Re:Does expensive wine taste better?
by hilbert42 on Monday January 25, 2021 @11:41AM
(#25905221)
Asking whether an expensive wine tastes better than cheap ones is about as fatuous and asinine as asking whether an expensive computer is better than a cheap one. Where do you draw lines for comparison, the bottom 10% to the top 10% or say between the ranges of 10-20% and 70-80%? Also the taste for wine is often an acquired taste, so at what point in your learning experience do you start your comparison?
If one has to answer the question without any further information then the answer is an unequivocal yes but there's lots of caveats--too many to discuss here.
Some decades ago I had the misfortune to be a part of a wine tasting group run by a well known and highly respected wine aficionado and we tasted some of the generally agreed very best including Burgundies, Bordeaux first growths, etc. At one blind tasting we tasted all the 1945 first growths.
Those in the know will understand the significance of the '45 moniker. There's no doubt expensive wine of this caliber taste very significantly better than cheap wine (some would say that's an understatement). Incidentally, an interesting phenomena one notices with wines of such high quality is that there's no such thing as a person who doesn't like them--unlike good but lesser quality wines where experience counts for one's discernment, even inexperienced neophytes instantly know they're better.
Above, I mentioned that tasting truly excellent wines to be a misfortune because I now know how remarkably good and very different they are from not only cheap wines but also from otherwise excellent wines that are say ~10x cheap ones. Those remarkable wines have permanently damaged my palate, there's no way that I can afford to drink them again, nor am I ever likely to taste them again as their price has increased conservatively 10-50x since I tried them-- nevertheless their memory remains. For me, these days, even good wine tastes pretty ordinary.
(Incidentally, the pick of those '45s for me and most others there was the Haut Brion. Don't ask me to describe it as I don't have the vocabulary.)
If one has to answer the question without any further information then the answer is an unequivocal yes but there's lots of caveats--too many to discuss here.
Some decades ago I had the misfortune to be a part of a wine tasting group run by a well known and highly respected wine aficionado and we tasted some of the generally agreed very best including Burgundies, Bordeaux first growths, etc. At one blind tasting we tasted all the 1945 first growths.
Those in the know will understand the significance of the '45 moniker. There's no doubt expensive wine of this caliber taste very significantly better than cheap wine (some would say that's an understatement). Incidentally, an interesting phenomena one notices with wines of such high quality is that there's no such thing as a person who doesn't like them--unlike good but lesser quality wines where experience counts for one's discernment, even inexperienced neophytes instantly know they're better.
Above, I mentioned that tasting truly excellent wines to be a misfortune because I now know how remarkably good and very different they are from not only cheap wines but also from otherwise excellent wines that are say ~10x cheap ones. Those remarkable wines have permanently damaged my palate, there's no way that I can afford to drink them again, nor am I ever likely to taste them again as their price has increased conservatively 10-50x since I tried them-- nevertheless their memory remains. For me, these days, even good wine tastes pretty ordinary.
(Incidentally, the pick of those '45s for me and most others there was the Haut Brion. Don't ask me to describe it as I don't have the vocabulary.)