Vintage/Expensive wine - it's all a big con isn't it?

rubberduck · 19 Jan 2018 at 21:47

I'm sure we all know people who pay lots of money for 'fine wine' and claim you can totally tell the difference over budget wines. Anyone who can't is obviously an unrefined pleb with a palate destroyed by too many hot curries etc. But isn't it all a big con, much like speaker wire and cables that carry analog signals etc? I was thinking the other day that the experience of tasting a wine must be very much controlled by many things periphery to the actual wine itself. Most obvious would be the food that you have eaten that day which would include the proteins, carbohydrates, and fats coating your mouth, in turn this could lead to variations in mouth pH which would influence taste and mouth feel. Moreover, your degree of hydration, oral care routine and brand of product used, fatigue level, mood/psychology, and even time of day can all influence flavour. What I am getting at is that it is impossible to decouple these from the actual taste of wine thus making a semi objective approach to wine tasting next to impossible. So, does anyone else agree people who spend hundreds or even thousands on wine are most likely kidding themselves?

Hotwired · 19 Jan 2018 at 21:54

rubberduck said:
I'm sure we all know people who pay lots of money for 'fine wine' and claim you can totally tell the difference over budget wines. Anyone who can't is obviously an unrefined pleb with a palate destroyed by too many hot curries etc.

Funny you should say it that way round.

A relative of mine was working in the secondary restaurant of a celebrity fine dining chef and described the over-seasoning of all of the food as very deliberate with the expectation that diners had distorted their taste with alcohol. Didn't matter what variety.

BDEE · 19 Jan 2018 at 22:02

Actually drinking a very expensive bottle right now.

There is quite clearly a difference between wines and generally speaking the better ones are the more expensive, but that is not exclusive.

For example, Lidl do a very nice bottle of malbec which costs about £4.50. I will drink this happily, but they take some finding to be nice at that price. Usually they are like paint thinner.

That said, the bottle I am drinking now I had to source from a dealer. It is one of my favourites and costs about £110 a bottle. I usually open about 2 a year due to the cost. It is exceptionally nice.

For me it has nothing to do with the cost as to if I find it an enjoyable wine or not, but there is a general correlation. Just because you can't tell the difference doesn't mean people are kidding themselves. It just means your palate can't tell the difference.

For the record, I also enjoy hot curry.

adolf hamster · 19 Jan 2018 at 22:12

the best wine is the one you like.

its one of these things like cars, many people don't really care what it is as long as it gets the job done, some people like to put the effort in to make something their own, others are willing to put a bit more money in for a nicer experience, and at the really high end you have those who only care about exclusivity or having something as an investment.

considering it a con is wrong because that would insinuate the people who fall for it aren't happy with spending that amount to get what they want.

mistersprinkles · 19 Jan 2018 at 22:29

rubberduck said:
I'm sure we all know people who pay lots of money for 'fine wine' and claim you can totally tell the difference over budget wines. Anyone who can't is obviously an unrefined pleb with a palate destroyed by too many hot curries etc. But isn't it all a big con, much like speaker wire and cables that carry analog signals etc? I was thinking the other day that the experience of tasting a wine must be very much controlled by many things periphery to the actual wine itself. Most obvious would be the food that you have eaten that day which would include the proteins, carbohydrates, and fats coating your mouth, in turn this could lead to variations in mouth pH which would influence taste and mouth feel. Moreover, your degree of hydration, oral care routine and brand of product used, fatigue level, mood/psychology, and even time of day can all influence flavour. What I am getting at is that it is impossible to decouple these from the actual taste of wine thus making a semi objective approach to wine tasting next to impossible. So, does anyone else agree people who spend hundreds or even thousands on wine are most likely kidding themselves?

I used to think this. Then one day I figured I'd test my theory and bought a $50 bottle of wine. 12 years old. Better than sex.
Would do it again.

dowie · 19 Jan 2018 at 22:31

I don't think it is as much of a con as say some of the nonsense that gets promoted by hi fi enthusiasts/dealers, at least wine people do go in for things like blind tastings etc... but yeah some expensive wines aren't necessarily any "better" (this is subjective though) than wines costing significantly less

Nitefly · 19 Jan 2018 at 22:41

I don’t think it makes a huge difference in quality of taste once you go over ~£30. From their it’s just different and exclusive, not ‘better’.

Tend to spend £10-£20 a casual bottle. Wines in that price range are often much better than at the £5-10 range.

This wine from Asda however, is awesome for a fiver!

Also worth a mention is this, the most pretentious hipster wine I have ever seen...

Rroff · 19 Jan 2018 at 22:50

Quite a varied one - I'd take a middle of the road Australian red wine (they tend to have a nicely balanced taste and texture) over any expensive wine from most other parts of the world and can't really taste any difference between a supermarket £20-30 red and stuff that costs £180 or something per glass when from the same region.

Someone bought me one of the more expensive Isojiman sake once and you could definitely tell it wasn't cheap stuff.

Skeptic · 19 Jan 2018 at 23:01

£0-10 - rarely find a winner
£10-20 - much better chance
£20-£30 - sweet spot, unless burgundy is your thing
£30-40 - getting serious now, probably reserved for those who will appreciate the nuances
£40+ diminishing returns.

PlacidCasual · 19 Jan 2018 at 23:34

My father gave me some Port from the year of my birth. I have drunk a few bottles and it is head and shoulders the finest wine I have ever drunk. It was a good vintage and I drank some at its peak. Yeah I reckon vintage wine is a meaningful thing bu5 I eon5 be spending a grand a bottle.

Narj · 19 Jan 2018 at 23:41

Anything above £15 a bottle is a ripoff really. Go to the continent and you'll get a £40 bottle for about 12 Euros.

The only crazy drink-related expense I endure is a bottle of Hennessy XO every year for my Birthday.

Rimsy · 19 Jan 2018 at 23:54

Pretty sure I've never drank wine that's been over £12 a bottle but I'm now curious as to whether I'd really see the difference with a £30 bottle!! Damn you GD

Amp34 · 20 Jan 2018 at 00:09

dowie said:
I don't think it is as much of a con as say some of the nonsense that gets promoted by hi fi enthusiasts/dealers, at least wine people do go in for things like blind tastings etc... but yeah some expensive wines aren't necessarily any "better" (this is subjective though) than wines costing significantly less

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/amp.the...013/jun/23/wine-tasting-junk-science-analysis

Blind taste testing is a bad idea with wine. It shows up how much of the “flavour” of wine is based on the label and price, rather than the actual “quality” of the wine.

What studies seem to actually show is that if the plonk is not awful then it’s very much in the eye of the beholder. “Investment” quality wine seems to be based on the price people are willing to pay for it, based on the label and what critics feel about the wine. Basically it’s like art...

Realistically in a blind taste test very, very few people are likely to be able to reliably pick the “expensive” wines unless they are trained to do so.

Out of interest BDBB have you ever done a proper blind taste test wth a selection of wines?

dowie · 20 Jan 2018 at 00:14

Amp34 said:
https://www.google.ca/amp/s/amp.the...013/jun/23/wine-tasting-junk-science-analysis

Blind taste testing is a bad idea with wine. It shows up how much of the “flavour” of wine is based on the label and price, rather than the actual “quality” of the wine.

But that is a good thing! That is what blind tests are good for, calling out nonsense... my point was that at least the wine people tend to be quite receptive to trying it.

A bad idea would be to carry on believing in those judges and not testing things like this.

Angilion · 20 Jan 2018 at 01:05

dowie said:
I don't think it is as much of a con as say some of the nonsense that gets promoted by hi fi enthusiasts/dealers, at least wine people do go in for things like blind tastings etc... but yeah some expensive wines aren't necessarily any "better" (this is subjective though) than wines costing significantly less

There have been blind taste tests of wine in which the tasters apparently had such refined palates that they could detect differences between the same wine that had had different words spoken near it. Merely hearing that it was different wine was enough to change the wine, apparently. Who knew wine was so responsive to speech?

I'd say that it isn't as much of a con as cables. With cables, there's no difference at all across the entire range of pricing (assuming it's a digital signal). If it works, it works equally well. That's not true of wine. I doubt if anyone could reliably tell the difference with very expensive wine, though. £3 and £30, yes. £30 and £300, no. But hey, I'm a peasant. Maybe I'm wrong.

Once, when I was a student (bloody students!) we went to the off licence with calculators to get the most alcohol per pound. The winner was a "wine" called Tiger Milk. It made Thunderbird seem refined. I'm confident that anyone could tell the difference between that and...well, anything. Some cheap homebrew powdered wine stuff in a box that I inexpertly brewed in a big glass jar in my room for a few weeks tasted much better. Or, more accurately, much less horrible

FoxEye · 20 Jan 2018 at 01:08

Not a big fan of wine at all. It's pretty gross to an uncultured pleb such as my good self. But I could drink Kahlua neat until the cows come home. I like my girly drinks

Raymond Lin · 20 Jan 2018 at 01:13

BDEE said:
Actually drinking a very expensive bottle right now.

There is quite clearly a difference between wines and generally speaking the better ones are the more expensive, but that is not exclusive.

For example, Lidl do a very nice bottle of malbec which costs about £4.50. I will drink this happily, but they take some finding to be nice at that price. Usually they are like paint thinner.

That said, the bottle I am drinking now I had to source from a dealer. It is one of my favourites and costs about £110 a bottle. I usually open about 2 a year due to the cost. It is exceptionally nice.

For me it has nothing to do with the cost as to if I find it an enjoyable wine or not, but there is a general correlation. Just because you can't tell the difference doesn't mean people are kidding themselves. It just means your palate can't tell the difference.

For the record, I also enjoy hot curry.

The questions are:-

1 - can you tell the difference in a blind test
2 - would you be fooled if someone swap out the labels and you tell you it’s more expensive than it really is.

If you can tell after that then it’s money well spent, if not then I’d say there is an element of placebo effect in play that you think it’s nice because of the perception of price and where it came from (dealer vs ASDA).

BDEE · 20 Jan 2018 at 01:25

With this particular wine, yes I would tell and would know if it had been swapped. It is the only one I buy at that sort of cost and it is also very distinctive. At £110 I wouldn't actually say it was *that* expensive and is quite possibly a lot nicer than some £500 bottles. It is just a wine I happen to like.

Could I pick out the correct order of a £5, £10, £50, £100, £200, £500 bottle.... I doubt it, probably with the exception of the cheapest. But I don't think that makes them a con. But then I buy things I like, not things based on status. For example, I prefer Aldi chunky Beef and Veg soup over the Heinz version because it tastes nicer.

dowie · 20 Jan 2018 at 01:25

Angilion said:
There have been blind taste tests of wine in which the tasters apparently had such refined palates that they could detect differences between the same wine that had had different words spoken near it. Merely hearing that it was different wine was enough to change the wine, apparently. Who knew wine was so responsive to speech?

indeed, lots of it is just marketing

I'd say that it isn't as much of a con as cables. With cables, there's no difference at all across the entire range of pricing (assuming it's a digital signal). If it works, it works equally well. That's not true of wine. I doubt if anyone could reliably tell the difference with very expensive wine, though. £3 and £30, yes. £30 and £300, no. But hey, I'm a peasant. Maybe I'm wrong.

I'd suspect you're right tbh... perhaps there are some tasters who can and can do so when blinded, hopefully they'd be quite happy to test it. I'm not a massive wine fan but at a previous job the guy who ran our consultancy division took us on an evening out at a wine place where he was a bit of a regular - they had a little presentation about different wines and things to look for when tasting them then had us do some blind tasting etc.. and try to guess the wines etc.. I mean obviously the ones selected were rather different to each other and it wasn't some controlled double blind trial etc.. just a bit of fun but I was pleased they were open to the idea of blinding themselves when tasting. Whereas hi fi enthusiasts will come out with all sorts of dubious nonsense to object to blind testing.

Raymond Lin · 20 Jan 2018 at 01:58

BDEE said:
With this particular wine, yes I would tell and would know if it had been swapped. It is the only one I buy at that sort of cost and it is also very distinctive. At £110 I wouldn't actually say it was *that* expensive and is quite possibly a lot nicer than some £500 bottles. It is just a wine I happen to like.

Could I pick out the correct order of a £5, £10, £50, £100, £200, £500 bottle.... I doubt it, probably with the exception of the cheapest. But I don't think that makes them a con. But then I buy things I like, not things based on status. For example, I prefer Aldi chunky Beef and Veg soup over the Heinz version because it tastes nicer.

I guess I should have worded the question better.

I don't dispute that you like what you like, and this particular bottle must have a distinct flavour and character which you can pick out in a line up out of a dozen wine. That is not the question. The question is with a totally new selection of wine in different prices, are you able to tell them apart in a blind test.

I personally don't drink wine, I drink coffee and with coffee it has the same thing. You have your supermarket blends and you have your single estate coffee. Price wise it is nowhere as extreme as wine but there is a range.

I went through them all, and what I find is that 99% of them are drinkable, and although there are the 10% that i love, it comes to a point where if i am drinking it daily, I don't want to be paying 3x as much for coffee when the next thing that is close can be had for less. 3x as much is not a lot for 1 cup but over the course of the year it adds up to a large amount. Enough to get a few bottles of your £110 wine!