One thing about wine I really enjoy is that there are so many different tastes available, and that tastes may vary by year.
If you're still exploring your preferences, I'd recommend to stay below 30€/bottle (reseller price, not restaurant) and try a lot of different ones (not necessarily on the same evening thought).
It's funny to lump these together. Having lived in a couple of wine-producing countries now, I've found the wine culture is heavily centered around finding the best price for the best wine. Finding a half-way decent low-priced wine is considered just as much a skill as knowing which high-priced wines are actually worth the cost.
Even if you do know about wine this is what you should be doing. Drinking expensive wine because it's expensive is the wrong thing to do. The people who I know who really know wine are always in search of good wine that is also inexpensive.
my favorite wine comes affordably in a box. there are better box wines than others, and not all wines are appropriate for specific settings.
I can only get buzzed so often and only to a certain amount (I'm over 30), so when I choose to drink I try to get the most out of it. Since money is not a bottleneck in how often I can get buzzed, I think less about it in that context.
> drinking and enjoying wine is not about some 'pretending to be wealthy' feeling.
I'm pretty sure that these two statements are contradictory. Wine tastes good, and it tastes good with other things, but in no way more special than say, other fruit juices or beverages.
Do you maximize the experience of a fine meal with a flight of six different orange juices? No, nobody ever does that. And yet there is certainly as much variation in citrus juice as there is in grape.
Wine is treated differently precisely for the kind of reasons that you have to explicitly disclaim "pretending to be wealthy" as a motivation.
No, wine is a bit special here. It's somehow similar to cheese - there is a whole universe of tastes and subtastes based on many factors. You can of course ignore it completely and treat these foods like eggs (or put any other uniformly tasting kind of food here). That's perfectly fine. Or you can discover that there are so many flavors of cheese, with some of them particularly appealing to you - and just let yourself enjoy these.
Of course there are snobs who make a show out of everything, but don't let that spoil the genuine joy of tasting some good wine (or any other food that may or may not be expensive at that moment).
Compare that to the varieties of grapes - there are certainly more strains of grapes in total (5k-10k), but if you restrict yourself to only wine grapes, they are of similar complexity, and the entire grape industry is based on Vitis Vinifera and Vitis Labrusca, whereas Citrus has at least 4 original species.
And Citrus reacts just as well as Vitis Vinifera to terroir, as well - Citrus grown in volcanic soil vs limestone soil vs california loam has a distinctly different composition and flavor.
You're going to have to face it, wine is special because humans have declared it special, not because it's not similar in complexity to dozens of other agricultural, natural, and fermented products :)
If you want to try it out sometime.
> Do you maximize the experience of a fine meal with a flight of six different orange juices
A lot of people usually prefer to not have sweetness in their meal (at least where I live). Conversely I understand that people loving sweetness and not sour or bitter taste are perplexed by wine.
> And yet there is certainly as much variation in citrus juice as there is in grape.
You are underplaying the effect of fermentation, like from milk to a strong blue cheese. But yes other fermented juices could be as interesting, for example I heard Americans were quite into hard cider ("apple wine") in the past
I love orange juice, but I don't want it with my steak.
Although I typically go with my favourite drink of all -- plain water.
Certainly not wine.
Those are thoughtfully developed mixes, so few if any just out of a bottle and typical pricing is half of a wine pairing (the wine pairing is normally the same as the tasting menu). I wouldn't personally swap a wine pairing for them -- if you think a full menu is too much, you can often get a half or share the wine menu between 2 people, even if the restaurant doesn't mention so. But it is an interesting alternative.
Well, other than the fact that, on top of its own particular taste characteristics, it's also a vehicle for a substance with is both a recreational drug and flavor enhancer, which certainly has an effect on experience when it is consumed that has nothing to do with social pretense.
But ignoring that is a pretty big oversight.
The mix of the two in my stomach is not a pleasant feeling.
I have never tasted a wine I liked. Ever. At best some were tolerable. The sweeter the better.
Dry wines taste absolutely disgusting. Like someone collected filth and put it in a bottle to trick people (the emperor has no clothes).
I once tried adding sugar to a dry wine to see if I could taste those flavor notes the bottle said they contained. It helped a bit, but not much.
Like a color blind person not believing color really exists, I have a hard time believing people that they actually like the stuff.
I've tried cheap wines and a few stupidly expensive wines and I really disliked each one. It's just not a pleasant taste to me.
Same with champagne. Even expensive champagne is unpleasant.
The concept of wine or alcohol in general going well with certain foods is alien to me too. If I am eating and drinking alcohol at the same time, that warm fuzzy feeling in the head that you get from the alcohol makes my meal much less appealing to me, like it kills my appetite.
Alcohol and food is a case of one or the other to me. Never at the same time.
I used to grudgingly tolerate sweet whites, but red always tasted like something I shouldn't be putting in my mouth and drinking.
Some people clearly enjoy wine, but how/why baffles me.
It turns out that neuroscience has some intriguing things to say about the general concept of 'acquired taste'. For instance, the first time people heard Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring', they rioted. This Radiolab episode [1] discusses an interesting hypothesis that might explain the events of that night, and I strongly suspect the same factors are the reason for similar reactions to many different kinds of stimuli, possibly including your experience with wine.
Anyway, it's a great episode.
But there are some sweet wines that are utterly fantastic. I was at place a few weeks ago (Umbra Wines in Grapevine, TX) where I had a moscato d'asti that tasted like I was drinking liquid pixy stix. Ever since then, I keep thinking about going back so I could get a full glass instead of the mini-glass in the flight I had (it was the only wine in the flight I liked... the other two were dry, and I had to force them down, but the cost of the flight was worth it for the liquid pixy stix). Well, that and the mead they had there. The mead was also fantastically sweet.
That's an extremely subjective statement.
My contribution: Blueberry wine is delicious.
The reason why I like red wine is because I can select ones that are not sweet and I really enjoy non sweet drinks with food. Water is nice and what I usually drink but it is pretty neutral and does not add to the meal the same way wine can do.
However I'm not a fan of alcohol so I have been starting to drink non-alcoholic beers (I like lagers and I think those are fine as non-alcohol) but I have not found a good non-alcoholic red wine yet. I would love to though so if anyone has any recommendations please tell.
As someone who also can't stand dry wines but loves sweet wines, it depends on the beer. My favorite beers are sweet thick malty beers like doppelbock, milk stouts, wee heavy, etc.
There's a semi-local brewery here called 903 that has a Milk & Honey Stout and a Chocolate Milk Stout. Drinking those is like drinking a little bit of heaven.
But because of that latter part, it's really more like a liquid dessert.
Now give me a good wine in the $15-20 range and it can be incredibly satisfying. There are also plenty of bad expensive wines. But as you dip below the $10 mark I have yet to find a wine that isn't much harsher and harder to drink.
Are there? You may be missing that not everyone even notices this enormous variation in taste[1]. For my part, all wines taste like sting-y grape juice, and most beers taste like empty sting. This persists after numerous wine/beer connoisseurs have insisted that I just need to try one more of this special brand, or insisted that each wine in a particular flight has a very different taste.
For that matter, perhaps you're just imagining the flavor variation and have tuned yourself to give the socially-correct answer?
Furthermore, there may be an unrecognized disagreement in the basic ontology of "liking" something. I know people who will swear up and down that they "like alcohol", but it turns out they only like it when it's heavily diluted with other, universally enjoyable flavors (e.g. sugar). In my book, that's not what liking something looks like.
See also this reddit thread, with numerous posters agreeing that all alcohols taste gross to them:
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/2juncs/d...
[1] Important reading: "What universal human experiences are you missing out on without realizing it?" Punchline: people casually assume that all humans experience X, ground major beliefs on X, and turn out to be mistaken. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-ex...
Apart from the fact than nobody should expect you to spend any money on anything... Just like everything else, wines differ, among others, in quality. If you spend 5 bucks on a bottle, chances are what you're drinking is really bad. It is possible to find decent wine in this range, but it's quite difficult.
I often find people have a kind of placebo effect when it comes to expensive commodities. It's expensive so it has to be better. In the meantime, professionals buy generics: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/07/25/334459041/when-...
That said, I can tell for a fact price often does not matter past a certain point -- it definitely isn't a good way to determine quality. I have had great bottles that sell for $15, and (not horrible but) not special ones that sell for $50 or $100. There are plenty of good $15 wines and plenty of bad ones. Same applies to the higher priced ones as well.
Often it's hit and miss, and you need to do your research! (Which isn't necessarily a bad thing)
Just don't buy a bottle based on how the bottle looks.
On the other hand, the average person is unlikely to be able to tell the difference between a $25 bottle of wine and a $2500 bottle of wine.
When you cook with wine you lose all the alcohol, which is the only constant between two bottles of wine. You're just left with the rest from which comes the taste.
There's no such thing as "cooking wine". Bad wine is bad wine. If you wouldn't drink it, don't cook with it.
That all being said, I personally think wine snobbery is basically bullshit and I think blind taste tests tend to support that view.
Still, a wine isn't bad because it's $5. Nor is it good because it's $30.
When I lived in the UK I'd often get by with the table wine from Tesco for under 5 pounds and honestly it was fine. I found quite a few decent bottles of Portugese and Chilean wine for under 10 pounds. Beaujolais wasn't more than 3-5 pounds.
This is a myth. Even after 2.5 hours of simmering/baking, 5% remains. Flambeing leaves 75%, and a 15 minute simmer still leaves nearly half.
You say that like its a bad thing.
Cooking with the wine is a great way for it to end up on the table surrounded by random glasses where "I don't want to trouble you", becomes "well, since its open anyway".
But if you are cooking with the wine, you already have the bottle open. Since an opened bottle of wine will rapidly deteriorate if you don't drink it within a fairly short time period (day or so), you may as well drink the remainder, thus put the open bottle on the table (where family/guests are gathered), and it will be consumed with relish.
Stuff like red wine sauces, whiskey glazed veggies, rum cakes, flambeed mushrooms, etc. that aren't cooked as long contain a very significant amount of alcohol.
The last wine I drank was a Montepulciano d'Abruzzo; I can't remember the specific winemaker, but it was quite nice and was less than $9, despite being bought in another European country.
I'm still in shock about wine prices in the US but SF in particular. ~18 months after I moved here. In Germany I could buy the same Californian wines for cheaper than here, not to speak of pretty good French, Italian, Spanish ones. It's less bad if you're outside of SF.
Do these people actually exist or have you just heard about them on TV and over-match any time you hear some one talk about wine for more than 30 seconds?
Most of us were drinking what was already opened, or even the beer in the cooler.. but one guy... one guy, had to talk about every bottle. Go through a glorious ceremony for each. Find the perfect glasses, and people to talk to about it. It got pretty annoying, to the point the wine loving host himself was like, great to meet you, but why don't you and I get together some other time, let's focus on (couple's name) instead.
There you have two kinds of wine fans, one I like, one I couldn't stand being around. My mother is a third kind, the one obsessed with finding the highest quality to cost ratio she can. I'm not sure how I feel about her :)
Don't be the dude who grabs a bottle of my good scotch and pours it on ice in a rocks glass. The bottle of Jameson was right next door for a reason.
I don't find any of this pretentious, and more general interesting conversation.
You mean, "terroir".
For example, there's a group of wine selections that I've found to be pretty tasty (and often pretty affordable, with many in the $15-$25 range). I went into a busy wine store in an affluent neighborhood and asked the people in the wine department if they had any wines of that select, and they looked at me as if I was from the moon. They told me that's not the way wine is organized - they wanted me to give them a price point and tell them if it's red or white. That's how a lot of people approach wine: "I want to spend N dollars on a X color wine."
(I went to a smaller wine shop near a college, and they knew just who I was talking about)
People have said it's like talking about Vim vs Emacs, and it is somewhat, but it's like hearing people who have never used Vim or Emacs talk about Vim vs Emacs. Have you ever come across those conversations? Everyone is just repeating things they read and saying what they believe the common consensus is, and no one is thinking for themselves.
That's got to be one of the silliest, most insane things to actually care about.
I will gladly wolf down moscato, red moscato, moscato d'asti, kosher concord wine, gewürztraminer, port, etc., and I'm just not a fan of any wine that isn't sweet.
I had someone tell me to my face once that "the good wines aren't sweet". I honestly don't care. I like what I like, and if someone tries to tell me that I'm wrong for liking what I like, my opinion of them goes down.
I find they go great with even heavy, spicy meals.
I'm trying to popularize the term "enanists" for that sort of people.
What I have an aversion to is people who want to talk endlessly about wine. Or people who pretend they'd actually bother with wine in the first place if it didn't give them a buzz. Or anyone who expects me to spend more than five bucks a bottle (ok I can go as high as ten if it's a restaurant).
Aside from the whole issue of genetic differences between people and their fungiform papillae, I think the one line that gets to the heart of why people get so obsessive about wine is "no other pursuit made him feel farther from the lower-middle-class neighborhoods of immigrant Brooklyn from which he had worked so hard to escape".