I love wine. I am skeptical about the same things the article is skeptical about. I don't put much stock in price.
One thing I know, though, is that I am getting sick and tired of the "tinted the white wine red and fooled them all" anecdote as it has very little substance.
Any wine, white or red, can express a huge range of flavor and texture, etc., and there is absolutely no reason to suspect a "red" wine is actually a white wine. You'll note that the study does not indicate the testers thought it was a great red wine, or any particular red wine - just that they did not question it was red. That's not nearly the indictment it's made out to be. In fact, it's not an indictment at all.
Assigning too much value, or "enjoyment" to price ? Fair critique. Describing wines with bizarre descriptors like "asphalt" ? Fair critique. Dubious claims of "terroir" ? Fair critique.
But the "fooled them with white wine" test is meaningless.
Has anybody actually read the original study?[1] Brochet did not serve the wines to "wine experts". From the study, emphasis mine: "The wine comparison test was carried out by 54 undergraduates from the Faculty of Oenology of the University of Bordeaux. The sex ratio was 1:1."
Somehow, the results were transformed into, "Wine experts cannot tell the difference between red and white wine!" but that's not a thesis supported by the original paper. What we can conclude is that French undergrads sometimes use similar words to describe both red wines and red-tinted white wines... and that's about it.
They're not just any undergrad students, they were Oenology students -- they might not be experts, but they certainly know more about classifying wines by scent, flavor profile, etc than a layperson.
Undergraduates in most settings will still be extremely prone to conform to recently-acquired knowledge as dogma, probably even more likely than a layperson. "Uh, they said data must be normalized, so here's 15 db tables to represent an employee..." maps the same as "Uh, they told me to use this and this word for red wines, so here's this and this word..."
The paper implies that they sampled "experts", when they really just sampled "students" or "disciples". Quite the difference.
(Besides, it's dramatic how scientific research keeps oversampling university undergraduates to such a large extent, purely out of practicality.)
I am(maybe was Haven't worked on it in a bit) working a wine-tasting app, because paper and pencil can get a bit tedious to look up previous tastes. I use a 3 star method, 1 star= Don't like, 2 star = Will drink/buy if nothing else available, 3 = Will buy given the opportunity.
Generally all the 'dark cherry'/'tobacco'/'plum' etc. flavors are kind of meaningless to me. I rarely detect anything I think I can pick out, I just tend to decide if I like the taste or not. Usually the nicer the wine smells, the better it tastes, sometimes its 'fruit forward' (sweet), sometimes it's 'tannic' (bitter acid) and sometimes it just burns (alcohol content).
What I believe is bullshit is the people trying to describe flavors in a wine and extrapolate quality from that. If you like a wine, buy it, if you don't, don't. I enjoy some cheaper wines (Chariot Red at Trader Joe's is a fine value for about $5 imho), but my own tasting notes do indicate some $60 bottles of Pinot Noir taste way better to me than average. However, there are also some $60 and $150 bottles I don't think are very good.
As for wines tasting alike, if you can't taste a difference between grape varieties, I guess stick to Charles Shaw and enjoy. I wouldn't be surprised that the experts have a hard time with multiple tastings, as the wine taste changes with exposure to oxygen, on top of the tiring palate.
Your app idea is a method I have used in the past. I started a note in Evernote and when I tried a new bottle of wine, I would take a picture of the bottle, write a comment of it's quality [Avoid, Okay, Pretty Good, Fantastic], write down it's basic characteristics, and then write what food I thought it would pair well with.
One thing I have noticed about wine though is that even with a bottle of wine that I really like, the next bottle I get of the same vintage might be terrible. What the article does not mention is how important environmental conditions are for storing wine and how a case of wine can sometimes get ruined in shipping, sitting on a store shelf or not allowed to breathe properly.
Because of the amount of variation in wine quality I have adopted the habit of just buying $6 - $15 bottles and when I find something I like, I stick with it until I stop liking it. If it's a special occasion, I will put my faith in a nicer brand that I have tried and liked before that I believe will pair well with whatever food is being served but for the most part, buying expensive wines is too much of a gamble for me. Especially considering that my wine palate is not much more complex than your 3-star system.
Describing wines with bizarre descriptors like "asphalt" ? Fair critique
I confess to having not RTFM'd, but when I made my first (and to date, only) batch of Barolo and tasted it way too early, my comment to a friend was "I don't think it should taste like asphalt." His reply was a link to the review of an expensive Barolo that contained the phrase "has notes of tar."
Knowing that the liquid in front of you is wine, and seeing that it looks red, what is your probability that it is really red wine?
Unless you have specific reasons to suspect foul play, your probability would be very very near 1 (certainty). Now, overcoming this near-certainty with our poorest senses of all, taste and smell, is quite difficult.
The taste isn't all in your head. You're going to tell the difference between grape juice and 15% ABV wine! And over-oaked wine has a vanilla-like flavor that is pretty apparent. Some people like it and some don't, but that's a different question!
I mean, it is subjective in the same sense that the sky being blue is a subjective thing. In other words, a philosophical debate over qualia.
But if you ever had a wine-tasting dinner with a large company of people, with a ranked progression of wines, you would not doubt that certain qualities of wine are absolutely shared amongst almost everyone who drinks them.
Our experiences are different. You seem caught up with categorization.
I'm fairly confident I couldn't tell a merlot from a cabernet, blind, from a glass. But that doesn't mean one wine doesn't taste nicer than another, or goes better with a particular dish. And that's what I was alluding to.
I know a couple who weren't wrapped in either of their surnames, so when they got married, they changed it to something they both liked - Merlot. It works well as a surname, methinks.
this reminds me of the science book I had as a kid. After reading it, I made blue waffles and my mom said they were the worst ones she ever tried. wasn't like i replaced water with food coloring
I thought the conclusion was that using different language to describe wines according to color is unnecessary. Seems like a pretty good hypothesis for further testing to me.
> They described the red in language typical of reds and the white in language typical of whites.
I call bullshit. There are some red wines that can work where you'd normally go for a white, such as Pinot Noir. I'm willing to accept someone can mistake a full bodied white for a thin Pinot Noir if food coloring was involved. Mistaking a thick red Sicilian wine for a bone dry Chablis? Not going to happen. Unless you're running into the effect where test subjects are trying to please the researchers and they're ignoring the fact that the "red" wine tastes somewhat unusual.
They were probably using a white wine that was in the middle of the spectrum.
But since you have not tested this hypothesis at all, and have no evidence to back up your claims (like they do), I'm not sure why you think your opinion of bullshit is relevant.
Actually, what I think they've tested is wine snobbery, not whether there's a difference between red and white wine. That's what I meant by "bullshit".
Look at the setup of their experiment. They made people say stuff about the wine they were drinking. Unsurprisingly, they found people used "red" words for wine dyed red and "white" words for un-dyed wine. This is not a surprising result. The effect is called "priming" and it has been known for a long time.
It doesn't say anything about being able to taste the difference between red wine and white wine. If you do a blind folded taste test, I can guarantee you you can tell the difference. And if you happen to know red wine tends to be less acidic and more astringent than white wine, I can also guarantee you will be able to pick out which is which.
One question that might sound silly, but i've grown to think isn't: Why shouldn't the color affect the drinker's perception? Presentation matters, why do we think it's dumb when we are swayed by it?
Color may be a poor indicator of taste but it's a good indicator of nutrition. Orange/Yellow/Red Carrots. Maybe its just a mis-applied bias in this wine case. As in Crystal Pepsi.
I agree strongly about coloring whites red and calling foul on well-meaning participants. Sure a lot of these guys might be pretentious, smarmy jerks but that's no excuse to act like this is any sort of meaningful exercise. This could just as easily lead to the conclusion that humans taste, to some extent, based on what they're expecting.
For example, if I was told I was drinking milk from a glass but it was actually filled with beer, I would probably not take more than the first drink even though I really like beer. This example is a bit far but I'm just saying expectation means a lot.
> if I was told I was drinking milk from a glass but it was actually filled with beer, I would probably not take more than the first drink even though I really like beer.
I had a similar mishap once with orange juice. It caused me to vomit, even though the orange juice was perfectly fine. I don't even like milk.
My father was making dinner and got the cheese sauce confused with the dessert custard. We ate cauliflower custard. The custard wasn't sweet as not much sugar had been added. I realised about 75% the way through that something was wrong, the other 2 finished, but were slightly confused by the taste and discussed it at the end, after the big reveal. Context is very important. And every so often I still ponder how the hell I ate it with cauliflower.
They also didn't mention at what temperature the wines were served at. I'd expect a wine to taste markedly different when served chilled or at room temperature.
"But that didn’t stop the experts from describing the “red” wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert said that it was “jammy,” while another enjoyed its “crushed red fruit."
Food for thought: What is the flavor of "crushed red fruit" anyway? Cherries, strawberries, raspberries, cranberries, and tomatoes are all red. Oh, and watermelon (unless you count the outside). They don't taste very much alike.
"Fruits rouges" in French (the test was done in France, so most probably in French) has a rather specific meaning, it refers to a mix of strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, blackcurrant and redcurrant, basically.
It's often used to describe this particular flavour in yogourts or other things like that, in France. I can imagine the exact taste just fine.
The studies that conclude that tasters are no good at differentiating wine seem to presuppose that price is a good indication of quality to begin with, and when an expert picks a cheaper wine over a more expensive one they fail to consider the possibility that the problem is with that assumption rather than the expert's tasting ability.
Edit: TFA (which I didn't R :) makes the point that there seems to be little correlation between price/qual. But it's worth emphasising this point anyway, I think.
Wine ain't bullshit, they finally managed to release a version which runs AoE2 with readable fonts! Lots of applications are working just fine, often the only thing that's broken is the copy protection scheme (they do nasty shit like installing device drivers).
Let's talk about something akin to the "malolactic fermentation" bit.
Red wines are red because when they ferment the juice, they leave the grape peels in the barrel. The peel's color is what give a wine that dark red color hue. (Try squeezing the juice out of red grapes. You'll find that the outcome doesn't have the same color as red wine!)
Now, peels have things called "tannins" which give fruit peels their bitter flavor.
If you've ever had tea which was steeped for a very long time, and is thus very bitter, you are tasting tannins.
Which is an interesting point - we would all easily tell the difference between strongly-brewed tea and mild tea. Or coffee. And we might have a preference for one versus the other.
The taste of wine - being that it is "brewed" in grape skins - is affected in an identical way! But we never ask "is tea bullshit?" because we can all very well tell the difference between certain flavors of tea.
This is why the "red food coloring" part gets to me. A red wine that was lightly steeped is likely to taste similar to a white wine! There's not enough information to know.
This is not to say that marketing, color, price, etc are not huge factors in the enjoyment of wine.
But at the end of the day, the taste of wine is affected by the same things that would affect any other fruit or leaf-based food, so the idea that wine is any more bullshit than eggs, maple syrup, or tea doesn't really coincide with our personal experiences.
Nope! Wine isn't bullshit. Painfully overpriced anything is bullshit, but then that usually (as in this case) ends up being a matter of opinion.
I'm a fan of Scotch whiskey, and I think Johnny Walker Blue Label is usually worth the price. Would it be worth it to someone who doesn't already enjoy Scotch? Absolutely not; it'd taste like turpentine, and turpentine is cheap.
I'm also a fan of very dark beer. Is Young's Double Chocolate Stout bullshit? Sure as hell not to me, but my girlfriend would probably tell you it's awful shit, so clearly to her it is.
So much of so many things is subjective. This is one of them, and it's one of those times where your opinion, my opinion, and everyone else's opinion is worth exactly dick (and yet they're all worth exactly the same amount of dick). If you like it as much as the person who priced it, then yeah, perhaps it's worth it to you; if not, then yeah, it's bullshit. To you. Just don't try to declare that particular amount as an objective measurement. :)
Yes, but even subjective judgements are invalid if they're not based on objective differences.
If you reliably prefer white wines in blind tastings and I reliably prefer reds, that's valid. But if we both claim a preference but can't actually identify which is which, our preferences themselves are invalid.
Or at least, we've learned that our true preference is "I like the experience of tasting a wine that I have seen is X color."
Perhaps the truth is sometimes "I enjoy consuming something that I have been told is expensive." It would at least be enlightening to know that about ourselves.
Yes, but even subjective judgements are invalid if they're not based on objective differences.
I disagree here... subjectivity is intrinsically at odds with objectivity. They may sometimes work together (mostly in "I agree with you about this opinion for this reason that both of us can clearly observe"), but calling something subjective "invalid" is calling an opinion invalid. It can't be unless you've decided to have an opinion about a fact (e.g. "I have decided that this spoon, which is clearly silver, is actually copper").
>> subjectivity is intrinsically at odds with objectivity.
Maybe I wasn't clear? Suppose your opinion is "wines which are red (objective) are tastier (subjective)." If you cannot even identify red wines by taste, you clearly, provably, do not prefer the taste of red wines.
There may be something else about the visual experience, social prestige, etc that you like about drinking red wine, but as far as taste, you are fooling yourself. Your opinion about the taste is invalid in the sense that it isn't about what you claim it is.
Fair point, but I think there is an everyday common threshold we operate with, when an opinion strays too far from any objective characteristics, we say its dumb. It's not a hard and fast rule, but I think we all have some idea where that line is drawn.
In many domains, subjective ratings are highly correlated across human. For instance, there is such a thing as objective facial beauty: the beautiful faces are those rated as such by most humans (note: gender and sexual preferences matter). (Caveat: beauty vary across cultures.)
What's more interesting is determining which domains are highly correlated (human beauty in current western culture), and which are poorly so (blind wine taste). And that assessment can be backed by much more than uninformed personal opinion.
Unfortunately, this doesn't just touch on whether a thing can be judged in any specific capacity objectively. People "like" or "dislike" things for too many reasons to reason about them.
There's a sort of masochism in many of us that results in things that are slightly painful -- e.g. consuming capsaicin -- being pleasurable. Many people are also drawn to abnormalities in human and other physiques and other statistical oddities in nature for various reasons.
Then there are people who perceive the world differently (e.g. the colorblind, the blind, the deaf) who perceive the same things very differently and will thus have differently-formed subjective experiences of the same things as 'standard' humans.
Yes, subjective ratings can correlate. However, that does not mean they're any closer to objective, or any closer to validity or invalidity.
There does seem to be some sort of difference between the beer world (and to a lesser extent scotch) and the wine world.
Not one single beer enthusiast is going to confuse a Rochefort with a Dogfish Head IPA. Doesn't matter what bottle it comes in, or if you are blindfolded or what. Same thing with Laphroaig and Dewers. There are simply different drinks.
Now it is entirely possible, probable even, that marketing, labeling and price has an effect on which beers or scotches you identify as good, but that's different from treating things that are indistinguishable as distinguishable.
The thing I really like about beer culture is that it isn't price focused. There are a few niches of beer where the price starts to go up, but most beers are in the same ballpark price-wise.
Every culture has rules about how you wave your banner and show people how into that culture you are. With wine culture, it seems a lot of that is through price and rarity. With beer, that sometimes comes into play, but it's equally likely to be with IBU, darkness, or local expertise.
I'm not a fan of the hops-gamesmanship that goes on, but I do like that beer culture celebrates variety and small breweries as much as it does "famous", exclusive beers. For every Rochefort, there are ten Abitas, Lagunitases, etc. that are just as well loved.
Not one single cork dork is going to confuse a late harvest reisling with a dry sparkling wine with a chianti either and yet reliably once or twice a year some one brings up that oh hey look some people can be tricked into thinking an unspecific white is red, as if that were the only distinction between wines.
I can't get into Young's Double Chocolate Stout. I like Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout and Rogue Chocolate Stout, but those two are more pronounced in flavor. Samuel Smith's Chocolate Stout is like they melted a whole Hershey's bar in it or something, wasn't my thing, haha.
Hell yes. There was a place in the Twin Cities (and by some accounts there still is) that served it on tap... a whole pitcher of pitch black slightly-chocolately slightly-coffeeish gloriousness is a wonder to behold.
Enjoyable article, which misses an important point: the quality of cheap wine has increased markedly in the last 30 years. It isn't that the fine old wines don't deserve their reputation; it's the difference between Gallo in the gallon jug and Charles Shaw that's remarkable.
I found Charles Shaw unpalatable, but I did find some enjoyable $4, $6, $8 Italian wines. Up to a point though, you are buying something with price: reliability. I got a lousy run of our favorite $4 nero d'avola. Never bothering to buy that one again.
A friend of mine makes wine, here in SF bay. My wife and I splurge the $30 on his blended white, because we so rarely find white wines that excite us like his does. Are we overpaying? As an occasional treat, it is nice to know you will get something we will really like, rather than being so "clever" as to save money and not get a truly enjoyable glass with our meal.
Yes. Practically, that means that you should try the cheaper wines from your markets / supermarkets, they can be perfectly satisfying. It's actually harder to find wine that's total "bullshit" nowadays!
I tend to think the price of wine has much more to do with _prior_ vintages than the current one in the bottle.
A winery is a brand, they build a strong brand by consistently producing good tasting wine (also: advertising, PR, etc). So, when you pay top dollar you should have an increased likelihood of enjoying the wine just bought. It doesn't mean you will though.
On the flip side, cheap wines may actually taste great. They just haven't built up a reputation for that yet, maybe if they do things right their price per bottle will triple over the next 3 years. You never know.
I think this explains most of the price disparity within a certain range... let's say between $0-$150 / bottle. Anything priced above that range, is probably more driven by something else. Could be more advertising, "collectors" bidding the price up, limited production, etc. - for the most part it's "irrational" (for lack of a better word) and has nothing to do with taste.
Just spent a year in Aquitane on the right bank of the Gironde (where Bordeaux wines come from) and can confirm that quality in wine is in fact bullshit. (not wine, but the idea of quality in wine)
Just looking at the difference between left and right bank prices and a complete lack if difference in quality is telling.
Also that the 5 first growth producers are rated as such for historical reasons and no-one gets into the exclusive club - and yet Premier Cru is used as an indication of quality in wine.
Quality in wine was real back when the idea of hygiene in producing wine and the knowledge of wine making was not shared and access to labs was limited. No longer and so unless you're screwing up a well known process, you're going to get it pretty darn right.
So wine quality is bullshit, but is wine bullshit? I don't think so. Lets put it this way: If you fly first-class, there's something a little more than the bigger seats and better food that you enjoy. It's the idea of flying first class.
And so while a bottle from most decent chateaux on the right bank may be of equal quality to the left bank (left bank is where all the major chateaux are based) and yet much cheaper, you're still going to really enjoy the idea that you're drinking a bottle of 1990 Margaux as several connoisseurs jealously watch your every sip and explain how you're drinking one of the best vintages of one of the 5 best chateaux in the world.
Price does indicate quality, however. In Europe, there's a big difference between EUR 3 wine and EUR 8 wine. Usually.
And only if neither wine has a reputation. A EUR 8 Bourgogne is pretty much guaranteed to be crap: you're paying for the word "Bourgogne" on the label. A EUR 8 Cotes du Rhone, however, is pretty much guaranteed to be very drinkable (a EUR 3 Cotes du Rhone: not so much. EUR 3 Bourgogne doesn't exist).
Once you go above the EUR 10 price point, it becomes hit and miss. None of these wines will be bad, but price will no longer correlate exclusively or at least predominantly with quality. In that sense the article is right.
But at the lower end of the market, where, I'd assume, most mere mortals operate, yes, price indicates quality.
>Why would you expect the selling price to translate to quality?
Because of the massive wine snobbery industry focused on shaping your wine preferences to match to "official" rulings?
>For an apt example, could I sit you down at a computer and have you tell me the price of a video game?
No, but there's no elite/elitist group built around convincing everyone that $60 games really are better (except the advertisers themselves, which allows you to account for the bias).
I think you're misrepresenting the criticism: it's not that "hey, more expensive wines might not be right for everyone"; rather, it's that "... so why all the puffery around convincing people otherwise?"
> For an apt example, could I sit you down at a computer and have you tell me the price of a video game?
You can usually tell pretty easily the difference in (art/etc) resources spent on a big budget title (e.g. Call of Duty) and those spent on a smaller title, like Darwinia or Little Inferno or Angry Birds. You can't tell me that it's a $1 vs $3 game, but you can pretty well tell the difference in the games that expect you to buy them for $60 versus those that expect to be bought for $15-$20.
On the Charles Shaw aka "two buck chuck", it's famous because it won an award when it was $2. How this brand works is buying the unwanted discard grapes from other wineries and then having them bottled. There is no consistency. Most years it is not very good. But, there was a glut of grapes on the market some years ago which allowed Charles Shaw to buy good quality grapes at a very low clearance price, which created a brief bubble where they had good wine for cheap. Since then they have been buying, as they do, the low priced, and low quality grapes, and the wine is not that great. It also has not been priced at $2 for some time. But, a lot of people know the story that "two buck chuck won some sort of award" and so they buy it and talk about how good it is even though it's pretty bad. Well good for them, they are happy and not spending a lot. I fail to see that that is a problem.
So when the journalists in 2013 trot it out and claim it is an award winning wine for $2, that shows instantly the journalist knows absolutely nothing about the wine market.
Since this happens in the opening paragraph in this article, it saves a lot of time reading.
The inconsistency of two buck chuck can be turned into a fun game though. My friends like to each buy a bottle from each pallet and try them in the parking lot. If any of them turn out to be good, they go back in and buy the whole pallet.
This reminded me of a basic consumer thing that must have a name and several good discussions, could someone help me out here? The thing (framed as wine)-
Lots of people like some accessible, simple tasty wine. Some keep drinking it, others develop a taste for some other wine based on their initial like of the first wine. Some of that group then develop another taste based on the second (which was based on the first), and so on. The point is that by getting one wine a couple times, you tire of it, and it also prepares you palette/preferences to really like something that has some continuities and some contrasts with it. It seems like the audience narrows as you go through each step, partially because you probably won't appreciate the Nth wine until you have gone through the others, in order more or less. As you go along this chain, you are more willing to pay higher and higher the further you go.
Some other chains I could think of like this (minus the "paying more as you go" where it doesn't really apply): Music genres, Coffee (almost any food really), Fetish porn, Text editors, so many more...
There are things in economics called Veblen goods (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good) which become more desirable as they become more expensive. They seem related, but not exactly the same phenomenon you describe.
A cynical term would be "hedonism treadmill", since once you level up in quality, after a period of amazed novelty you're no happier than you were with the last option and itching for another upgrade.
- Look for a screw-cap bottle of wine priced about $14-18. This price point gets you a bottle that is likely worth the extra few bucks over the bottom-tier pricing ($2-$12 range) and which is able to avoid having to use a cork to appear sophisticated. Screw-tops are associated with cheap wine, so any wine that has one and still commands a market price above bargain basement ($2-$10) is likely decent.
- Also, European countries heavily subsidize the wine industry, so it's possible to get great wine for around €8. In America those might end up costing $15-$20 but they are still a better value than most $30-$40 American wine (which is overpriced b/c of the super expensive real estate it is grown on and lack of subsidy).
Not bad. Also look for names that might be difficult to remember. Many buyers go entirely by name or label design, so a good wine with a bad name will tend to sell at a discount.
I think this article is focusing on the high end of things. I personally had little difficulty distinguishing between a $5 wines and a $20 wine- that is, until I started to develop a taste for harsher drinks. (Now all wine, even the cheap stuff, tastes smooth as silk)
If you boycott expensive wine, should you also avoid sushi and seafood restaurants because you know that cheap fish can be just as enjoyable?
Inexpensive fish might be just as enjoyable, but what about one of the most common varieties of cheap fish- that is to say, week-old fish? Is it just as enjoyable?
Oh, and last thought- how can people be tricked into thinking a white is a red? I can see the "floral hints" and "buttery accents" being easy to confuse, but the reds I like are extremely dry, and every white I've ever had is sweet and sticky, sometimes even saccharine. Are there whites and reds that blur this boundary?
Yeah, that last paragraph is kind of trolling the readers. When you say fast food restaurants "dilute the quality of their meat," you're actually talking about possible jeopardy to human health stemming from awful factory-farm practices or poor quality control w.r.t. suppliers -- so price is (by and large) an indicator of a very meaningful qualitative difference. Not at all the same scenario as with wine.
I think this article is focusing on the high end of things. I personally had little difficulty distinguishing between a $5 wines and a $20 wine- that is, until I started to develop a taste for harsher drinks. (Now all wine, even the cheap stuff, tastes smooth as silk)
What do you mean by harsher drinks? I can (and do, fondly) drink whiskey straight but I can't get into the taste of red wine.
Scotch, IPAs, double IPAs, etc. I found cheap reds were mostly distinguished by thinly veiled alcohol content and bitterness, but the difference in bitterness between a good wine and a poor wine is much smaller than the difference between a poor wine and a glass of scotch.
As for not enjoying the taste, my tongue is not yours, but is your issue simply with the flavor? Or do you find it too bitter/alcoholic? If it was the former, that's a matter of taste. If it was the latter, I would indeed be surprised given your affection for whiskey.
There's plenty of whites that aren't sweet at all - although I doubt I'd mistake a Californian chardonnay for a red, I'd also never describe one as sweet and sticky. For that matter, there's also tons of sweet red wines. I can tell you've never been subjected to a glass of Manischewitz on high holidays. (Lucky you.)
I don't know why the article makes such a big deal about mistaking a red for a white. For example, I could very easily mistake a red lambrusco for a white champagne - they taste pretty similar.
Ok, thanks. Yeah, I probably have only been exposed to a small cross-section of reds. I started with merlot and pinot, liked what I had, and haven't felt the need to branch out yet.
Man, I'm sort of jealous - if you get into wine, you have so many awesome first experiences in front of you! When you want to try more reds, I'd look at some cabernet sauvignons and syrahs.
Yes there are whites and reds that blur that boundary a lot. A light red beaujolais (often served chilled) could easily be white, just to pick one. You should try some more kinds of wine!
I have had a $100 bottle of wine that I loved and a $100 bottle that I didn't. Same is true of a $10 bottle. Overall, I know what regions and years I tend to like. Which is something the article doesn't really mention. The 2005 growing season in New Zealand was awesome and a lot of Central Otago Pinot Noirs for that season are unavailable, which drove the price up future seaons. Some have been good, others haven't. There is no way to tell someone what taste they will like nor what seasons are going to be great. But if you find a region you like (syrah from the russian river valley), try other years. Contact the winemaker and see if you can get on their mailing list, possibly buy futures.
I think a connoisseur would be more likely to say, "I've tried 10000 things like this, and I like qualities A, B, and C about it, but perhaps dislike D and E. Overall, I like it right now, so it seems good to me, but my tastes will probably change in the future, and not everyone will share them. I look forward to trying more things."
I believe connoisseurs also equate liking things with them being good, they're just less naive about it and don't necessarily proclaim universal goodness. I mean, did Roger Ebert ever give 4 stars to a movie he didn't like?
Did Roger Ebert ever give 4 stars to a movie he didn't like?
Often. He frequently made clear on the point that he gave high ratings to movies which achieved what they set out to do, and did so with skill ... even if he didn't particularly "like" it.
No, I don't remember a suitable example off hand. ...though the closest I do recall is The Human Centipede: he refused to give it an N-star rating at all, because it earned 4 stars for its quality for achieving what it set out to do, and zero stars because it was so hideously offensive nobody should see it; unable to reconcile the two, he just didn't.
ETA: That's summarizing what I recall him writing about it, which includes material beyond the official review thereof.
He didn't say anything about 4 or 0 stars in his review.
> I am required to award stars to movies I review. This time, I refuse to do it. The star rating system is unsuited to this film. Is the movie good? Is it bad? Does it matter? It is what it is and occupies a world where the stars don't shine.
I haven't read most of Ebert's reviews, but I would be quite surprised to read a 4-star review in which he clearly expresses that he didn't like the movie. Maybe Ebert is not typical of connoisseurs? He did say that giving 4 stars to Superman is not the same as giving 4 stars to Ben Hur (or something similar), but he still liked both of them.
I assume you're a connoisseur of something. Pick two things that you dislike, one that is good, one that is bad. Do you dislike them equally?
Unless you are specifically making a recommendation to somebody else ("I don't like this, but you might."), how does that work for any meaningful definition of "good"?
Do you mean something along the lines of "precise"? Like, "I don't like this, but it is exactly as its maker intended it to be."? I wouldn't describe such things as "good".
Is it that hard to separate 'I like' from 'is good'? Wine flavors are often described as citrusy or fruity. What happens if you didn't like citrus, and drank a wine that had a very good but Citrus flavor. You would not like the wine but it wouldn't be crap. Or going the other way if you like Twinkies you shouldn't be under the impression that they are a culinary delicacy.
> Is it that hard to separate 'I like' from 'is good'?
This is a trend I've noticed particularly on Reddit, but it's probably growing elsewhere too. As if everything is purely subjective, and we cannot talk about objective quality at all.
It's a childish view being literally unable to look beyond "I like it", and it's anti-intellectual bullshit, a total rejection of the value of expertise and experience.
It's a childish view being literally unable to look beyond "I like it", and it's anti-intellectual bullshit, a total rejection of the value of expertise and experience.
This. Well said. Worth repeating.
What I've struggled with in this thread is how to explain such value to those holding the view. "I can't" just doesn't cut it for me; I deeply want to share the pleasures of fine wines, coffee, sushi, steak, etc. ... but it's strange to face a perspective that denies something, and does so in a way which seems to beg me to beat it into them.
There is a difference between talk of objective qualities of an object, and talk of if it is "good".
"Good" is the language of opinion, and is inherently a subjective matter. If you want to speak about qualities like "it is exactly as its maker intended it to be" or critical acclaim, then there is less presuming language that you can use to do that.
I think that the failure to realize this accounts for a large part of why people talk of 'wine "snobs"' or 'movie "snobs"'.
I think experts are more able to talk about objective features, but they get labeled as snobs when they proclaim that they've grown out of their initial subjectivity. ("Anyone with good taste will find this collection of features to be good and that collection to be bad; anyone else doesn't know what they are talking about.") When really all that's happened is their ability to articulate preferences and domain knowledge has developed. It's like adults looking down on childish behavior or something.
That's exactly right. "Good" and "bad" are objective, for sufficiently loose definitions of "objective" (go away, Kant). "Like" and "dislike", are subjective, matters of personal taste. Not only can you dislike something that's "good", you can like something that's "bad".
This is what's meant by good taste. If you develop your taste in a particular subject, you can easily make the good/bad objective distinction, without letting like/dislike mislead you.
Actually, a connoisseur is someone who can say, "I don't like it, but most other connoisseurs will also say it's good [as long as you don't blind the test]."
The skill with which it is crafted, and the extent to which it matches its platonic prototype.
Think of dog shows. Regardless of how you think your dog looks best, the judges are still looking for a defined perfection that may not be to their choosing.
The problem enters when people start adopting the language of subjectivity and opinion to describe these things. That is when people start calling them "snobs".
Regardless of what you think of wine, trying to extend this to cover things like sushi, or beer, or cheese, seems like a mistake. Yes, taste is subjective, and that affects other things too than just wine, but the cultural expectations of other foods are different than with wine.
Take for example sushi. Yes I'm sure there are plenty of sushi restaurants that substitute cheaper fish when they think their customers won't notice. But these aren't going to be particularly good sushi restaurants to begin with, I'd wager. If you go into a really good sushi restaurant, and order Omakase (where you sit at the bar and the sushi chef serves you whatever he wants to), you're going to get the best fish the restaurant has, and you're really going to taste the difference.
Yes, taste is subjective, it also has objective properties which can be understood and reveal meaning beyond simple "like/don't".
Wine, sushi, coffee, steak ... all certainly revel in their subjective "I like it" properties, but also have discernible properties which few have sampled & studied enough to have reliable understanding and meaningful opinions on. The better wines I've had usually correspond to higher prices. Omakase (thanks for the tip) is served by someone who knows why, objectively, it will taste better. Few people have had really good coffee (let me roast & brew you a cup), so they don't know that such flavors can even exist, why they occur, and don't consider making anything of it when experienced unexpected (beyond a momentary "hey, that's good"). Steakhouse offerings can be indistinguishable from what comes off the backyard grill ... or can be moments of enlightenment (my word that one at Stoney River 6 years ago was incredible, and the one that preceded it at the same sitting was worth sending back for replacement).
The problem with such popular "$5 and $500 wines are indistinguishable" pronouncements is they rally people around ignorance. While, sure, poor expensive wines and cheap good ones exist, most people don't understand what they're tasting enough to develop an appreciation thereof. There are objective differences, and once those are understood your whole perspective on "good" changes.
I take your point, but I think you're drastically overestimating the quality of the sushi place. If you grab whatever cheap salmon is frozen then you'll likely be eating the same salmon that's used at a restaurant. (Even if you're on a coast, your salmon will be frozen for at least 24 hours before being served raw to kill those nasty parasites.)
Your local grocer's counter is a disappointment since they've basically taken all of the lovely seafood that was individually quick-frozen at the source and thawed it out for god knows how long. That shrimp sitting behind plexiglass stinking the place up? It came to them in a bag frozen just like the bag sitting in the freezer case just to the left. It will be cheaper and higher quality if you buy the bag of individually quick-frozen (IQF) shrimp.
If you live on a coast and go to a local fish monger then you can get better results. But even your fancy grocers are thawing pre-frozen shrimp unnecessarily.
Edit: Even if so, I don't really care. Your attitude is the same one people use to justify all sorts of uselessly stupid things right up until it hurts them or someone they love, then suddenly they're not so tough.
I enjoy all Priceonomics articles. I also enjoy the service they provide to users. I hope the experience at that company is as enjoyable to work for as the content is to consume. I started using the service after reading the blog posts from HN. The blog has the right dash of math, data, and readability. The blog reinforces the company's structure and path while building a great image.
It saddens me that they have not penetrated the market as expected. I am still hopeful they will find another feature to make their site reap the well deserved rewards.
If it helps, I find the priceonomics articles like this unfailingly interesting. I'm not a customer, but it's one of the subsets of posts here on HN which I actually look forward to encountering. They answer questions I've had in ways I hadn't thought of, or present new questions that hadn't occurred to me but which have interesting data-backed answers.
Each episode is a blind taste teste of a single wine with 4 experts who are asked to guess the varietal, country, region, year and price. They don't always get it right, but they're significantly more accurate than you would expect if wine was a hoax.
Thanks for the video. One interesting point, they're determining the price based on their knowledge of wine, and how much a wine of that variety, grown in that particular region should cost to produce. At no point do they associate taste directly with the price. I think this helps to illustrate we should be trying wines from different regions, rather than different price points. Find a region and variety that you enjoy, and then find a bottle that's priced fairly for what you're buying.
It's not bullshit, it's a verschränkung. The answer is dictated by the consumer and market you observe.
Some consumers will say yes, it's bullshit! They will buy the cheapest bottle that tastes decent enough to drink on a regular basis. Both the budget of the average consumer and their lack of interest in becoming experts on a drink will create an expanded market of low-priced wines.
Then there will be those that say, no, it's definitely not bullshit! Their higher income combined with the belief that there's intrinsic undefinable value to wines produced a certain way will create a separate market for high-end wines. The higher prices they pay offsets the smaller market.
Wine is both bullshit and not bullshit at the same time, and it can stay that way forever because of the two separate motivations of its consumers and the two subtly distinct markets. Regardless of any other factors people are not going to stop drinking wine anytime soon (especially considering putting a different label on will change how it's observed)
I'd wager there's a whole array of products like this, for example designer clothes vs bargain clothes. At the end of the day you just need to keep from being naked.
I personally think that if you can't tell the difference between an $X product, and a $10X product, you are on the path to good frugal living and $$$ in your pocket.
Also, you can only put so much stock into what other people or studies say. Ultimately, you have to take the dive and try things out for yourself. What I mean is, by 2 buck chuck, and test it against $10 wines, and $10 wines against $100 wines, etc... I've done this many times not just with wines, but coffees, cheeses, tomatoes, etc... After all this, I've concluded that the price difference isn't worth it, and whatever differences there are is very subjective to me.
Fun definition: the definition of a good wine is the wine you like to drink.
Real definition: the difference between good wines and bad wines is the complexity of the flavor. Crap wines usually have a very narrow and uncomplicated flavor profile, wines that are more likely to be enjoyed have more complex profiles. What makes it confusing is that different kinds of wines have radically different flavor profiles: a Pinot Noir has a "lighter flavor" than a Cabernet Sauvignon. The $2 a gallon wines at the local gas station are unlikely to have a complex flavor profile, and that's why people call them "crap".
Also, contrary to popular belief, wine blends aren't necessarily a sign of a bad wine, due to local soil conditions (which provide different nutrient ratios and can change the flavor profile quite a bit) some varieties of grapes grow fine, but don't produce the desired complex flavor profile. Vintners blends wines from several sources like a recipe to "build up" the flavor profile they wish for.
To learn to drink wine, simply try lots of them, try them by themselves and with different foods. Some are better paired with certain foods (the food diminishes or accents certain parts of the wine's flavor), or by themselves. Don't spend lots of money on wine, the "sweet" spot to me for good wines tends to be between $7-$14 per 750ml at the store (the exact same wines will be about 3x that at a restaurant). Costco seems to be about the cheapest place to buy good wines, a $10 wine there is consistently $12-15 elsewhere. If you go to a winery, expect to pay around $20-30 for a bottle. Find what you like and TADA! You've found a good wine.
There are essentially two kinds of wineries, ones that grow their own grapes, and ones that buy grapes from other farms and ferment the wine themselves. Most wineries will also buy wines from other local wineries for their blends. There's nothing wrong with it and it's just how winemaking works.
Wine drinking is an acquired taste, many wines might be harsh or unpleasant on first sip, and by the bottom of the glass sublime. The taste might change a bit as you work your way through a bottle. When you read that wine has "hints of spice and plums" or whatever, it's just a way of describing the profile to you and what you might be able to expect. "Plum" might describe a deep fruity flavor (not sweet), "tobacco" describes some of the bitter tannins that come from the skins.
Wines also change flavor as they sit in storage. Some wines don't develop their full flavor profile until a couple years after they're bottled. Some wines are intended to be enjoyed almost immediately (Nouveaus).
Try wines from different places, the normal French styles are popular, but there are some incredibly good local varieties that aren't well known outside of their home countries (and are usually very cheap). Spain and Italy in particular have a rich and complex wine culture easily as great as France. Many popular varieties are also grown in places outside of France. California for example grows lots of traditional French varieties. Areas not necessarily known for good wine might actually mean that they don't have the right kind of soil or climate to grow these popular varieties. Virginia, for example, is too wet to grow really good Cabernets, but there are almost entirely unknown grapes bred just for Virginia that are excellent.
Wine glasses are intended for your nose rather than your tongue. They're designed as recognition that about half of our flavor comes from our noses, so different shapes of the glass are intended to help deliver vaporizing parts of the wine to your nose to help build up the flavor profile.
Wine drinking is not snobby, in places with a very long wine drinking history, wine is the normal table drink. It's nothing unusual to sit down in a reasonably priced family restaurant, order a plate of the local whatever and get a 500ml carafe of house wine as part of the order instead of water. It probably won't be great wine (might even be cut with a bit of water), but it'll go fine with the meal. In history, wine was the "safe" alternative to water, priests, construction workers, delivery men, soldiers, etc. all drank wine as part of their normal day-to-day.
Think nothing of sitting outside on your porch with a bottle of Merlot and a red plastic solo cup if you enjoy it.
A few of my personal favorites (all between $9-14 at Costco):
"the difference between good wines and bad wines is the complexity of the flavor"
Most people like simple wines better, which is in part why less expensive wines usually do better in these studies. Similar studies show that people like McDonalds-esque food more than anything else, because it's mostly just fat and salt, but that doesn't mean that the entire food industry is a conspiracy either.
I think my wine drinking progression went something like Red Blush ($3bottle, or box wine)->White Wine->Merlot->Cabernet->Pinot Noir.
Not sure what I would recommend to new wine drinkers at this point, maybe dry Riesling. Lots of decent slightly sweet wines that are good chilled for the summer ;)
Riesling is probably as good a recommendation as any. If you expose a group of wine novices to lots of random varietals, Riesling tends to be the plurality favorite. (At least going by the data from the Cornell intro wines class, which has about 1500 students per year.)
Many countries have abandoned corks and go with twist tops instead, except when they export to countries that associate corks with quality. I hate corks, I can't wait for the whole world to adopt twist tops.
Your hell will be plastic foam corks. And those win hands up for medium duration of storage : they have some of the properties of the classic corks and let the wine breath a little (twists tops do not), with no disadvantages.
They are used more and more in low-mid range of wines in France, and nobody complains about it.
Still it does not cut it for more than a year or two of storage.
Yes, always disappointed when a plastic cork is revealed, a lousy glass usually follows, followed by pouring the rest down the drain.
Of course, 4 or 5 Euros in France usually does the trick for table wine (with a real cork to boot); imagine in the States the same bottle will run $25+
You can usually find decent French wines in the States for $12-15 if you shop at the right places. Most wine specialty stores tend to overprice (and at restaurants they'll easily run $30-50).
I don't like the plastic corks myself, they seem inordinately hard to pull out of the bottle.
I complain about plastic corks, and I wish the low-end French wines would switch to screw-caps. Plastic corks tend to fail under any kind of environmental stress, and they are hard on corkscrews. No one keeps that kind of wine longer than 6-12 months anyway, so in my view they have no advantages over a screw-top. Germany and New Zealand see this.
But plastic corks will probably stick around, because they seem to give folks the illusion that they are doing something special when they open the bottle.
I opened a 2007 with a synthetic cork a couple nights ago. It was great. I can't say if they hold up well for decades, but I've encountered no problems with them in the <10 year time scale.
Isn't the point of corks that the wine can slowly oxidize (age) in the bottle? I also prefer screw caps, but I can't see this being better for all wines.
Thank you for this! I've heard similar things from a friend who is knowledgeable about wine. Enjoying good wine seems similar to enjoying good coffee or beer; price is more of a reflection of the limited markets for specialized styles and costs of transporting from the country of production than a simple function of quality. You certainly don't need to spend much to find something good if you are willing to look around a bit.
It's also almost exactly like coffee and beer in that it tastes terrible the first time you try it, but as you learn to enjoy it, it becomes almost a necessity.
I thought the whole issue was that people trying to snob you were full of it and that you oughta just buy whatever you enjoy and tell 'em to ram it up their snout.
I've been drinking red wine quite a bit ever since I met my wife 8 years ago (her family is Italian). I can finally, after this long, begin to taste the various flavor differences and describe them in a meaningful way.
I've had expensive bottles I thought were 'meh', and cheap bottles I thought were the greatest thing ever. So I'll agree that wine price is determined by a number of factors, the least of which is flavor.
Is it really? Or maybe the bullshit is the fundamental assumption of economics that you can understand human behavior by equating them to a set of agents maximizing some mythical utility function, and the temptation to see the world through those reductionist lenses.
No, buying $2000 bottles of wine probably is not worth it in terms of maximizing any utility function, but i would argue it is precisely the point.
There are many great bargain wines out there, true. But, I would not call all wine bullshit.
Those $300-$400 bottles are, IMO, complete bullshit compared to most $100 bottles, which are in turn bullshit compared to many $50 bottles (I've been a Williams-Selyem subscriber for a decade now)... which are in turn bullshit to a ton of great cheap wine from S. America.
I really enjoy wine. But - yes it is bullsht. It's just a higher class of bullsht...
Roman Weil (an accounting professor who decided he was more interested in wine than FASB rules) did some empirical analysis on the topic. Here's a paper where he finds that most people can't tell a good year from a bad year on similar wines.
It isn't just that prefer the wrong one, it's that they can't tell the difference. He's done similar studies on "Reserve" wines versus regular, and again most people can't tell the difference, and the ones who do don't necessarily like the better one. He also demonstrated that people can't identify wine based on the tasting notes.
Does this mean wine's not worth drinking? Certainly not. But it encourages a little humility.
So is beer, whiskey, fashion, electronic gadgets, and lots of other things. But our perception being altered is part of the experience, and if you need to know that it cost a bit more to do it then good for you and if you get your kicks knowing that it cost just a few dollars then thats fine too.
Fashion products are very overpriced compared to their quality, but in fashion you're intentionally overpaying for the bragging right of having too much disposable income.
What's remarkable about wine is you're paying extra not for vanity or features (unless it's for a date or a gift) but for some added taste quality that is probably skewed by knowing the price of the bottle: your brain has the expectation that more expensive wine actually tastes better, so your paying for something that may not even be there, and yet wine drinkers seldom feel enough buyers remorse to stop buying expensive wines.
>is you're paying extra not for vanity or features (unless it's for a date or a gift)
When else would you get wine? I don't think I've ever bought wine that wasn't for a social occasion (except in college, but then I bought the cheapest stuff I could find).
Some people like drinking it. They'll have a glass or two after a long day at work. But that probably means half a bottle of wine.
This kind of long term, regular, drinking of not-excessive amounts is worrying, especially among women. They don't see it as harmful, when it probably is.
> Hospital consultants in north-east England have reported seeing an "epidemic" in the number of people in their early 30s with alcoholic liver disease.
Some people are just convinced they can see/hear/taste the difference between expensive things and their cheap counterparts, and there is no research that can sway their minds. I guess it makes them happy to think that so I let them, it doesn't seem to hurt anybody.
Some people are just convinced nobody else can see/hear/taste the difference between expensive things and their cheap counterparts, and there is no research that can sway their minds. I guess it makes them happy to think that so I let them, and continue to enjoy the finer things which they don't.
1. Its cost of production. An ice wine, for example, costs more to produce because the cold climate in which it is produced leads to poor harvests. A more expensive production may take prune their trees more, giving a particular quality to their (eventual) grape juice. Some technology allows for more efficient processing of grapes. Cork is more expensive than screw top.
2. The supply and quantity demanded of said wine.
The cost matters in that it sets the amount of supply. Knowing that most people are going to be unwilling to pay 35 bucks for a bottle of ice wine, not much is produced.
There are plenty of good, inexpensive wines. This isn't 1949 where an inexpensive bottle of wine is going to be little different than vinegar.
You should also keep in mind that some products artificially increase the price as a marketing tactic. The increased price leads consumers to (falsely) believe it is of higher quality because they expect price to reflect quality.
I enjoy a good wine, but never bothered refining my taste for regions, pairings, etc. Instead, I found a good, local wine shop. When I need a bottle, I just ask for what I want... "something to go with a duck dinner", "something to drink on a hot, summer night", etc. So far, they haven't let me down. I probably average $20/bottle - certainly more than strictly necessary for a good bottle - but I figure it's almost guaranteed I'll enjoy the bottle, and it's going to a local, family business, so I'm ok with that.
"MetaCookie+ is a technology that changes the taste of a cookie when it is being eaten based on an illusion evoked by changing its appearance and scent."
The way something tastes is partially determined by your expectations. Smell, appearance, cost, and if someone tells you it has hints of X, you will probably find that X.
Still, pleasure is personal and your own opinion is the only one that counts.
>> In another experiment, critics tasted one red wine and one white wine. They described the red in language typical of reds and the white in language typical of whites. The problem? Both were identical white wines; the “red” had been tinted with food coloring.
Try that with me, 1, 50 or 1000 times (preferably the latter) but you will not be able to fool me. White (regardless the color) is so different from red it's like in another dimension.
I don't even know much about wines but it seems hard to imagine I'd confuse a white wine for a red one. But then again I saw an experiment with people tasting jello without any food coloring. People couldn't tell strawberry from lime from grape or anything else. Perhaps not a totally accurate comparison but I do think we see a certain color and our brain starts preparing our other senses for the experience.
I've never been able to understand why people claim that no wine is better than another, or coffee, or tea, or anything. Do a lot of people have very insensitive taste buds? There is most definitely a correlation between price and quality. Very cheap wines are most often garbage, and very expensive wines are almost surely good, and usually exquisite, as long as they have not turned to vinegar. That being said, it is not necessary to spend a fortune on a wine to get a delectable experience. I've had $15 dollar wines that I have much preferred to $30 wines. But I find it unlikely that I'd prefer a $10 wine to a $100 dollar wine. Note also that some wines have a better price to quality ratio: I'm more likely to prefer a $50 Bordeaux than a $50 Chilean wine. What's more, does anyone think that "movie appreciation" is bullshit because some reviewers will give one star while others give four to the same movie?
Another thing that happens is that certain wines, e.g. Chateauneuf-du-Pape, are just never as cheap as others, and cheaper wines just typically don't have their flavor profile. So if you want that certain taste because whatever food you're pairing it with would be matched better, then you'll find yourself spending a little more, not fundamentally on quality, but on variety. This leads to the tinted white wine "experiment": if you know what you're drinking, you know what you're looking for (the test is sort of interesting, but I don't see it as evidence that wine is bullshit). Recognition is one of the main sources of pleasure in a lot of things. Consider a neophyte looking at oil paintings: many people are baffled by the prices some of them sell for. But for someone that recognizes the evolution of a certain genre, style, and techniques, it may not be so incomprehensible. Similarly, if a flavor profile only appears to exist in certain more expensive wines, one guzzler may appreciate looking for its subtleties. That they would not notice them if they weren't told which wine they were downing is entirely possible.
Lastly, I'm not sure I understand people's gripe with using words like asphalt, tar, leather, tobacco, etc. Flavors, in wine or anything, usually fall into three categories: vegetal, animal, or mineral. If you've picked out a characteristic flavor in what you're drinking, it is not hard to categorize it within those three. What is more difficult is to make this observation more precise, and if you have the enlightenment to see that asphalt is actually what you're reminded of, then why not use the word? It doesn't follow that just because you wouldn't eat asphalt, you could not appreciate the playfulness detecting this aroma.
Maybe you're right, but to be sure you should give your friend a few hundred, let him go buy a couple of different wines and blind test you. Record both how you like each wine and what you think it cost. Also for fun, write down the tastes and compare to the description (asphalt etc). Film this and put it on youtube so we all can see. I'd be willing to donate a few bucks for this, anyone else?
This seems to be Priceonomic's MO. See their earlier article entitled "Diamonds are Bullshit". It's largely the same (a few non-controversial facts mixed in with anecdotes and straw man arguments)
I remember when I had my shot of Midleton (Irish Whiskey), which costs around $300 because it was aged, special brew, etc. Then I get a bottle of 12 year aged Dewars for $35 and my god was the Dewars better...
Yet my whole family was impressed with the Midelton.
Next time, I switched what was in the bottles, it was the Dewars that won.
I've never been a wine drinker... It gives me headaches.
However, there are many goods which have traditionally inflated prices, such as diamonds, but there is no shortage of people who buy into the words of marketers.
That said, aficionado types often agree upon their favorites, so there must be something to the rankings of popular vintage.
Whatever you think of this article, it's interesting to do your own blind tasting of kinds of wine, tea, peanut butter, or whatever. If you personally can't tell the difference, it's both educational ("I thought I liked the expensive one better!") and lets you happily save money.
On a side note, there is a grand difference between ice wine and regular wine. Oh, it's a sweet wine, and there is no mistaking that taste. If you've never tried it, I'd highly recommend it.
Of course there's need to analyze it. Understanding why "it tastes good", why "some tastes better than others", and - oft overlooked - what leads to a reliably enjoyable experience for which you are willing to shell out considerably more money on a regular basis, necessitates analyzing it. As for the conspiracy, some do exist (taking shortcuts to larger profits), but most are imputed because the ignorant don't believe there is any objective backing to what they don't understand.
I love craft beer. Price doesn't necessarily play a huge role -- I love a $4 Lagunitas as much as a $15 [insert higher-priced beer], but there is a correlation between price and the complexity of the beer. A $2 bottle of beer you get as part of a six-pack can be a good craft beer that I love, but you often don't find very niche, unique breweries doing the six-pack thing and just have more expensive single bottles.
One thing I know, though, is that I am getting sick and tired of the "tinted the white wine red and fooled them all" anecdote as it has very little substance.
Any wine, white or red, can express a huge range of flavor and texture, etc., and there is absolutely no reason to suspect a "red" wine is actually a white wine. You'll note that the study does not indicate the testers thought it was a great red wine, or any particular red wine - just that they did not question it was red. That's not nearly the indictment it's made out to be. In fact, it's not an indictment at all.
Assigning too much value, or "enjoyment" to price ? Fair critique. Describing wines with bizarre descriptors like "asphalt" ? Fair critique. Dubious claims of "terroir" ? Fair critique.
But the "fooled them with white wine" test is meaningless.