My wife and I love to cook, have discussed opening our own restaurant, have eaten at lots of very expensive "haute cuisine" restaurants and have tasted lots of wines.
Part of the "problem" is that taste is subjective and can be influenced through suggestion. So the atmosphere, the price, the meal pairing can all affect a person's appreciation of the glass.
I remember an episode of Penn & Teller's Bullshit where they had a "water sommelier" at a restaurant who would upsell customers on speciality bottles of water and they were all filled with the same tap water from the same garden hose at the back of the restaurant. The results were fascinating. Subjects swore they tasted different from one another.
The real question, in my opinion, is whether a high-priced bottle is "worth it" by as near-objective standards as possible. In other words, given two bottles of different prices, all else being equal, would the average person prefer the taste of one over the other?
That varies widely from one wine to another. My wife and I have enjoyed a good vintage but we are also perfectly content with a $15 bottle from a local vineyard here in Ontario, which is our "go to." I'm equally partial to a $15 Rothschild Merlot or Pinot Noir and I wonder if the truly exceptional wines that I've tasted at restaurants were more about the environment, the food pairing, the company and the occasion than they were about the flavour in isolation.
Take some decent apple juice without preservatives. Add a bit of yeast; baking yeast for bread at the supermarket will do just fine. Observe basic sanitation principles. Add some sugar, perhaps 150 g per litre of juice. Leave the concoction in a cool, dry place for a few months. A one-way seal for the CO2 release is preferable (a balloon works) but is not strictly required; leave the cap on loose. Carefully pour off the result into a new vessel. Let this settle for another month.
A very palatable drink results at about 4 - 5% alcohol by volume. People figured this out thousands of years ago. And they did not have plastic bottles, germ theory, or infinite hot water on tap. It's trivial to make an alcoholic beverage. The rest is finesse. And posturing.
I do think something can be said to effort put in vs what you get however - I've enjoyed some very good beer that took a little bit more work than letting some grain lying around ferment. Of course, on the other hand, plenty of beers are brewed in Belgium using essentially that method, so it all comes down to one's taste I suppose.
> I expelled all my breath and sucked down another glass. Vinegary, yeasty, with a rusty shank of an aftertaste. I was feeling a slight buzz, but I didn’t think I could stomach another glass. It was booze all right, but two glasses was my non-incarcerated limit.
I had expected your link to be the classic Steve, Don't Eat It! Prison wine story. So here is the obligatory link to that: http://www.thesneeze.com/2005/steve-dont-eat-it-vol-8.php
We go to great lengths to keep our fruit juices from fermenting. In fact, non-fermented juice is a relatively recent invention in human history.
Hot dogs are a decent example, they're all now "meat" and many are "pure beef" when they used to be the disastrous remains of who knows what. And even they are being destroyed by just how cheap hamburger is - the original fast food was hot dogs and that's almost entirely gone now.
Curious about this history. According to Wikipedia, fast food was common during antiquity, while the hotdog wasn't invented until the 1400s. White Castle seems to be recognized as the origin of modern day fast food and it opened as a hamburger joint.
According to research from the University of Guelph, hotdogs are comparatively uncommon in fast food because hotdogs are harder to cook consistently and have a shorter window of enjoyability which makes them less suited to fast food than hamburgers.
The corporate parent of Carl’s Jr. bought Hardee’s in 1997, but Carl’s stayed pretty much the same.
What really defines fast food is mass production and uniformity.
Interestingly, I always assumed that “fast food” meant the type of food; so a hamburger, even if not made from mass produced ingredients, would always be a “fast food”.
In context, though, the original commenter considered things like street hotdog vendors to be fast food. That is not unlike the kind of delivery you would find in antiquity, even if the actual food product differed.
> What really defines fast food is mass production and uniformity.
Technically, what really defines a term is how it is used in a certain context and how it works towards reaching a shared understanding, which was achieved with the original use of fast food found in this thread. You are right that the definition that emerged here does not align with definitions found in other contexts, but those other contexts are irrelevant to this particular context.
> It’s a weird thing - people in the USA know what you mean by fast food and somehow McDonald’s under a heat lamp counts (rarer now but still found) but burgers at the gas station under a heat lamp don’t count.
But, I think it's a bit rich to call it the origin of fast food. Modern fast food in terms of what we think of as technology and business model is a bit broader than that. And just "food you get fast" is obviously far older. The original "fast food" in that sense was getting bread from a baker.
Particularly when we just got finished talking about fast food in antiquity. I suppose that explains why nobody said such a thing.
The best wine I've ever drank cost less than $3 and was produced in a tropical (21 South), 800m altitude region of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Never assume wine is bad because it's cheap or from somewhere.
Do you remember what this was called, or specifically where? If I'm ever there I'd love to find this!
But usually if you want something that's exceptional you have to spend a lot on throwing away the unexceptional parts. Not every year will be good, and even if the weather was good there's still no guarantee the wine will be amazing. Yet the costs are there. That's why there's a very hefty premium on brands that only deliver the top-top-top quality. (Obviously they sell the grapes/wine that did not make it under a different brand, but sssh.)
I don't think they can - wine is usually sold by vintage year. "Origin" is usually weaker (e.g., 50% of grapes must be from the declared origin) and my understanding is that is where you can "adjust" year-to-year.
> Scarcity is the number one factor that determines the price of an expensive wine.
just because something is rare doesn't mean it's good; a random rock on a beach is one of a kind but you couldn't sell it for a penny
> good quality wine from a recent vintage will cost less than an equally desirable wine from an older vintage, simply because people haven't drank most of it yet.
no, if it's less expensive it's because there is work involved in cellaring a wine and that adds value
That is precisely what I am saying. Rare (and because of that, expensive) doesn’t make a wine good.
> no, if it's less expensive it's because there is work involved in cellaring a wine and that adds value
Yes, for wines that are hundreds of dollars, but that doesn’t necessarily add any quality. For wines that are thousands of dollars, they’re just scarce.
To a person who can't tell the difference between cheap and expensive wine, expensive wine is "strictly ostentatious" by definition.
That doesn't necessarily mean better, but you might be paying for scarcity in the flavor.
My point is more-so that the more general consensus of quality has asymptotic diminishing returns after around that point.
So, I think the biggest problem with all those blind wine tastings is that they equate price with quality. Because those two are, as goes for everything in life, only ever so loosely related.
One secret is that most nicer restaurants allow you to bring your own wine, provided you pay a "corkage" fee of usually $10-40. So if the wine is say, $30 retail + $20 corkage, you are better off than paying $90-120 for the same bottle at the restaurant.
...except Franzia, which sucks.
For those among us who have recently been laid off - Bota Box Nighthawk Black is a decent/drinkable red if you're on a budget.
As to the matter of price, most of my wine tasting friends (including some with proper wine collections) are perfectly ok paying 5-10 euros for a bottle, as long as they like the wine - some of them have even made it a specialty to find good and cheap wine.
At the other end, I was once served wine without knowing what it was at a friend's place. I took a sip, then something happened in my head, and I started crying (I cry when food is really good) . I still remember that particular bottle, and the, well, infinite landscape that had suddenly opened in my mind (I know it sounds utterly ridiculous , but this is how it felt). No other wine has had the same effect on me, and it turns out the bottle was worth about 400 euros!
Music is a massive factor [1]
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/effects-of-music-on-sales-20...
Wine "pairing" is a whole thing. Certain wines go better with certain foods. A good sommelier is expected to be an expert in wine pairings and will recommend wines based on your food order.
The principle is what chefs think of as "balancing" flavours. There are 5 recognized basic flavours: salt, sweet, acidity (sourness), bitterness and "umami" (savoury).
When learning to cook creatively aspiring chefs will think about balancing these flavours, as each will affect your perception of the other. Salt will "neutralize" / "tame" bitterness, sweetness will do the same for acidity / sourness and vice versa.
If what you find is that your wines taste sour after eating a food, then you are probably sensitive to sweetness and / or sourness. Most people can experience what you are describing by eating a bite of something really sweet, like cheesecake, and then tasting a dry wine. It will taste VERY sour as a result because your taste buds have just been desensitized to sweetness based on the really sweet food that you just ate, so the sweetness in the wine will not be perceived, leaving only the acidity.
It just sounds like in your case this phenomenon has been dialed up to 11.
Please don’t make the mistake of thinking “I like to cook” means “I would like to run a restaraunt”. They’re two completely different things.
Professional cooks have a completely different working style to skilled amateurs. They move faster and more precisely, and are able to juggle far more things at a time. It's a massive step up.
Plus the skillset involved in cooking well is orthogonal to what's needed to run a successful restaurant. Your major costs are labor, rent, and raw materials, and you need a certain personality to drive those down. Customers tend to be price-sensitive (again, apart from those high-end places) so you don't have as much power on the revenue side.
I love cooking. I'm never working in the food business.
It sounds like you're describing landlord behavior where they don't simply arrive at a target rent and happily collect it, but attempt to actively monitor revenue of businesses renting from them and then ride the line between capturing that in rent increases below the line where it's worth it to the tenant not to move and unacceptable extortion.
If so, that's both interesting and kinda terrifying. I've never considered that rental prices might be set as much by specific tenant income as market conditions, and now I'm wondering if I should never tell any prospective landlord what my real income is beyond minimum requirements.
Commercial landlords, especially of restaurants, have way more pricing power because the tenants can't just move. Their customers expect them to be there, or there's a ton of existing foot traffic - location, location, location. And usually tenants put their own money into renovating the space for their needs.
"I like making video games" would be analogous "I like to cook."
Of course "I like making video games" might not mean "I want to work for an AAA developer", but the reasons why would probably be different than those you wouldn't want to make a commercial indie title / open your own restaurant.
I think the distance between them is about the same, as the GP noted. It's not analogous, but they didn't make that claim.
I have only cooked less than 1% of the time the restaurant has been open. Also "enjoying cooking" has nothing to do with enjoying a commercial kitchen. Pretty sure literally at all.
I feel compelled to put out quality food, but I do not enjoy it at all when I'm not cooking at home.
But obviously many people do set up and run restaurants.
But... quoted industry failure rates are insanely variable - from 17% to 60% in the first year, depending who you ask. The variability possibly says something interest in itself.
Clearly a restaurant is literally a food production line. It has to run smoothly and efficiently across a wide range of circumstances and load factors. And it has to handle shortages and customers who may be overly demanding, drunk/high/irrational, or actively hostile, while keeping staff morale high.
I'd guess that being able to make something nice at home seems like a good start, but isn't necessarily the most relevant qualification from a business POV.
* How do you train and employ an effective wait staff?
* How do you design a good menu that's practical to cook a lot of?
* Where do you source your ingredients from? How do you get the quantities you need (and no more)? You might need to cook dozens or hundreds of a certain dish in a day.
* You need to buy or lease a building suitable for a kitchen and dining room. The location is extremely important & will cost you a lot of money.
* Do you choose to embrace delivery apps?
* Can you handle lunch & dinner rush?
* How do you price your menu in order to remain financially solvent, given everything above? (and likely many factors I'm not taking into account)
Some of these things change depending on the nature of the food (e.g. pizza to go vs sit-down fine dining), but it comes with all the problems of a small business.
This really resonates with me. In day-to-day life "worth it" depends a lot on the person, and especially their financial standing.
I like to try to think of an unbiased "worth it" as plotting cost vs value of everything in the category on a scatter plot. Things that are "worth it" are above the average curve (and the curve is going up at higher prices).
Basically "this option provides more value than most other options of same or lower cost".
For instance, in Costa Rica, one year, many wine drinkers prised this wine as exceptionally good, specially consideringn it was very very inexpensive and not even packaged in a glass bottle.
https://vino.cr/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/CLOS-DE-PIRQUE-CA...
I can't remember the exact number, but it cost between $5 and $10. That was over 10 years ago
I'm so stealing that
French adjective
Translated definitions: Carefree, careless, reckless
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/05/80/42/058042c06780bbc0fa3a...
Maria's husband Tom writes the tasting notes for each variety, such as...
Rwanda Dry Process Macuba
"Berry notes, floral impression, ripe blackberry, blueberry, fruited acidity, darker roasts tie in delicious bittersweet undertones, like strawberries dipped in chocolate sauce."
Yemen Al Qafr Hawari
"Sweet, somewhat rustic, notes of pistachio cookie, malted chocolate, ginger powder, sesame candies, corn syrup, tobacco leaf. Super chocolatey dark roasts."
I swear (even though I know I'm wrong) that he just makes this stuff up.
I don't know if this in particular is made up or not. But tasting notes, especially of the marketing kind, can be a collection of notes from different preparation methods, consumption temperatures, and, most likely, from being drank next to other coffees that taste different and might bring out each other's individual accents.
I think almost anyone could tell the difference between different coffees side by side. I just don't think people are super focused on the coffee flavor when they drink their regular brew.
Where you have to be careful is when boiling the water yourself for a chemex or aeropress brew. Done right, those are better. But I can't be bothered most days.
Assumes they're roasted nicely, otherwise it's comparing ashtrays with pencil shavings.
here's james hoffmann's guide to cupping coffee at home: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSEgP4VNynQ
Cocoa, chocolate, brown sugar, Graham cracker... These are all notes that I want my morning latte to taste like.
Berries, lemon, floral, citrus, melon... These are all flavors I can do in a cold afternoon coffee, but otherwise taste really sour to be.
But it's just two categories for me. I couldn't distinguish any of those flavors individually.
basically, some essential oils of one smell at a time.
Looking at more extensive smell kits, there is a huge jump in price if you get a "master wine aroma kit". They can have many many scents.
It might just be putting names to smells, but I also wonder if you can actually develop or enhance your sense of smell (and therefore the aromatic parts of taste)?
Frankly, "notes of blue and a hint of graphite steel" sounds too remote from normal experiences to be consciously made up - I mean, who's going to relate to that anyway?
(An exception is some Ethiopian beans which have an unmistakable blueberry aroma and taste that they are famous for.)
I've stopped worrying too much about "advancing" past that level. Now I just buy the coffee, read the notes, enjoy experiencing the sensations that have been placed in my head. Is it "connoisseurship"? Is it a placebo? Who cares, it's fun!
Unfortunately, some roaster embelish those notes to drive up sales, since it's the only to differentiate between coffees, especially if you're not familiar with that particular farm/region.
Or, you can just ignore them and have fun :)) Coffee can be a rabbit whole where you can spend lots of money to get certain microlots or improving your water profile.
Fun tidbit - The difference in aroma, appearance, flavor, and experience of a $9 eighth of cannabis versus a $900 eighth of cannabis would likely be noticeable even to an amateur.
You don’t necessarily need to be a Ganjier[0] to tell.
Efforts to homogenize it and remove labeling do serve to remove brand bias which is why it is standard now at cannabis cups - but still the quality shines through - literally sometimes.
But when it gets down to reviews and describing experiences we are all limited by the English language.
Some quotes from my own reviews:
“The insides almost looked like the outside of a banana slug. That kind of yellow.”[1]
“Beyond the citrus notes, the smell is definitely honeydew to me, not cantaloupe.”[2]
[0] https://ganjier.com [1] https://thehighestcritic.com/reviews/cultivar-review-pleazur... [2] https://thehighestcritic.com/reviews/strain-review-melonade-...
Even participated in a session called “tasting on the right side of your brain” all about identifying and interrogating those more abstract impression.
As poetic as they are - they carry insight and information both about the taster and the liquid that - without interrogation even the taster maybe unaware of.
bad - wine that actually has gone bad (skunked, turned to vinegar or some other faul)
low-quality - jug wine (high sugar and/or extremely high acidity and/or strong ethanol flavor)
average/meh - the wine is drinkable and nothing stands out
good wine - the wine hits all the key traits of its varietal
Those super-sensitive can get more fine grained, and anyone who doesn't hate wine will have a 5th "great" category based on their personal preferences. But those are replicable consistently across the population.
The average/good distinction is trainable for the average person with some practice.
Also while price doesn’t predict which category you are, it’s hard to find a very cheap good wine. You have to either know your stuff, or buy something more expensive
Well that spoils the next tastings. You can remember what the expensive wines taste like and score them higher in the future.
Having said that, I'll also mention, the way the editors struggled for new adjectives did sometimes make me laugh:
"a vast, hearty body, notes of blue and a hint of graphite steel"
"a radiance similar to the sun at dawn, a strong body, notes of orange"