I am no wine guru but I do know one thing for sure. There is definitely such a thing as bad wine. If paying a little more would guarantee not having a terrible bottle, that would make me pretty happy. In the real world I've not found that to be true though.
> There can be objectively bad pizza — burnt, cold, mushy — but there isn’t really any objective best pizza. Fancier and more complicated pizzas can be more expensive, not because they’re better, but because they’re more interesting. Maybe wine is the same way.
I feel like the difference between cheap tasty pizza vs expensive tasty pizza is that I usually feel a lot worse after eating the cheap stuff. Physically worse, not emotionally worse because I cheaped out of something.
There is. My father was really in to California wines in the 70's and 80's. From my freshmen year of high school in the early 80's I was always served a glass of wine with dinner. A couple of years in to this my friends and I hit our peak drinking phase. One would come up with a gallon jug of Gallo or some off brand box of wine. I would take a sip and just no. I can't drink this, it's awful. Now beer I could drink some of the worst, 40's of old English 800 for example, but wine, ya it at least had to be palatable before I would touch the stuff. My friends thought I was a snob...
In Croatia many years ago, we ordered the cheapest bottle on the wine list. It was disgusting. The locals were amazed that we didn't know to water it down before drinking.
That's also typical in Spain. In fact, most family restaurants offer free wine, but it's of that level of quality, so you usually mix it with sparkling water.
Also, it's typical of young people to mix cheap wine with Coca-Cola, and have parties with that.
It's typical to drink watered down wine with routine/non-fancy/on-the-road meals. The locals call it 'gemišt' which is a germanism (gemischt = mixed). The wine used for this is bottom of the barrel, since it's a shame to waste good wine for this purpose.
Haha, I had the same experience: ordered the house wine at a restaurant—wine they actually made at that restaurant—and it was thoroughly mediocre :P I'm not much of a wine drinker and Croatian wines from local wineries were fine to my taste, but the ≈homemade wine was an unambiguous step down.
When my grandparents lived in Croatia in the pre-WW2 years they used to mix a little wine into their water because the water quality was bad. I guess the wine killed the germs, or at least masked the taste of the water.
Sorry, I just don't remember after all this time. Although IIRC the label's picture had a peasant sort of character who appeared to be holding a glass at arm's length (or at least that's how we interpreted it)
The thing is, wine "quality" is entirely subjective. I've not found much correlation between price and whether I will like it or not. The only safe bet is that if it tastes too strongly of vinegar, probably people won't like it as much. But some European wines (Spain and Italy) intentionally produce wine with a non-negligible amount of vinegar taste.
I know of a single maker that only puts out wines that I consider good or at least okay: Heitz.
Heitz is pricey though, and a $6 bottle of Barefoot or Charles Shaw two buck chuck can be just as good or better than a huge assortment of $50 or $300 bottles of swill. In my experience.
> a $6 bottle of Barefoot can be just as good or better than $50 or $300 bottles of swill
As someone who has blind tasted many wines…
- I can see not being able to tell a difference between $50 bottles and $300 bottles, and even preferring the less expensive option. Some of the tastes can be very subtle, and sometimes the more expensive wines need to be cellared before they really start to shine.
- I honestly don’t think I have ever had a $50 plus bottle of wine that I would not have preferred over Barefoot, which has approximately zero taste markers of a wine made to taste good.
- There are inexpensive wines (sub-$8) that can hold their own versus $20-30 bottles, but that almost always involves generous use of oak chips and an audience that doesn’t mind the imbalanced flavor profile. Most people don’t mind the imbalance, especially since the wines are usually inexpensive, high alcohol, and taste better than wine at a similar price point.
- Folks who can’t differentiate wine taste may be “non-tasters”. I dislike this term of art, but it’s folks who have fewer taste buds per unit area of their tongue. Tell-tale signs are people who salt everything and/or use hot sauce to an extreme level.
- For folks on a budget who want to drink decent wine, Trader Joe’s Reserve wines ~$10 a bottle) punch way above their weight. These are basically $20-30 retail bottles of wine that needed to be cleared at the winery cellars quickly to make space for a new vintage. “Shiners” is the term of art for these bottles pre-labeling.
I could see one becoming convinced price has no correlation with quality given the bullshit that's sold in the $10-20 range. "Why, this was $15 but it's plainly worse than the $8 bottle I had last week!" There's some real crap in that bracket, at least around here. Especially French and Californian. I get the impression France drops their trash on us (the USA) in that price range, relying on their national "brand" to sell it for more than it's worth. Above that range, they're consistently damn good, of course.
[EDIT] As for Californian wine in that range, it seems to have a problem with marketing-over-substance. I expect trying to compete in that range on quality is... frustrating.
> I could see one becoming convinced price has no correlation with quality given the bullshit that's sold in the $10-20 range.
Yeah. There seems to be a lot of variability below $20. That said, it’ll you do the math, it’s tough to make a wine with a good and distinct character below $20 for reds and $15 for whites (I’ve seen it, but it’s relatively rare).
Also, totally agree with your edit. California wines have a lot of challenges with marketing over substance across the whole range or price points.
“honestly don’t think I have ever had a $50 plus bottle of wine that I would not have preferred over Barefoot, which has approximately zero taste markers of a wine made to taste good.”
I can’t believe that. I’ve never had barefoot and probably never will but there’s a lot of totally undrinkable, maybe even semi-poisonous, expensive wine. It’s not even rare. If you buy from a good merchant this is less of a problem but still, expensive wines go bad, and some were never good to begin with.
The most likely expensive dud you're going to see is aged Burgundy reds. Many don't make it.
Very old red wine (e.g. 30+ years), if it's not fortified or a dessert wine, is also not particularly pleasant. I've had some very famous Bordeaux from some celebrated 70s vintage, a sip from Hedonism Wines in London, and it was very much not worth it; more than anything else, it reminded me of clothes in an old person's closet.
On the other hand, the same day I had a sip of something sweet from the 19th century - like 1898 or something - from Crimea, and it wasn't bad. It wasn't great, but it wasn't bad or undrinkable either. Might have been related to these batches - https://quillandpad.com/2020/07/21/the-massandra-collection-...
> but there’s a lot of totally undrinkable, maybe even semi-poisonous, expensive wine
“A lot”? Really? Change your wine merchant if that’s the case.
That said, sure, I mean, if you want to include flawed wines like ones with brett, ones that haven’t been stored properly (e.g., in the sun), wines way past the their peak, etc., then one will certainly run into some bad wines at any price point.
That’s sort of a given, imho, and is in no way a reflection of the quality of the wine.
That certainly doesn’t in general make the high end wine “fake” or not worth a higher price (at least to some point), which is the point of the linked article.
When eating a dish, I can usually identify the ingredients and spices by flavour, but different wines taste more or less the same to me. Some taste different, but I can't say that they taste significantly better than others. Spending $50 more on the food in a restaurant is going to make an enormously bigger difference than spending $50 more on wine. In fact, I find that not drinking wine at all usually makes for a better experience if the food is good, because the super strong flavour of wine destroys your ability to discern flavours on the next bite. Not all that different from putting hot sauce on all your food, in fact.
I strongly agree with what you're saying here and having been thinking along similar lines while browsing this thread. Taste is an important factor in food appreciation and one that most people already have and can develop further, to real value (including health benefits) in eating. It often reflects the quality and freshness of the ingredients (and thus nutritional value), as long as the cook also has some skill and hasn't 'ruined' those ingredients in the finished dish. Taste with wine simply doesn't have the same richness and usefulness, beyond indicating when a wine is 'off' or has been too cheaply/chemically processed, etc.
Not speaking for everyone but I'm pretty sure a lot of people who love extreme hot sauces, it's not so much the flavour but that they just want to feel something for once :o
I'd be shocked if you thought there's was actually no correlation if you're thinking of a price range from $5 to $100+. The worst wines by far I've had have been the ultra cheap stuff. Once you get above like $20 or whatever your personal threshold is though the variance is much smaller in terms of quality I'd say.
You do make a good point; the worst of the worst tend to be the ultra cheapies.
With that said, there are unbounded arrays of cheap and expensive selections that all taste like shit (again, in my opinion - others likely perceive them differently).
I've met plenty of people who happily drink something I consider 100% not palatable or suitable for human consumption.
> The thing is, wine quality is entirely subjective.
The article says it isn't. And I agree. Go buy a two-buck chuck at Trader Joe's, and a $50 Chateauneuf de Pape from 2018. One is an acrid, acidic fruit punch, the other is a balanced soft tannin delight. I guarantee your palette can tell the difference, or your money back. :)
Agreed, they have different qualities. Still, characteristics don't automatically translate to people preferring the expensive one because it's "better", it's only "different". Individual taste preferences introduce a high degree of variance.
Yea I think probably most people can tell the difference between $6, $20 and $50 and then struggle beyond that (and beyond that it is very subjective).
But for 'crap' 'ok' and 'good' and 'good+' categories I think it's actually fairly straight forward.
Anything related to taste and smell is partly subjective, partly intersubjective. The sense of smell varies from person to person due to genetic differences, different learned tastes, partial anosmia, etc. This is also the reason why one like a perfume and another one hates it. The chromatograph can analyze a substance objectively but every nose smells it a bit differently.
