Wine tasters in the first world getting vaccinated before doctors in the third. Probably says something about inequality or something.
Yes. There have been multiple tests where tasters were blindfolded (or not fully informed of wine's cost), and could not tell the difference between a Savignon Blanc that was aged for 85 years in a seasoned wine cask in the finest vineyard's cellar, and Grampa Baguette's Bargain Boxed Wine.
It isnaleays amazing to me how this keeps happening and the world nuzt carries on completely unbothered
To add to this, i know a guy in the business and according to him, even the most expensive wines don't cost more than 10 bucks to produce. Thing is, you can't indefinitely expand how much really great wine you can produce, it requires good vines, on good soil, in the right microclimate, you can't scale that up for the exceptional stuff. So there's a disparity between supply and demand that drives up the price. All these 300$+ bottles come from vineyards that are so hyped they are particularly susceptible to that effect, for some of them scalpers already buy up the entire vintage before it even gets cellared and then resell it when it hits ideal drinking age.
the short answer is yes. if you can get your hands on a copy of De Long's Wine Grape Varietal Table (a sweet poster/infographic) and figure out where your preferences are on the major axes (acidity, color, weight) you will know more than 99% of the population, including the off-beat wines that most people have never heard of. i like dry, heavy reds, but cheap is the real name of the game.
in the US, the wine culture is wildly classicist and snobby making wine wildly overpriced here unless you don't give a shit and go for the screw top stuff. which i absolutely do, and it drives my colleagues nuts. i think mostly because i know more about wine than they do and eye roll at anything more than $8/bottle. my philosophy is, it's fuckin' booze. stop trying to church it up.
there used to be this funny interview online from like 20 years ago with Fred Franzia, who i'm sure is an asshole because he's a very rich CEO, but when it comes to wine making he's my kind of asshole. he works out of a shit trailer, complains about ants, and wipes his ass on everything. all the super low budget wines ($2 chuck, the screw top gallo gallons) are under his banner. the repeatedly shreds the US wine industry for being full of shit. some big fancy wine contest had a blind entry one year and his like cheapest offering cleaned up major prestigious awards, so the contest body stopped allowing blind entries lmao. one of his major quotes are "our wines are for drinking, not storing in a closet."
all that terroir, "i taste the sophisticated impertinence of juniper trellising and geranium" bullshit is patter for the rich rubes. never forget that in the 1980s the austrian wine industry collapsed because an insider dropped a dime to regulators on the wineries for putting antifreeze in their wine... because nobody could tell that's where the sweet flavor was coming from. here's a link to the Down The Rabbit Hole about it ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhN-o2ame-4
The line between real and fake is somewhere between differentiating between red or white and being able to tell the year and exact vinyard.
Since people have different levels of taste sensitivity, who's to say where that line really is.
But paying more than $30 as a layman pointless
I mean, French wine is massively overrated, and any bottle over $150AUD isn't remotely worth it (the best wine I ever had was I think a $50 bottle.) And wine tasting past a certain point is basically down to personal taste, with wine testers being super jaded, which is why they're often tricked into thinking goon is an "art wine"
That said, you can definitely tell the large-scale difference in the quality of the wine (though that has little to do with the price, a high end goon is as likely to be good as a $1000 wine, and mid range bottled drinking wines are more reliably tasty), and the difference between, say, a French and a South American Malbec, or a Pinot Noir from the same region, is really and reliably noticeable.
It could be a good wine. The BiB method of packaging the wine is vastly superior to glass bottles both when it comes to resource use, practicality and keeping the wine from spoiling.
Eh, it's just a AUD15 box of Coolabah red that I'm mixing with pepsi.
This is a Beautiful Doc on a Wine trickster .. .. . A the end ..no one of the Ripped off Millionairs can acgnoledge that they have been ripped of (and therefore dont know shit about Wine)
But the Trickster gets only busted in the first place because he tried his shit with the French ... So who Knows... (Maybe there is a Eng, Version out there ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7AaB0dvPns
"Hon hom hmn, only French wine has the terroir to produce such notes like oversized baguette, cigarettes, and quosaant"
Extremely French but also not completely bullshit. It is not unreasonable that people who depend on their sense of taste and smell for their livelihoods are worried about a disease that kills that sense.
I mean I could see this for honest to god supertasters in the current system but the whole sommeliér thing is pretty much a large ass scam.
It's like fortune tellers asking to be prioritized because covid fucks their chakras
That depends. If it is the people who arrange wine tasting for rich snobs it is pure bullshit but if it is the supertasters who blend wine for a living I understand their concerns.
