I cannot wait for the current trend of brettanomyces contaminated "natural" wines to die.
I too am not a fan of natural wines largely because of the additional flavours, but normal sulphite-laden wine can come with a dose of bret and it's different - I particularly enjoy it in some Cote Rotie producers, where it comes out as a hint of smokey bacon.
I would agree that brett can be a contaminant in wine, if that is not what you are going for, but much like how brett has long been the backbone of some trappist and all lambic Belgian beers, there is a case to be made for it in wine - even in fine wines.
If the popularity of brett in beers is anything to go by, you're going to be disappointed. And I hope you are - as much as I love a purely sach ferment, there's lots to love about other yeast and bacteria taking part in the fermentation process, too.
See: beauty products, wine, art
There are people who can discern quality reliably... but those people are an extremely small portion of the total market.
Consequently, things that are not quality (chiefly, marketing and price) start to become dominant features.
I'm always amused when I hear this, because I live in Ontario. Our alcohol laws are set up to heavily favour local wines.
Of course Ontario reds are consistently both more expensive and worse than foreign wines.
Higher price doesn't mean higher quality here.
If you buy any California wine, for instance, it was picked by a migrant worker. Times haven't changed much since Grapes of Wrath, other than it's typically Latino workers rather than Dust Bowl refugees.
(I grow about a 1/2 acre of grapes here in Ontario)
Part of the reason is just the retail environment, which is a whole cluster of a topic here, but I won't get into that...
Because of... history and culture, Ontario "VQA" wine regulations demand that growers grow almost exclusively various European vinifera varieties (the famous cab sauv, cab franc, pinot noir, etc.) . There's a list of permitted grape varieties, and most new generation hybrids (like e.g. the ones bred by Bruce Reisch's breeding program at Cornell just a couple hours from the Ontario border, or from Minnesota) are not on it, while a whole laundry list of pure vitis vinifera varietals that can barely grow here are.
If you're not growing one of the permitted varieties, you can't even put the word "Ontario" on your wine label. Nor a bunch of other protected words like "Niagara escarpment" or "Lake Ontario" or whatever.
These European varieties are not well adapted to the northeastern/midwestern/great-lakes region here. They are magnets for disease, and wimps in the cold. They are difficult to grow, and about 1/5 winters, they are frozen to the ground to the point where they often need replanting.
So costs to grow are very high. There's spraying and cold protection costs, but also the extra labour involved in managing cold damage, etc. And there's per-tonne price recommendations per grape varieties, and the permitted vitis vinifera varieties naturally cost more to purchase from growers than cheaper hybrids ; but cheaper hybrids of any quality would struggle to get a VQA label, and in any case the LCBO (our monopoly provincial liquor retailer) won't stock them apart from a few mediocre Baco Noirs.
On top of that the regulatory environment prevents producers who have under 5 acres planted from selling wine. But most townships go further and have even stricter regulations on top (10-20 acres, only allowed to grow in X part of the region, etc.)
These regulations are framed as if they're about protecting consumers, but they're really about protecting entrenched winery industry interests here, as well as cultivating a certain "kind" of wine industry which differs markedly from what you will find immediately across the border in the Finger Lakes in New York. And it's also a reaction to the kind of (beyond crappy) wine industry that existed here until the 70s. It's rules written by the baby boomer victors of a battle to make better quality wines here in the 70s and 80s.
The wine industry here is definitely more "snobby" than in NY and other northeastern areas, and it's mostly appealing to a certain conservative baby boomer demographic. The owners are mostly retired lawyers etc. running the wineries. They seem to think/wish they live in Bordeaux or Tuscany and have tacky faux-chateauxs and it's a whole lifestyle thing ... for you to daytrip from Toronto to bask in.
Like much of Canadian "high" culture, it's an inauthentic imitation of European culture, because of our colonial inferiority complex. If we made it, it can't be good, unless it's a complete imitation.
FWIW, there are very excellent vinifera wines made here. In a hot year, earthy delicious Cabernets are entirely possible. And in almost every year, an absolutely fantastic Riesling is possible. My family has roots in the Rhineland, and I've tasted hundreds of Rieslings from both there and here, and Ontario is right up there. And a quality (but $$) Ontario Cab from a good year is more like a Bordeaux than a typical new world Cab; earthy and more low key, not a fruit bomb. More to my tastes.
Anyways, yes, there's protectionism to some degree, but in reality Ontario wine is expensive because it's just really expensive to grow that kind of wine here.
In general you find this kind of thing a lot in Canada. Regulatory capture is all over the place here. Domestic wine is expensive here for the same reasons data plans are. Canadians tolerate monopolistic bullshit way more than they should.
My NY family puts as much pride in the local apples and the summer sweet corn as the regional wine.
The Niagara area in Ontario is a few growing degrees warmer than the Finger Lakes (despite being further north) and Lake Ontario provides more of a protective lake effect on temperatures than the Finger Lakes themselves.
On the other hand, you get better snow cover for insulation in the winters.
In other respects, similar areas.
The battle about vinifera and its place here in Ontario is really kind of the story of Konstantin Frank vs Phillip Wagner in the Finger Lakes. Except here in Ontario, Frank "won" while in the Finger Lakes there was a compromise drawn. Bruce Reisch gets to make excellent new grapes and the local wineries grow them.
Up here, the products of Helen Fischer's grape breeding program doesn't get to contribute to the local winery industry. It's strictly all about -- what vinifera varieties sell well? Grow that and market the crap out of it.
Ontario wineries can get approval to open retail stores, but the product they sell can be at most a 50% foreign blend.
So you always have more retail locations and a wider selection with Ontario wines.
You do occasionally get cheap wines that hit above their weight, but that's unusual.
More common, you get wineries hitting below their weight for a number of reason the winemakers aren't very good, there are issues with vinyard, it's a bad harvest, or the winemaker just wants bigger profits and is trying to convince people their wine is better than it is.
As an example of vinyard issues, I know a man whose vinyard produces very poor wine because his soil is rich in serpentine, which makes the wine smell funny. Even doing everything "right" his wine is not going to taste as a good as that made identically by someone with better soil.
This does not mean that wines at that price point must be good. I know someone who made the mistake of buying in a vinyard that was extremely rich in serpentine
Alcohol here is as expensive as in Hawaii (maybe a bit more), OTOH LCBO employs people and there's something to say about more expensive alcohol may prevent alcoholism/accidents etc.
I've always enjoyed "more dollars than cents" for the dual meaning if you know the phrase is supposed to be "sense".
With that said... I've had some terrible bottles of $100+ wine from well regarded wineries.
It's not just seeking out a particular flavor profile. If you want to experience something novel for your mouth and you've been drinking only $20 bottles for years, you will never encounter anything new. But if you try $100 bottles, you're much more likely to accidentally discover something new (whether you like it or not is subjective)
Continuously searching for new experiences is an expensive hobby.
Once you get to $50 and above, they are trying to show you something unique, perhaps an expression or a particular flavor they like or an expression of the local terroir.
Maybe 50 years ago you couldn't get a cheap good wine without doing it one of five ways but modern logistics allow winemakers to make good wine cheaply with a wide variety of different products and twists.
You would get the same effect with $5 bottles, wouldn't you?
Why not describe your experience with the good stuff. We lack decent language to describe taste but we have loads of language for experience and feelings.
Lots of people here are pontificating (me too) about wine but so often the discussion ends up with bottle price and not what is actually important.
The problem is that it’s just highly inconsistent for a variety of reasons, including the fact that even if you trust the label you have no idea if that 20 year old bottle was left in the sun for awhile, and so on. Plus there’s personal taste, etc.
So you can spend a lot and get something underwhelming. In short, it’s complicated.
With that said, having gone for a full day tasting at Mouton Rothschild, and a couple other similar spots like Caymus, Y’quem, etc, I can say with complete confidence that there’s a level of quality thats simply not going to be reached with $50 bottles.
Similar to how a pack of cigarettes costs $15 in NYC and $6 in Raleigh, NC.
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_price_rankings...
Even in Raleigh, there are taxes on tobacco.
Eventually, more often than not the temperature control and matching wine with what you eat matters more than anything.
German wine in the USA is just mass market Rieslings and maybe an ice wine and nothing else. We’d always joke that they save the good stuff for themselves.
For wines in a top US region, you wind up paying a ton of money for the mortgage on the land, too.
And I could buy British gin in Hong Kong cheaper than in UK
Eg £4 https://www.aldi.co.uk/kooliburra-australian-chardonnay/p/04...
https://www.decanter.com/learn/tax-wine-much-pay-uk-ask-deca...
You can find proper wine at 4-5€ at the producer, 3.5€ is probably the strict absolute minimum where you can find honest wine direct from producer. Any thing below is just fermented garbage, the grappes that otherwise would spoil the wine, it just happen to have sugar to be fermented, I don't know how the hell how they are pre-processed, just stay away from it.
"The natural advantages which one country has over another, in producing particular commodities, are sometimes so great, that it is acknowledged by all the world to be in vain to struggle with them. By means of glasses, hot-beds, and hot-walls, very good grapes can be raised in Scotland, and very good wine, too, can be made of them, at about thirty times the expense for which at least equally good can be brought from foreign countries."
-- Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
(Making good recommendations may well be more profitable than making bad recommendations, because if they make bad recommendations you'll stop coming back. But they absolutely are trying to sell you something).
Works out to about $20 a bottle in California.
If what you’re saying is true, then an acre in the Napa valley is more than twice as expensive as its counterpart in the Champagne region. Which is weird, I’d expect the Champagne acre to still make you a lot more money
Identifying a specific wine is easy, even non experts can learn to do it.
What experts have shown to fail is telling good wines from bad wines, cheapo wines from expensive wines, and so on, in blind tests.
There they are not asked to identify a label and vintage they already known and are familiar with (because they drank it before), but to detect quality.
No, they are asked to detect price.
(...) some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific. The first experiment took place in 2005. The last was in Sacramento earlier this month. Hodgson's findings have stunned the wine industry. Over the years he has shown again and again that even trained, professional palates are terrible at judging wine. "The results are disturbing," says Hodgson from the Fieldbrook Winery in Humboldt County, described by its owner as a rural paradise. "Only about 10% of judges are consistent and those judges who were consistent one year were ordinary the next year.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-econ...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-econ...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-econ...
Heck, they can't even distinguish wine with artificial coloring from actual red wine:
How does this jive with the studies showing that, if anything, regular people have a slight preference for cheaper wines?
Typically, if you go down the path of wine education, you first learn a definition of what makes a wine good. WSET [0] e.g. mentions balance, complexity, faults, finish etc as part of what makes a wine "good" (by their definition). If you want to be certified by WSET (Level 3), you have to pass a tasting exam, where you have to examine wines according to their scheme.
Regular people aren't trained in wine or sensory evaluation, thus "quality" means less to them and cheaper wines are often easier to drink, or people are more familiar with them so they like them more (see "mere-exposure effect" [1]).
tl;dr: Liking a wine != the wine is "good". But mixing up those two things make no sense.
Single origin chocolate is amazing, and completely different than even the high quality mass market chocolate.
I.e., the stuff that someone would make relatively quickly, hidden out in some bathtub hidden from the authorities, with very little quality control.
When prohibition lifted, that was the taste American wine-drinkers had for wine. It was a low brow, low quality, sweet-tasting alcoholic beverage, probably with a weird after taste.
That association apparently stalled the development of high quality vineyards in California. So it's certainly within the realm of possibility that this prohibition era impact continues to exert some influence. I still see a lot of people preferring rather sweet wines, for example.
And while I can't say for sure, something tells me the people who drop an ice cube into their red wine fit into all this somehow. :)
I don't know if this is still the custom; but when I was a kid in France, families would serve wine to their children. They'd serve it half-and-half with water. So children would presumably grow up with an appreciation of watered wine.
I'm "regular people". I drink a lot of wine, nearly always a £5.00 Australian red. I've very rarely drunk an expensive wine that impressed me. Someone served me some amazing Burgundy, back in the late 80s...
A diner choosing a wine will most likely eschew the lowest price option, and obviously the highest price option will be out of most people’s reach, but customers will “spring” for the mid priced option.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader
A retail shop will put TVs on sale for 50% off but only keep 5 in stock. They advertise it everywhere, 100 people show up looking for cheap TVs, find it's out-of-stock and buy one of the expensive ones that are only 5-10% off.
A loss leader might be Costco hot dogs or cheap razor handle for which replacement cartridges are the true profit centre
[0]: https://portal.ct.gov/DCP/Common-Elements/Consumer-Facts-and... https://consumered.georgia.gov/ask-ed/2015-09-08/do-stores-h... http://www.ossh.com/firearms/caag.state.ca.us/consumers/gene...
20 years ago, Computers were perennially loss leaders at a best buy I worked at. We sold you $2000 computer at a small loss, hoping you'd buy printer paper and cartridges and cables and warsanty.printers are still notorious loss leaders of course.
I guess what I'm asking is if there's some special storage requirements which can't be met at home?
Unfortunately, simply digging a hole in your back yard only gets it to the average temperature of your area which may be quite different to that hypothetical wine cellar in France.
In the end keeping even a fairly large room at whatever temperature and humidity level you desire isn’t that difficult, assuming you have the space and budget.
But yes, with care a hobbyist can do better than how some retail wine is kept.
Edit: The main points are 1) cool (~55F/13C), 2) dark, 3) not too dry (70% humidity is usually recommended. This is to protect the cork), and 4) store on its side, also to protect the cork from drying out. Five years is a long time.
Most retail wines are made to drink now though. If it's on the shelf it's ready.
The whole idea of "sealing" wine in a bottle is to keep it and not actually change it. It's a preservation method. However, the bottle is not really completely sealed and the small air gap at the top is not empty either. The cork might allow a tiny amount of air transfer too. The remains of the wine creation process might also leave some reactive components.
When you store wine it seems that a cellar type environment with its stale and earthy air helps - hmmm I wonder why!
Challenge your tastes or whatevs. For example you might find that a really cheap bottle of white chilled to about 5C and fizzed in a Soda Stream makes quite a decent Champagne analogue.
A regular household fridge costs something like $100/year to run. My fridge has 20 cubic feet of volume, which is something like 500 liters. This suggests we can fit at least 100 bottles into it. This gives us $1/year as upper bound for storage costs per bottle. This is upper bound, because air conditioning costs go down with volume, due to square-cube law.
Point is, if the price premium was driven mostly by storage costs, it would be significantly lower than it actually is.
Also factor in temperature and humidity controlled storage (a kitchen fridge will not do), insurance against disasters, backup power generation, and so on. If you think aged wines are overpriced, it is easy to cut out the middleman and age it yourself — so my guess is that the market is reasonably efficient.
This is right, I forgot about this: at 5% interest rates, 5 years of storage is actually 25% of the original price, which is probably substantial factor.
> Also factor in temperature and humidity controlled storage (a kitchen fridge will not do),
My kitchen fridge example was only meant to provide an estimate for the cost. Controlling humidity upwards is not expensive at all, it’s even cheaper in fact than controlling temperature.
> insurance against disasters, backup power generation, and so on.
These are extremely cheap at scale. You don’t really need backup power generation, the wine won’t spoil from few hours or even days of inappropriate temperature.
> If you think aged wines are overpriced, it is easy to cut out the middleman and age it yourself — so my guess is that the market is reasonably efficient.
My point was rather that the mere cost of storage is not the main part of the premium. Capital cost is probably significantly higher, but what is probably even higher still is speculation premium: not all wine vintages are appreciating equally, and if you just buy random wines, they will likely won’t appreciate all equally over time.
There are some fridge-like "wine cellar" contraptions that work well (keep optimal air quality / temperature).
Or a basement does the trick if the humidity is right (needs to be high but not too high)
I remember when I was a kid, my parents had a room in the basement for storing wine that was entirely airtight, with an AC-like device that controlled the air. That’s probably extremely overkill if you aren’t a wine buff (& storing huge quantities of it) though
for industrial climate control on wines? if you remove the improved drinkability that comes with age, and the scarcity and desireability of well-known chateaux it absolutely does.
There are companies that specialise in storing wine portfolios and you'd be amazed at how much they charge, wine in bottles takes up a lot of room and is really heavy.
One of the fun things is that you don't really know exactly the optimum amount of time to cellar a new vintage. So there are online forums where people will buy a case and open one bottle a year and report their results on how the quality changes over time.
This is a hidden benefit of belonging to a wine club. Often you can talk to the wine maker and/or they are opening enough bottles regularly that they can give you a sense of when it's time to drink. After you've been through a few years of the syrah or the cab sav, you get a sense for yourself too because you start to get the pulse of what the winemaker is making.
This is actually the first year in a long time that I have a batch aging -- using wild grapes growing on my property. The first wine I ever made (from a kit), unbeknownst to me, needed to be aged to taste good. Once I learned that, I did the same test: every few months I'd open a bottle and taste it. After a year, most of the "tarry" flavors were gone, after 3 it was getting good. At five I really liked it. Unfortunately, no bottles survived to the 10-year mark, but I did learn to make wines that matured a lot faster!
For most people you really don't need to go above $20 for a wine that's world class in terms of quality. At the higher price points most of what you're buying into is the story and exclusivity. There are things you can taste but as you say, it's arguable if these are actually virtues beyond those two features, and it's doubtful if it outweighs the cost unless you have a lot of disposable income.
I'm sure there are people that can identify different tastes. I question whether or not those tastes are a sign of objective quality, or just something they've been conditioned to think of as good.
An interesting test would be of people who have never tasted wine before, and have no sense of what a "good wine" is supposed to taste like. But in my experience, most people who aren't used to alcohol will simply find all wine distasteful.
You can actually see this in action when you see different cultures interact. For instance, the baijiu has a similar position in Chinese society as wine does in the West. There's an enormous price range, and a complex range of flavors and aromas. But almost every Westerner I've met found the taste abhorrent when they first tried it (though a small few eventually were able to develop a taste for it).
So though people in different cultures can acclimate themselves to what is currently considered to be good in their culture, I don't think that's the same thing as a certain taste being objectively good.
So yes I am pretty sure that some wine is objectively better than sulfuric acid but the rest is just a matter of individual taste. It does not matter that the tester can distinguish between 2 buttles of the same wine and tell the year it's been produced.
The thing about champagne is it produced using the traditional method [1]. As long as other sparkling wines are also made using the same method, they can be quite good. My favorite non-champagne sparkling wines are Crémants[2]. Much cheaper than champagne, but as good or better depending on your personal tastes
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_method [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkling_wine#Cr.C3.A9mant
(Interestingly enough though, two of my buddies also never had a taste for them, until in their late 20s they literally decided to "get into it". Boggles my mind if you're not caffeine addicted in your impressionable teens, why you'd actively TRY to develop the taste in your adulthood... But they did, With entirely predictable results :)
My reasoning was: other people like these, I think they taste gross, but I'm always telling people they can learn to like things, and if I did learn to like them, I'd expand my range of possible pleasures.
I did end up liking them. Not love them, but enough to appreciate them.
I really doubt that there is anything in the world that is enjoyed by a large group of people that I couldn't eventually get myself to like. And then: how wonderful! More things you like.
In the end, culture and personal tastes. There is a lot to be said for fitting in.
Same goes with beer or wine, quality goes up with price but in the end, it's all a matter of personal preference.
Considered what you wrote, your palate is looking for sugary stuff, and this wouldn't work for coffee, chocolate, beer or wine.
Sugar kills everything.
Nevertheless, the effect of sugar is more complex. For example, I do not like cocoa alone or in too high concentration, as too bitter. Sugar is pleasant, but when alone I do not care about it, I prefer most food with no sugar at all.
On the other hand, I find addictive the combinations of sugar with certain flavors, e.g. sugar + cocoa or sugar + vanilla. So, at least for me, the combination of sugar and cocoa has a very different effect than each component alone.
If you take the drink outside of its reference culture and try to measure how “good” different examples are, you’re going to get nonsense out.
Food and drink don’t exist in a vacuum. To the extent that you live and participate in the culture of wine (I do not), you may find value in spending for a “better” product. On the other hand, I will happily pay a premium for beers with tasting notes like “barnyard” and “wet horse blanket” or rums tasting of “petrol” and “rotten bananas.”
I think my professor meant "objective" in the sense that someone with a trained palate will agree with others who have a trained palate. I.e., they're not just saying, "well this tastes good to me." Experts are generally consistent between each other about what tastes good and what tastes bad.
Of course this doesn't necessarily mean that these preferences are objective in a God-given sense. And from what I could tell it does seem that different subcommunities have their own preferences. Californian wine tasters seem to prefer bigger and bolder flavors than French wine tasters, who like subtler flavors.
I mean, that’s kinda a different question right? Like it’s not “objectively good” as in “you’re objectively wrong if you don’t like it.” It’s “objectively good” as in “there are objective standards that have been agreed upon by a large group of people.”
This is certainly true for whiskeys. One of the ways to objectively tell better whiskeys from worse ones, is to learn how to detect acetone! The less that's in there, the better!
Sounds like crypto.
You can't walk into a grocery store and buy a tree-ripened banana no matter how much money you're willing to pay. This is sort of the proper way to think about high-end wines, as a vehicle that enables one to do something like this, but obviously with grapes.
A violin (1) can be played to produce two notes at once and a third note will be heard. Since around 1715 that extra, third note was noted and then thought to be an artifact of our ears or something. Recently someone got all scientific and studied the effect. It turns out all or most violins produce the third note but the oldest instruments produce a louder third note. More study needed.
There is a really dodgy analogy here but I can't help conflate a violin's "vintage" with a vin's (err ... wine's) vintage.
Sound and music is phenomenally complicated but quite well understood compared to taste although there is a lot of research and results coming up there. My point is that I don't think that the (say) £/$100 bottle of wine is quite in the same league as the mad cables, especially the digital ones that cost silly money. A £100,000 Strad is capable of making a different noise to your common or garden £10,000 violin.
For example, you note people capable of identifying a source and year for a wine because that's how we classify the stuff, along with some really awful attempts to put taste into words and of course you note the silly cable buyer equivalent. However, there are way more factors involved.
I also think the whole tasting thing needs a massive overhaul. Notes of peach and cut grass and all that bollocks is a bit unimaginative and frankly daft. I've never "drunk" grass, let alone cut grass - yes I understand that smell and taste are quite often synonymous but there is way more to it than that. I have eaten peaches but there is also a huge variety of flavours there that a wine buff overlooks - there is no such thing as a canonical "peach".
I'm not sure how it would work but perhaps we need a taste language that is not completely dependent on other tastes and smells. We might also need an analogy for volume too - mild and punchy are simply rubbish as a scale! I know that industry is churning out a vast number of clever flavours and smells but I think that the language is being left behind.
(1) https://www.newscientist.com/article/2344992-phantom-notes-p...
If you get to know winemakers, there are a lot of games that go on to doctor grapes. The chemistry and know-how are commendable. You also start to realize there are wine makers who are making wines they like, but that may not hold mass-market appeal. I had a private tasting with a guy who spent years in Napa and now does custom white-label work. I thought his stuff was absolute garbage - not at all to my tastes - but he's in demand because he knows how to do all the magic to pull out certain attributes that some wine drinkers may enjoy.
And that's the real key - drink what you like, at a price point you feel comfortable spending, and it's totally ok if you bought it because it had a cute label. The company you keep matters just as much as the quality of what's in the bottle.
Now, for the record, I take the same approach you and GP mentioned here. I happen to prefer pretty dry wines too, but I’ve gotta admit knowing this shook me a little.
This was the cause of a big scandal back in the 1980s when it was discovered that some Austrian winemakers were adding antifreeze to their wines. The wines are tested for their sugar content, but diethylene glycol has a sweet test and wouldn't be detected on standard chemical tests for sugar. Unscrupulous winemakers began adding the chemical to their wines to make them taste sweeter and boost sales.
That's not true. Adding sugar is even part of some AOP. It's used to regulate the amount alcohol in the finish product.
Northern / northerly?
Assuming this isn’t just an autocorrect issue, is there a word for this phenomenon of writing an incorrect but similar word that’s also on your mind? It happens to me with annoying frequency.
I haven't seen anyone mixing wine and vodka there, it's just not a thing.
Russia and Balkans and the austro-hungarian region preferring sweeter wines is a centuries old culture and a wine making tradition. The same goes for Georgian wines.
Vodka with wine... is that even a joke?
Fortified wine culture sounds more like Portugal to me, even though they definitely make it almost everywhere.
EDIT: typo
> The production of Soviet champagne prioritized quantity over quality. Grape growers uprooted acres of indigenous vines from Moldova to Tajikistan and replaced them with durable, high-yield varieties that catered to Stalin’s sweet tooth.
> The result was Sovetskoye Shampanskoye, a cheap, syrup-sweet sparkling wine for the ordinary Soviet worker.
https://www.singaporewinevault.com/busting-the-myths-around-...
Interesting, for most other things I can taste, nobody has to teach me to identify quality. Either it tastes better or it doesn't.
It is important to buy different bottles of the same grape to see how it varies across vintners and regions. It is also important to buy different grapes, because you may be surprised over time what vintages you settle on as your tastes develop.
https://auction.bestofpanama.org/en/lots/auction/auction-202...
More seriously coffee can be as expensive as wine, and frankly speaking, for good reason. The difference between farms, fermentation process, roasting skills for a se varietal /region produces large differences, like for wine.
I hear these things, but nobody will tell me what I should drink if I want a cheaper 2010 Mouton Rothschild.
Or a cheaper Krug, people will recommend $50 Champagnes but generally not ones that actually pursue a similar style.
He was of the opinion that generally speaking the quality of a typical wine increases monotonically with price up until around the $40 range with the big steps around the $5, $10, and $20 price points. But above $50 or so, you're no longer paying for higher quality, per se. It's more that you are paying for a unique flavor profile and reliability. But unless you're seeking out that particular flavor profile, you can get a bottle that is just as good for $30-40 (and occasionally even cheaper). And above a few hundred dollars it's all just fads, speculation, and hype. (He liked to say that the people who buy those wines have "more money than sense.") They're good wines, but you can get a bottle that is just as good for a fraction of the price.