Wine Snobs Got Nothing

[REDVAN]

If you have the wines in order, you can tell the difference. Not saying more expensive is better or worse, but you can certainly tell different wines when they are drank sequentially.

Ie/ at a winery, taste the cheap and go to the expensive. You can notice a difference. At last I did at my last winery tour. So much so that I just bought the second most expensive one (the most expensive- I didn't like it).

I'd say 15-25 is where you can find the best wine for the price. Anything more, and does it matter? Anything less, and yeah...

My favourite is still wine from a box/bag. Hilarious.

[Mean Mr. Mustard]

Originally Posted by username

Hmmm maybe they should sample some of my dad's home made potions and run this study. His wine is like drinking diesel compared to 7 dollar bottle "cheap" wine.

I really dislike people who make their own wine and then try and pretend that it is special. I had a coworker who would continually rave about how fantastic his homemade wine was, so finally I had some - and it tasted like rubbing alcohol. Actually the worst part about his entire thing was he insisted on cellaring his homemade deer piss. Odds are the #### that took 3 weeks to make in a kit you bought on sale isn't going to cellar jackass.

[REDVAN]

Originally Posted by Mean Mr. Mustard

I really dislike people who make their own wine and then try and pretend that it is special. I had a coworker who would continually rave about how fantastic his homemade wine was, so finally I had some - and it tasted like rubbing alcohol.

My dad used to make a kit wine, with a very low alcohol content, that my mom and her lady friends loved. But it was juice, not wine. Maybe it was 5%.

I'd love to buy grapes and stomp them and ferment that way... we should make a CP wine next fall.

[Crazy Bacon Legs]

My favorite wine is $18 a bottle. I have had expensive wine that was very "meh." I once threw a bottle of "fine" wine at a waiter's head for daring to feed me overpriced, mediocre swill. I missed, and yet this act provided more satisfaction for the price than drinking the rest of the bottle would have.

What does this mean? I have provided an opinion and information, and yet contributed nothing to the discussion. I have nothing else to add.

[peter12]

Originally Posted by Gozer

Pedantic on the topic of alcohol?

I admire the devotion.

Sorry, are you at all aware of the meaning of pedantry?

[Bring_Back_Shantz]

Originally Posted by REDVAN

If you have the wines in order, you can tell the difference. Not saying more expensive is better or worse, but you can certainly tell different wines when they are drank sequentially.

Ie/ at a winery, taste the cheap and go to the expensive. You can notice a difference. At last I did at my last winery tour. So much so that I just bought the second most expensive one (the most expensive- I didn't like it).

I'd say 15-25 is where you can find the best wine for the price. Anything more, and does it matter? Anything less, and yeah...

My favourite is still wine from a box/bag. Hilarious.

Ahh you do realize that you're example of setting the wines up by price and then sampling them in order, is exactly the kind of bias this article is talking about right? Hell even not liking the most expensive possibly based on a bias against the most expensive as being not worth it compared to the second most expensive.

[Bring_Back_Shantz]

Originally Posted by Crazy Bacon Legs

My favorite wine is $18 a bottle. I have had expensive wine that was very "meh." I once threw a bottle of "fine" wine at a waiter's head for daring to feed me overpriced, mediocre swill. I missed, and yet this act provided more satisfaction for the price than drinking the rest of the bottle would have.

What does this mean? I have provided an opinion and information, and yet contributed nothing to the discussion. I have nothing else to add.

So does your story end with you getting arrested for assault, or is it just made up?

[Crazy Bacon Legs]

Originally Posted by Bring_Back_Shantz

So does your story end with you getting arrested for assault, or is it just made up?

My made up stories almost always end with me getting arrested. Or fighting crime.

So, to answer your question: "yes."

[Yasa]

Arrested AND fighting crime?! We must share stories, say over a bottle of unlabeled and unspecified wine?

[Crazy Bacon Legs]

Originally Posted by Yasa

Arrested AND fighting crime?! We must share stories, say over a bottle of unlabeled and unspecified wine?

As long as the price point falls under $20, I'm in. I refuse to drink high-priced wine on principle. I find it muddies my head and causes disturbances. That is to say, it makes me cause disturbances.

[Matata]

Here's Penn & Teller making a bunch of food snobs look stupid for 10 minutes (language)

NSFW!

[REDVAN]

Originally Posted by Bring_Back_Shantz

Ahh you do realize that you're example of setting the wines up by price and then sampling them in order, is exactly the kind of bias this article is talking about right? Hell even not liking the most expensive possibly based on a bias against the most expensive as being not worth it compared to the second most expensive.

Yes I know that's what it was talking about, but I guess I shouldn't say they were ordered in price... they were ordered in years and varietal and then after tasting we were told prices.

I did like different years and varietals more so than others. And, at least at the winery I went to, I could tell which of the selection would be the most expensive. But if I wasn't in that setting, it's true- wine is wine.

Obviously I am not disagreeing with the article... just stating that anyone who's been to a tasting or a winery, and also drank wine otherwise should partially agree with the results.

[Bill Bumface]

I definitely like a 20 year port better than a 5 year.

But that very likely could be because I can't afford to buy 20 year old port very often, so it just tastes different than I'm used to. If you switched them around in price, I'd probably like the 5 better as it would be a novelty.

[Save Us Sutter]

Originally Posted by comrade

Coincidentally I was just reading a very relevant article.

Appreciate the article, very interesting read. Your link points to page 3 though and might confuse some people, as it did me for a second.

Here's the link to the first page.

And to REDVAN, taste it heavily influenced by both expectation and context, so that could explain how you "knew" which wine was more expensive. Highly doubtful your tongue could actually differentiate the subtle differences let alone how those differences would influence price.

I would say this is also why people think their homemade crap is so good. They expect that the work they put into making it will pay off, so it tastes better to them then an impartial taster.

[V]

I really like my wine. I also really like the fact that it costs less than 3 bucks a bottle. It also takes virtually no work to make. What's not to like?

[Yasa]

Originally Posted by V

I really like my wine. I also really like the fact that it costs less than 3 bucks a bottle. It also takes virtually no work to make. What's not to like?

Your wine.

[Torture]

I'm currently reading a book called "The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives". Pretty interesting stuff and recommended for people who are into this nerdy stuff.

Really good book, I read it last summer....definitely second your recommendation.

[Table 5]

Originally Posted by comrade

So you reject that the findings of the experiment (performed on several hundred people) apply to you due to a baseless assumption that "science nerds" (defined as anyone who has attended a science festival) could not possibly have any interest or experience with wine, unlike you. You then admit a few posts later that you're "not a big wine guy" and offer an example where you were duped in the exact same way as the subjects of the experiment.

Hey nerdlinger, you're confusing my post with Fotzes. I'm not sure which one of us should be more insulted.

[flylock shox]

That Guardian-reported study seems a bit limited.

Really, all it shows is that the quality or "goodness" of a wine - as far as most people can tell - does not correlate with the price of the wine.

And it's also limited in that it asked the question of non-experts - which is fine to a limited extent. But I'd be interested to see how experts fared by comparison - not in assessing which wines were "cheap" and which were "expensive," but rather which scored highly, and which did not. It would also be fun to compare the average and spread of ratings amongst experts on blind taste tests.

Anyway, for the average Joe, the study is reassuring, I just wouldn't extrapolate it to a more wine-educated crowd.

[JohnnyB]

What would be the objective basis for quality of flavour? If it's not just a matter of personal taste then it ought to be possible to describe what makes for high quality flavour in terms that are more concrete and specific than anything like 'honeyed' or 'smoky'.

I would think that there may be some parameters that most people's reactions to flavours of wine (or other things) operate within, but I'm pretty skeptical that specific differences in flavour and enjoyment of it would be common enough to establish any kind of clear ranking that would hold for everybody. Our tastes are so subject to change and the influence of our prior diet that the whole idea just seems silly. Two people can have genuinely different experiences of enjoyment in relation to the same chemical stimuli in the mouth, so why bother trying to assert the universal superiority of one to the other when their value is only in relation to enjoyment. That's really where wine drinking gets snobby, because judging another person's taste is basically based upon a judgment of their past consumption practices and the perceived value of their consumption practices in a way that has nothing to do with their enjoyment of what they have been consuming.