any more.
Even if I had the time and money to make thorough study of this, I'd have spent a year being drunk and discovering perhaps a dozen excellent bottles - which would henceforth never be made again. Screw that. Inexpensive box wine for me.
Or, just as often, an IPA. The beer people know how to produce consistent quality and have categories where the product consistently meets expectation, while still having entertaining variations between brewers.
I agree it is best to not to depend on price, score, or reviews when finding a good wine. Its all about your own senses.
The best advice I ever got at a wine tasting was, actually, tasting advice. Basically just savor a glass of wine and develop a memory of the sensory experience. If one takes the time and attention to do it right the mind will automatically tuck that away and recall it for comparison when tasting other wines months or years into the future.
Still, I agree with your general thrust. I find that my favorite wines, especially per dollar spent, are between $8-20.
This was a long time ago so it's hard to say. But I've had plenty of reds that tasted great straight out of the bottle, so IMHO any wine that needs to "open up" is not as good as one that doesn't. Also, while it is absolutely true that the taste of a wine will change over the course of an evening, it's far from clear how much of this is due to the flavor of the wine changing and how much due to your perceptions changing. Taste buds can get fatigued (I get "wined out" after trying 5 or 6 different wines) and food makes a huge difference too.
My bottom line: I now know plenty of wines that reliably taste great (to me) straight out of the gate and keep tasting great through the whole bottle even if I keep it for a couple of days, and which cost a lot less than Silver Oak. So I just drink those :-)
Yikes. Gonna have to disagree with you on that. The effect of a wine being aerated/oxidized after being opened and/or decanted is obvious even to a casual wine drinker.
> I now know plenty of wines that reliably taste great (to me) straight out of the gate and keep tasting great through the whole bottle even if I keep it for a couple of days
And, by the same token, the taste of red wine degrades fast and is generally completely unrecognizable within 24-48 hours of opening, even if it's well kept with a fancy stopper.
Reading those two comments of yours makes me seriously doubt your ability to make observations that generalize to other people.
If I trust you to make my food in secret, out of sight, I trust you to open my wine in secret, out of sight.
I've seen a few use those aerating pourers, which is better than nothing.
There are a huge range of wines that need to be decanted. The effect is not only obvious but marvelous, how they start smelling and evolve into something much deeper, specially on the oldest bottles.
Same with the degradation. I have a vacuum pump for the bottles I left open and the degradation is still obvious.
> Reading those two comments of yours makes me seriously doubt your ability to make observations that generalize to other people.
Two responses:
1. What I've said here is not based just on my own experience, but also on the firsthand observations of other people who have participated in blind tastings along with me. And...
2. The general impossibility of generalizing one's own subjective experience to other people when it comes to wine is kind of my whole point.
After having had a lot of moderately expensive wine over the past few years, I'm sometimes surprised when I go back to a $5 bottle that I like. Usually if I think about it harder, I find that I'm enjoying a combination of sweetness and oak that are pleasant, but not really that fun to dwell on. It's similar to that balance of salt, sugar, and fat that snack foods use to be broadly liked but not have much depth.
Not to say that such wines are bad, but I think you're missing the point to say that expensive wines are supposed to be appreciated by the masses.
Sure, that's why we repeat the experiment regularly (though less formally than we used to). In fact, we just did it a few weeks ago with a friend who is a really hard-core wine snob. He has a 10,000 bottle collection in off-site temperature controlled storage. And he's not just a rich asshole showing off his wealth. He's upper-middle class and really passionate and knowledgeable about wine, as is his wife. Both of them rated the Barefoot cab very highly. No Silver Oak in the lineup this time, but some very comparable bottles, like a Franciscan and a Veeder Reserve, alongside a few other varietals (we were actually trying to see if we could pick out varietals blind). The Barefoot didn't come out on top, but it made a very respectable showing. One of the things we rated the wines on was, "How much would you guess this wine sells for?" My friend gave the Barefoot a $50 rating, and his wife said $130.
I'm curious how the other varietals did. Cabs have so many flavors going on that it might be easier for cheaper wines to "hide behind" oak and alcohol. (Relatedly, the general wisdom for homebrewers is that Budweiser-style beers are much harder to emulate at home than IPAs, because any bad flavors in a light beer will stick out much more than a flavorful ale.) I've heard some wine people talk about how hard it is to find "good" Pinot Noirs for under $30, presumably because that grape has a bit more nuance and it's hard for (at least the snobby) people to find cheaper bottles that don't have sharp edges.
I'd certainly encourage people to try natural wines if they do a tasting. They're on the cheaper end of the good wine spectrum, don't need aging, and almost universally taste better than the median wine at 2x the price. Something like Raisins Gaulois is a good starting point.
I respectfully disagree. Basically I stick to cheap wines (for budget reasons), and my decanter will turn almost any unbearable red into acceptable. A newly opened red sometimes just needs to be smoothed out via air a bit -- at the extreme of things, if you leave a glass out overnight it will be flat (not to mention, the alcohol will have evaporated of course).
edit: not sure if "evaporate" is the right scientific term
Myhrvold in Modernist Cuisine recommends to use a... blender. It really works ;-)
source: have left a glass of wine on my nitestand before, and in the morning it was glass of sour grape juice.
[1] http://www.ars.usda.gov/SP2UserFiles/Place/12354500/Data/ret... (see page 12)
Then you should try it again! Not only are there many varietals, but they change far more year over year than your traditional wine would as it's basically a blend of whatever was available as overage from many different California wineries. Some years there is a bit of a hidden gem worth spending a few bucks to find.
The Wine Trials: 100 Everyday Wines Under $15 that Beat $50 to $150 Wines in Brown-Bag Blind Tastings
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0974014354/
It currently can be found for $0.01 (!!) It's a great book.
Wine snobbery may be bullshit, just like jazz snobbery. But that's not the same as 'appreciation,' which requires some education and experience, maybe even some aptitude.
Or think instead of sex: Wow, that sure was great! Why would I want to try anything different? tl;dr: You don't know what you're missing, or you're doing it wrong--or, more likely, both.
https://winemakermag.com/95-blending-batches-tips-from-the-p...
OP's point is that without the information about the price and make of the wine, your brain alone can't "appreciate" anything not matter how educated and experienced you are. If someone tells you you are drinking a rare extremely expensive french 100-year-old vintage, your brain will "appreciate" it, even if it's actually cheap box wine.
The only real exception that I know of is Hunter Valley (Australia) wines. The Hunter Valley is a very unreliable wine region and it only gets a really good vintage every 5 to 10 years. Wine makers just can't charge the correct price for hunter wines in the good vintages because they have to be able to shift their production the rest of the time. In a good year you can get totally amazing wines for a very reasonable price - the only problem is the long wait.
Got them home - had some later, tasted nothing like what we had in the tasting room... weren't as impressed.
Same thing with Raymond, but Caymus is always consistent.
But if you like to drink wine - it doesn't make sense to drink a 30/60/90 dollar bottle of wine a week. You need to find a bottle that is something you like and is also affordable. Save the Special Selection for a special occasion.
I've always been of the opinion that Barefoot punches above its price, so to speak.
Could you go into a bit more detail on this? The very idea of forcing myself to "acquire the taste" for alcohol seems distasteful in itself. I've got additional reasons for choosing not to do so, but I'd be interested to hear another point of view and why you'd want to make a fairly drastic change.
The logic of any acquired taste is simple:
It takes a finite amount of effort to acquire the taste.
In return, you get satisfaction for the acquired taste that is only bound by the length of your life. The sooner you acquire the taste, the longer you get to amortize the value.
I've taught myself to enjoy damn near every food and drink out there and I am immensely glad that I have—I now inhabit a world filled with delights.
Well yeah, when you have drugs to "teach" your brain how to enjoy something (i.e. "this flavor = feel goods"), it's not that hard. I always figure that having to aqcuire the taste of something via drugs is a warning sign that said thing is probably not good for your body. Take tobacco connoisseurs for example.
I don't doubt that they can taste and enjoy lots of "woody" and "grassy" flavors in their smoke, but to someone like me without the acquired taste, it smells foul and acrid, and my brain is warning me to stay away.
>An acquired taste often refers to an appreciation for a food or beverage that is unlikely to be enjoyed by a person who has not had substantial exposure to it, usually because of some unfamiliar aspect of the food or beverage, including a strong or strange odor (e.g. stinky tofu, Gefilte fish, durian, hákarl, black salt, nattō, stinking toe, asafoetida, surströmming, or certain types of cheese), taste (such as alcoholic beverages, vegemite/marmite, bitter teas, salty liquorice, malt bread, unsweetened chocolate or garnatálg), or appearance.
Even with coffee and tea, the acquisition works just as well if you drink decaf. (I only have one cup of caffeinated beverage a day, but I still occasionally enjoy a cup of decaf in the afternoons.)
A lot of people do like the effect of the alcohol, but it's a side-effect, not the main purpose of drinking wine. Personally, it seems to have no effect on me, but I also don't drink very much at a time.
Forcing yourself to "acquire the taste" for wine is no different than forcing yourself to "acquire the taste" for expensive, fine cheeses, or doing the same for fine cuts of meat instead of eating a McDonald's burger.
I really wish that synthehol (of Star Trek fame) were a thing. I was at a champagne tasting of 60+ wines from the best producers (Krug and Roederer come to mind), and made it through 25 or so, spitting each one, and was still terribly buzzed.
If there were a way to enjoy the taste without the effects I would be all for it.
I've never actually had that feeling, and always wondered what this "buzz" effect is. I've been to wine tastings, drank multiple glasses at once, etc., and never felt a thing.
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/10/you-are-no...
But I've found I have had to get more clever about the wines I like by finding vineyards near to the fancy ones, such as a wine from Gigondas vs. its more expensive neighbour Chateau-du-Pape, or a good Cremant or Prosecco vs. Champagne. Even at that not every supposedly "great" wine is transcendent, but from the right areas I've occasionally I gotten lucky and it's really something else. And some of the best wines I've had weren't for sale, small hotel in Tuscany making it's own wine, or a professor in Hungary who happened to own a vineyard were stunning.
Invariably, I found that I liked the cheapest varieties the best. The $100/bottle port tasted like crap to me ("Grandfathers"? I think that might have been the name), whereas the cheapest port was fantastic paired with chocolate, which was something I had never tried at the time. Same with wines and champagnes; the cheap Asti Spumanti tasted good to me, the expensive stuff was just nasty.
I also think the roll-your-own is a great idea. Wine snobbery is annoying; I try to only buy bottles where they show right on the label what kind of wine it is (sweet vs. dry) instead of a bunch of stupid flowery language about notes and aromas.
I also wish they'd cut it out with the stupid corks. Those make as much sense now as wooden spokes on car wheels, or 50-pin SCSI ports on computers. Screw-on caps are superior in every way.
I might add that I got a Moldovan 2 bucks wine in a PET bottle this week and quite liked it. :-)
(I prefer dry red Spanish that you almost have to chew (I think the English term i s "rich"?). I should probably just admit defeat and replace the wine with a bit of vodka in espresso. :-) )
Edit: Hmm, I guess the cheap stuff is blended in giant volumes and hence consistent? Thanks for the information, lisper. I should try to widen my experience.
> vodka in espresso
Whatever works! My wife likes vanilla vodka with olives, and raspberry martinis with a dash of tabasco. But I love her anyway :-)
What the market "likes" isn't correlated to taste, it is correlated to scarcity.
Certain climates and variations in climate that one year, coupled with name, garner the premiums.
It isn't age or "complex nuance". Although these are one form of magic the industry relies on being perpetuated by consumers, the other is the idea that climates cannot be replicated.
I hear people make this comparison between wine tasting and whiskey tasting and drives me a little batty.
It's especially unfortunate that this comparison brings vodka into the mix, because vodka is a neutral spirit --- it's not supposed to be distinctive (Dave Arnold, when he was at the French Culinary, used to "make his own" by ordering potable ethyl lab alcohol and diluting it). But try to say the same thing for rum or gin: different brands are wildly different.
The difference between wine and whiskey is how few options you get within a style in whiskey tasting compared to wine. The options are small enough in whiskey that an amateur on a budget can memorize all of the flavor profiles relatively easily.
But that doesn't change the point that blind tasting whiskeys can give you interesting non-price correlated results.
(What's worse is that a lot of brands want to claim a price in the boutique price range --- like WhistlePig --- and so you really have to know what you're shopping for if you want to pay extra for it).
Sorry, Ron! I'm knee-jerk about people comparing wine tasting to beer and whiskey tasting. :)
I presume you know this, but an awful lot of those craft brands in the middle (including some of the Whistle Pig line) are made by the same distillery in Indiana. Which doesn't mean that they are bad, but it does disincline one to trust any of the puffery one reads on a label: http://www.seriouseats.com/2015/09/best-whiskey-spirits-from...
I did happen across one brand recently that surprised me by having a genuinely authentic and interesting story. They are doing a sweet potato base blended with their rye cover crop: http://www.outsideonline.com/2040581/drink-your-sweet-potato...
Of course not. That's not what I'm saying. All I'm saying is that when I do blind tastings, sometimes the cheap stuff turns out to be my favorite, other times not. (And when it does, I'm happy!)
> vodka is a neutral spirit --- it's not supposed to be distinctive
And yet it is. If you don't believe me, try comparing Ciroc to Smirnov. You don't even have to do it blind. If you can tell the difference between Laphroaig and Glenlivet (a very low bar) you'll be able to tell the difference between those two.
> rum or gin
There is definitely more variation in flavor there. FWIW, my picks are Bacardi Black rum and New Amsterdam gin. If it's a special occasion I'll have a Hendricks cucumber gimlet :-)
Traditional Polish test of vodka quality: did it have any flavor? Did you go blind? Do you have a horrible hangover? If all three answers are no, 100/100.
In the 10+ years since, however, I can go to my local shop and pick up a made in Texas (!) vodka distilled 6 times for about $20 a liter. Is it as good? No. Is it leaps and bounds better than what I remember from college and in general drinking out and about? Drastically better.
People look at me funny but I claim to be able to taste the copper still pots used in the making of Titos. Can't really over OJ, but if it's stiff enough. Just not my thing!
I know the family that owns the bottling plant for most of the vodka brands sold in California, from premium to bum brands; they bottle everything from the same railroad tanker cars of ethanol from ADM. It was eye-opening to see but it makes sense; ethanol distillation is a highly refined, industrial scale process. Ironically, some of the cheapest stuff is the purest (it costs money to add adulterants to ethanol, after all). The industrial distillation columns are extremely efficient, so extra "distillations" don't buy much.
Here's a couple background articles on the bottler's role, without specific reference to flavorings:
http://adiforums.com/index.php?/topic/452-whiskey-bottling-v...
That seems improbable because flavored vodkas are common.
Flavored vodka has to include the flavor on the label. Pages 2 and 11:
But go to an extremely nice restaurant sometime --- my revelation happened at Alinea in Chicago --- and get a tasting menu with a wine pairing. Clearly it is not the case that all wine falls within the parameters of mass market wine. You'll get glasses of wine that blow your head off. Frustratingly: they will probably be "conventional" wines: I still remember the Pinot Noir they served me, but I've had no luck reproducing any of that experience by shopping for Pinot Noirs at any part of the price spectrum at wine stores. The wines a place like Alinea sells are very difficult to source.
You're starting to see some of the same effect in American whiskey: the so-called "craft" distiller movement is really just an excuse for branding firms to stake out different points on the whiskey product price spectrum, and all of them taste either like Makers, VOB, or something in between.
Now older whiskey for instance is going to always cost more than younger, and its usually going to be better, but you can get similarly aged whiskeys produced with the same or similar mash bills from the exact same facility that vary dramatically in price.
The current trend of "craft" distillers relabeling factory made bourbons and ryes is a different animal.
But that doesn't mean price and quality are aligned. There are good deals in scotch, and there are bad deals. There are mediocre scotches that command huge prices for their brand. There's a sharp trend towards no-age-statement scotches clearing the way for more like that.
Also: part of the reason there are fewer fake whiskeys in Scotland is that they're practically all owned by Diageo and Pernod Ricard. Within those corporate families, distilleries are outsourcing a lot of their grain production, malting, &c. The stills themselves are mostly software-controlled. The median scotch is probably better than the median bourbon, but there's a case to be made for bourbon having higher highs.
There's also a trend towards startups lighting up silent distilleries in Scotland, so prepare yourself for craft scotch as well.
On another occasion we were at a bed-and-breakfast that served afternoon wine and cheese. The whole room (including us) was raving about how complex and delicately nuanced the white wine was. It turned out to be Gallo Rhine Wine in a box.
(BTW, it's absolutely not the case that all cheap wines taste good. We tried the notorious two-buck chuck and thought it was absolutely horrible.)
The point is: wine snobbery is bullshit. Find what you like and drink that, and don't pay attention to anything that anyone else says. If Beringer white zinfandel is what turns you one, more power to you. (Actually, the worst possible outcome for a real wine fan is to discover that they really do enjoy Romanee Conti or Screaming Eagle. I really like Opus 1, but I wish I didn't :-)
So I think this roll-your-own-wine blender is a terrific idea. I can't wait to try it. (I wish I'd thought of it!)