Is wine tasting (quality) BS?

[robnplunder]

Thankfully my wife doesn't seem to notice the difference. It makes for a cheap date!

You lucky, you. My wife shops without looking at price tag and she will always end up picking the most expensive item. She says it is class (but why she ended up with me is a mystery, or mistake). Just last week, we both had a winery gift certificates for $50 each. I picked 5 wines worth $10s each. She picks 2 wines worth $30 each. Back to blind testing ....

 

[MichaelB]

You lucky, you. My wife shops without looking at price tag and she will always end up picking the most expensive item. She says it is class (but why she ended up with me is a mystery, or mistake). Just last week, we both had a winery gift certificates for $50 each. I picked 5 wines worth $10s each. She picks 2 wines worth $30 each. Back to blind testing ....

If she got two $30 bottles with one $50 gift card I'd say she did pretty well.

 

[audreyh1]

Tastes seem to change over time as well...but the pleasure is in the journey & social aspect. We stay in B&Bs with friends & get to chat with the winery owner/staff & that is a joy in & of itself. We have done these trips for over 10 years to the WA wine country & over time we have gravitated to spending more time in Walla Walla then in Yakima area, even though the prices are lower in Yakima. Go figure.

Yeah - Walla Walla wineries can get a bit pricey! We like Dunham Cellars and Zerba Cellars (which is just across the OR state line from Walla Walla). Among the more expensive wineries we have visited. We did visit the L'Ecole 41 tasting room, some lovely wines but $$$$.

We do most of our shopping in the Prosser area.

 

[Janet H]

IF you like wine to begin with, what do you think?

Wine tasting is bullshit. Here's why.



I'd like to believe there are just some people born with a far more acute sense of taste than the rest of us (hopefully all good sommeliers and chefs) and it's not something most of us can develop no matter how hard we try. Unfortunately (fortunately?) we don't have acute taste sense though we enjoy reasonably priced wines.

I think you can learn to identify flavors with some practice. In this instance more practice is likely to be fun so going at it in an organised fashion might get a good result.

I live in a wine growing area and almost every week get together with the same group of folks for a casual meal. A few years ago we started doing a blind tasting before dinner using whatever bottles were brought to share. We set up a simple procedure and printed out a stack of rating cards. After the tasting (and over dinner) we compare our various findings. We've gotten more accurate over time and the results are often interesting and sometimes hilarious. Here's the doofus rating system we use (warts and all):

 

[Midpack]

Your doofus system makes sense to me. Much more than most of this (sorry, I don't think most people can begin to "sense" all this):

 

[Midpack]

A supertaster is a person who experiences the sense of taste with far greater intensity than average. Some 35% of women and 15% of men are supertasters. Supertasters are more likely to be of Asian, African, and South American descent. The cause of this heightened response is unknown, although it is thought to be related to the presence of the TAS2R38 gene, the ability to taste PROP and PTC, and at least in part, due to an increased number of fungiform papillae

Sadly (I think?), DW & I are not a supertasters...

 

[braumeister]

in a blind tasting, people could not even distinguish whites from reds

I have a friend who is a sake distributor, so I have been able to taste some incredibly expensive examples. Really good sake is an amazing beverage, but one of those situations where you get what you pay for. The average sake at the average Japanese restaurant is barely drinkable at best, and then they have the gall to serve it warm! Good sake is always served at cool temperatures.

Anyway, my friend told me that when sake judges evaluate samples, they are served in black cups in a dimly lit room. That completely eliminates any bias related to the color of the beverage, which can be substantial.

On a related note, I once knew a bartender who had a little trick he liked to pull. Whenever he heard a customer comment that she (it was almost always a woman) didn't like dark beers, he would get her to try a flight of beer samples while blindfolded. About three times out of four, her favorite out of the group would be a stout. When the blindfold came off, the reaction was priceless!

 

[robnplunder]

I have a friend who is a sake distributor, so I have been able to taste some incredibly expensive examples. Really good sake is an amazing beverage, but one of those situations where you get what you pay for. The average sake at the average Japanese restaurant is barely drinkable at best, and then they have the gall to serve it warm! Good sake is always served at cool temperatures.

You can apply this entire thread to sake tasting. I love warm cheap sake but have tasted very good $$$$ ones that blew my socks off.

 

[Buddy Love]

Watch the movie Somm Documentry on Netflix. You will understand that some people have amazing abilities of taste and recall...just like many many people on this site have incredible knowledge on investment and savings

 

[Notmuchlonger]

You can apply this entire thread to sake tasting. I love warm cheap sake but have tasted very good $$$$ ones that blew my socks off.

Yeah I got turned on to the pricey stuff on accident. A nice sushi place in London screwed up our reservation. Out came the good stuff. I couldn't believe how much better it was than the usual stuff I have had. Hmm then again maybe free booze just tastes better.

 

[HFWR]

Hmm then again maybe free booze just tastes better.

That^^^

Granted I'm a cheap Bastard, but neither price nor "rating" seems to correlate with "good", at least in my limited experience.

 

[NW-Bound]

I am just happy that my peasant taste can be easily pleased with wine less than $10. That saves me money to spend on expensive spirits, and as I do not drink that often, it results in a net gain.

 

[MBAustin]

This is a fun blog: CostcoWineBlog.com - Reviews of wines found at Costco

Thanks for the blog link Audrey - very interesting, although most of the wines reviewed I have never seen in our local Costco.

I did a Costco run this week and they had a great selection of highly rated red wines under $15. We tried one of them already and it was excellent, hope the rest are as well.

My general price point is $10-12 (up from $9-10 since the market did so well last year ). Rarely spend more than $20. But definitely can tell differences among good and not-so-good bottles at the same price point.

 

[robnplunder]

I did a Costco run this week and they had a great selection of highly rated red wines under $15. We tried one of them already and it was excellent, hope the rest are as well.

Hard to go bad with Costco wines. They do a good job at pricing right, and selecting decent wines. Kirkland labels are even better value. Early in the year, we sample some bottles and buy what bubbles up to the top throughout the year.

 

[F4mandolin]

My wife likes wine....I don't. Her favs lately are Barefoot Pinot Grigio (even I don't mind this one) and we are having trouble finding the red she likes...Black Swan Cabernet Sauvignon.....if either costs more than $5 it likely costs too much. Only dry white wine....when we eat at my friends place they keep giving her sweet wines. I end up being the equivalent of dumping it in the plant.....when they aren't looking I down it.....I just don't really care. I can kind of relate this whole topic to my college days (late 70's). Tequila was popular. I was cheap (college student...duh) so bought the cheapest.....tasted like crap. At some point I bought Two Fingers.....ahhh better.....but still tasted like crap. Then splurged at some point and bought a better tequila.....I could really tell the difference......my eyes didn't spin around and my throat didn't burn so bad....just a better quality of crap.....but I could tell the difference. Eventually I found that it went down a whole lot better if you didn't breath after taking a shot......breathing really made things worse. After 10-15 seconds or so....breath, reduced the nasty bite quite a bit. Hmmm....maybe I need a Corona...with a little touch of Roses lime juice in it....

 

[explanade]

Costco is a huge buyer in the wine business so they wield a lot of influence:

The Buyer Behind Costco's Billion Dollar Wine Business - CNBC

 

[robnplunder]

5 annoying wine words ... my favorite (?) is at #5.

Annoying Wine Words

 

[audreyh1]

Hard to go bad with Costco wines. They do a good job at pricing right, and selecting decent wines. Kirkland labels are even better value. Early in the year, we sample some bottles and buy what bubbles up to the top throughout the year.

Also - being based in Seattle, they tend to carry more NW wines than I get anywhere else in my area. I really appreciate that.

 

[explanade]

Costco buys a lot of imported wines too.

And the stores in CA have a lot of CA wines.

 

[RunningBum]

I rarely drink wine so I can't specifically talk to wine tasting. A friend of mine owned a wine store and said that if I wanted to buy wine to have on hand for friends that he could always suggest some good $6-10 bottles.

My son and I went on the KY Bourbon Trail this fall. We tasted something like 18 different bourbons over a couple of days and shared notesm, and found we had similar tastes. Sometimes high priced single batched bourbons were best, but some of the higher rye content ones were not as good to us. A month later we had our own tasting at home, with 15 different bourbons. It was blind for me, and he did his best to forget what he poured where. The results weren't that far off of those on our trip. For example, we didn't like Woodford Reserve, a fine bourbon, either time. And neither of us cared for the cheapest one we tried, Jim Beam. Kentucky Spirit, another fine one, ranked among the top 2 or 3 both times. We also tried to guess which was which, and got a couple right, but for many of them it was only the second time we'd tried them. People have different tastes. Just because I don't like Woodford doesn't mean others won't or shouldn't.

 

[REWahoo]

I saw this and realized it was a shoe-in for this thread...

How to open a bottle of wine - without a corkscrew - YouTube

 

[robnplunder]

I saw this and realized it was a shoe-in for this thread...

LOL. Cheers, mate.

 

[F4mandolin]

I first saw the "alternate" wine opening trick floating in a raft down the Yakima river between Ellensburg and Yakima.....around 1978.

 

[F4mandolin]

Since Walla Walla came up a few times.....thought I would give it a thumbs up for a decent place to live as well. Plenty of sun and nice summers. Winters can be coldish.....but average a good 5 degree warmer than the Spokane area most of the time. Bit of wind however. It was one of the places I was considering before deciding on the Spokane area.

 

[rockymountainhigh]

I have no trouble with opening wine since mine usually comes is a box.
Since I am a food migrainer I don't drink a lot of wine and neither does DW, the box keeps the oxygen away from the wine and so it keeps longer. Box wines have come a long way and are quite good.