Unless it's too much whatever makes chardonnay taste like butter, I can't tell much difference between wines of the same type without looking at the box.
Butanedione. Same stuff they use to flavor popcorn butter.
I could never be a wine judge -- I don't have the memory for it.
We had some folks over several years ago, and drank 5 bottles of 1999 zin, same winery, same winemaker, different vineyards. Each was quite distinct. I liked them all. And couldn't have told even then if one was better than another. Just different.
I can tell a difference between wines up to three small glasses. After that, my palate is shot and everything pretty much just tastes like wine.
2: Thanks. Do you know what makes PBR taste bad?
I would have assumed Milwaukee but I decided to double check and apparently not anymore.
My ex-husband's family owned a vineyard and I helped the ex do his master's in wine business. I spent every day drinking expensive-ish wine ($30-50 range) and every weekend doing extensive wine tasting in the land down undah. I do think there's a difference in general between cheap (<$15) a bottle, midrange ($15-$50), and expensive (>$50) a wine, in terms of complexity or depth of flavor,* though branding plays such a big role in wine pricing that very good wines can be underpriced and trendy brands are usually very overpriced. There's also a lot of year to year variety within brands and pretty limited ways to control quality during the process, since wine quality is so influenced by grape quality, especially among more expensive wines. There are smell kits for wines that one can practice with. Blind taste testing made up a part of his qualifying exams, so there are people who actually have to perform well on those things.
*After I moved back to the US and resumed my impoverished lifestyle, I had to work to redevelop a palate for 2 buck chuck and even Yellowtail, both of which tasted horrendously sweet and one-note after drinking really nice wines for 18 months.
Great, parts of my comment got eaten. I meant to write, there is in general a pretty reliable difference between cheap wines (under $15), midrange wines (15-50), and expensive wines (50+).
I don't think I've drunk wine that's more than maybe $200/bottle, but I think at the upper end it's pretty much driven by speculation and label/appellation prestige and other economic factors outside actual flavor. I might be totally wrong, but my guess is an $800 bottle of wine probably isn't appreciably better than a $200 bottle of wine. I remember learning about this as part of my husband's degree, but I forgot what was said, exactly.
Did they happen to cover why bars always serve cheap wine in bottles instead of cheap wine from boxes that would at least keep the cheap wine fresh?
11
Mostly it's stigma against boxed wine. Most cheap wine would be better off in boxes or at least with screw caps, but people are so into the idea that wine ought to be sold in a bottle with a cork, so it's hard to sell anything nicer than Franzia in a box. The overlap of people who can determine by taste when wine is stale and people who buy wine in large jugs is also not very large. There are smaller "hipster" labels that are trying to sell decentish wine in boxes, but I don't know how that's faring.
I used to bring the Carlo Rossi in the giant jugs, but they changed the formula and it isn't good any more.
Also, in a lot of restaurant or club settings, people buying $1000 bottles of wine are mainly doing it to wave their giant penises around impress their friends or clients. You could sell Cold Duck for a grand if you called it Le Canard Froid and put a fancy looking label on it.*
*This is what a lot of French wines are doing in China.
Thank God, the blog has needed some swippling.
Anyhoo, as I may have mentioned previously, when I was most immersed in wine (once literally, for a piece), I was writing a wine column, making wine and also working at a restaurant that was basically a fantastic wine list with food attached. I went to tastings all the time, so my taste memory was pretty acute—a friend at another restaurant challenged me to identify a wine once, and (granted, knowing what sort of wines the place generally had) I was able to identify it as a Burgundy of a certain vintage, but I missed the AOC by a few miles (it was a Fixin, not a Gevrey-Chambertin). The point of which being that if you drink a shitload of wine for a while, you develop a sense for fine points, and if you stop, eventually you lose it.
I assume most people who buy Carlo Rossi are elderly Norwegian men who then mix it with milk to make a heart tonic, but that's just from personal experience.
I have a $200 bottle just waiting for a guest to drink it with. It was a gift, so there's no problem saying it isn't worth it. . .
In New Zealand, I would say a majority of cheap & mid-range wine is sold in screw tops - surprised that isn't the case overseas. I think cask has dropped in quality since screw tops came in.
I can impress my friends by buying a round of $4 beers. Or at least surprise them.
I think 4 captures my palate's abilities better than 16.2.
my guess is an $800 bottle of wine probably isn't appreciably better than a $200 bottle of wine
At that point it's not really a matter of better or worse, just different. An old Burgundy or Bordeaux, for example, can be an amazing thing and also cost hundreds, but it's not necessarily objectively better than a younger, say, Leonetti that costs substantially less.
19: Screw-tops have caught on here. Winemakers have argued for them for ages, but it's only in the last ten years or so that midrange to expensive wines come with them.
19: Over the weekend, I was in a state with fewer liquor controls than my own and had a six dollar bottle with a natural cork.
19
Yeah, that's true in Australia as well (and with Aussie and NZ wines in the US), but not with US winemakers, even though bad cork will ruin a wine much more frequently than a screw cap. There's been a move to artificial cork, which is better than cheap natural cork but not as good as a screw top.
Except that the natural corks support a sustainable forest economy and habitat for lots of critters, so I'm all in favor of real corks despite the risk of taint.
We pick up bottles of Scaia pretty often, which uses a glass Vino-Lok cork.
Those glass stoppers are the best, but the last time we checked you had to order (expensive) bottles for them.
Once a bottle is open we use one of those vacuum stoppers. And we do prefer olive oil in the bag/box because of reduced oxidation.
In other wine news, we just bottled a pretty fucking fantastic Viognier.
That's some hard-hitting explanatory journalism from Vox.
I was glad vox published this: http://www.vox.com/2015/6/29/8847385/what-i-learned-from-leading-tours-about-slavery-at-a-plantation
I saw that earlier today. It was good.
Once a bottle is open we use one of those vacuum stoppers
I read a comparison of re-closing methods somewhere recently, and next to those inert gas doohickies, using the original cork and putting the bottle in the fridge was the best method.
33: I admit to being shocked she was white. Somehow I had been following her Twitter (@AfAmHistFail) for a while now and not gathered that.
I actually think some of her Twitter stories were punchier and more vivid than the personal essay. Maybe because the medium is less forgiving of verbosity.
Keeping a bottle of opened red on a tile counter in a drafty SF apartment is probably just as good as the refrigerator.
Also, The Toast did an entertaining interview with her.
As long as I'm serial-posting, the best line:
For some reason the more carefully-prepared the hairstyle, the more likely the person is to be a slavery apologist.
Careful. Teo is very careful with his hair.
Anyway, I recognize a lot of the dynamics she describes from my own days giving tours, especially the part about building rapport early on to help when controversial questions come up later. The personal defensiveness didn't come up much at Chaco (although slavery did), in part because most visitors saw it as a sort of mysterious ancient place totally disconnected from their own world. Which is a perspective with its own problems, of course, but they're different ones.
36.1 I've also been following her for a while now (one of the best twitter accounts IMO) and admit to being surprised she's white. In retrospect I suppose most ignorant/racist white people wouldn't have said the kind of jaw-dropping stuff to a black docent that they'd say freely in front of a white one. She's great. I wish her much good luck in her future endeavors.
Even the French are beginning to use screw tops on medium range stuff in some regions. They're fine; also, you can put them back, which avoids the need for endless discussions about what to do with unfinished bottles (Correct answer: Drink it you wimp!)
As per many people above, there are people who really can make very distinctions and identifications with wine. Much as there are people [perfumiers, and the like] who can make repeatable, and very accurate smell-distinctions that ordinary people can't. People with very accurate relative pitch, and/or absolute pitch, etc.
I think the general phenomena of that combination of basic sensory prowess plus learned discrimination via lots of experience is pretty interesting, and interesting to compare to the cases where some people _claim_ to be able to make those kind of distinctions but, in fact, actually can't.
The audiophile world being a case in point. Some people genuinely can hear the difference between particular compression algorithms, or between lossless and non-lossless compressed music formats.* But it seems basically no-one can hear the difference between high bit-rate and high-resolution formats and the "redbook" equivalent. Although lots of companies and individuals would like you to buy their expensive stuff based on just that.
* under some conditions, some of the time.
Without visual cues, I couldn't tell the difference between Iggy Azaleo and Gwen Stephani while listening to a song where "I-G-G-Y" was repeated.
A friend's dad has a crate plus of 1967 Chateau Climens, Barsac that he is giving her only on the condition that she drink it, not sell it. I say drink a bottle or two and sell the rest to buy a bunch of $40 wine that is fairly close to being as good.
He is 85, has a ton of old wine, doesn't care about money, and wants her (and her friends) to enjoy it.
i remember the first time we ordered a bottle of wine that turned out to have a screw top - the waitress apologized and told us we could change our mind if we didn't want it.
nowdays, i tend to favor screwtops when buying for home. it's so much easier to deal with than pulling a cork (even with a Rabbit); and a bit of aluminum sounds like a better thing to throw away than a slug of plastic.
If a waiter brings a bottle of wine with a screw top to the table, I always squeeze the cap anyway.
49. The dad is dead right. The stuff is wine, not currency. It exists for people to drink and now would be a good time to do just that. Also, 1967 isn't a star year and the internet reckons it's probably past its best, though still OK. So it probably wouldn't fetch silly money if you tried to sell it, but it would be a good idea to get it don't people's necks asap
AITIMHB, my dad and my uncle made wine a couple of years ago. They used the finest grapes Nebraska has to offer. It was close to undrinkable, but I still managed to finish the glass I had.
Appellation d'origine contrôlée hasn't hit Nebraska yet, but I think they were Platte Valley grapes.
54: I'm with will. If it doesn't provide much more pleasure than a much cheaper bottle of wine, why wouldn't you sell and let someone who'd be better able to appreciate it appreciate it?
But I'm awful with wine. I can distinguish between like two different lower-mid-range brands of sauvignon blanc, that's it.
And I'm shocked about @AfAmHistFail. I'd always assumed black (and male, given the avatar). I guess joke's on me, but that is an important detail for those sorts of stories. Now I'm trying to recall if there were any of those "hey I'm racist and I'm going to assume you are too, fellow caucasian; time to overshare" sort of stories.
I agree that it should be drunk or sold asap.
what to do with unfinished bottles
This is not a problem I confront often.
I have an '89 Haut Brion I could probably sell for a substantial amount of money that I could definitely use, but I would rather drink it at some point. I'm not sure how well that reflects on my priorities.
I'm not sure how well that reflects on my priorities.
If you are actually in penury and your children are hungry it reflects badly. Otherwise, it reflects well.
My children are not hungry. Which is to say, they're perpetually hungry, but I feed them. Constantly. So I guess I'll hang on to it.
We have a supply of cult desirable level audio cable and some duplicate LPs along those lines. The last redo of the sound state was financed by auctioning a modest length of cable, watching the last bit of that auction was hilarious.
Oh hey, I know the first author of that 2008 study. When I was living in Berlin, he found my Friendster profile, which had grüner Veltliner listed as one of my interests, and emailed to ask me out for a drink when he was in town.