The Weird World of Expensive Wine (2016) | Hacker News Reader

The Weird World of Expensive Wine (2016)

fivethirtyeight.com

62 pointsTomte69 comments

If you're interested in this, watch the Netflix documentary "Sour Grapes" about wine counterfeiting - millions and millions of dollars per year and most victims just "don't want to know". Sometimes the counterfeiters produce and sell wines for 10s of thousands of dollars - and the buyey later finds the vineyard never even made that kind of wine. William Koch is profiled in the film, he alone spent millions on counterfeit wine and hired a team of former CIA operatives to try and track some of it down. Fascinating stuff.

The book Billionaire's Vinegar is a eye opener too.

What I found funny is William Koch spent millions because he got his ego bruised.

The book also describes what might happen to some if you become a wine snob, and worse; what you might evolve into if you make a lot of money in life.

The book is very well written. I'm not a big reader, and I finished it in a few hours.

In college, I worked in a big wine store. The owner really didn't care about the business. He would come in sometimes under a bottle, or two, and after witnessing our horrid sales skills technique, should tell at us, "Open a bottle, and taste it. Then sell the crap!". I still remember that Shark's tooth, framed in gold, that would bounce off his chest while he was yelling.

The sliding door would close, I would watch him leave, and I could go back to my minimum wage clerk mentality. Meaning I would try to get my studies done. Besides dusting, there wasen't much work to do. This was in the ninties, and grocery stores, drug stores, etc. were taking away his business. He really didn't care, he owned a few apartment complexes that he made a fortune off of. He just wanted to ride out the lease.

One night, after the Manager, gave us the same speech about getting to know the wine, and sell it--a meek accountant from the back walked out and told us, "Boys--get ready!"

He then walked around the store picking bottles off the shelf, even the wine in the glass cases. He picked at least 50 bottles--all over $30. He was really miffed about someting.

We had a taste test that night. I couldn't tell the difference between the $70 bottles, and the $30 bottles. I was not a wine drinker though. The Accountant called us Beer Boys. He was right. I then asked him to do a blind taste test. He said, Go ahead--try to stump me!"

I set up twenty red cups with the price written on the bottom of the cup.

He ended up liking the less expensive wines. When I told him, he said, 'I've had a bad day---I can usually tell the difference', or something like that.

He then realized he just opened at least 2 grand worth of wine. He had a look of constipation on his face. He then asked us to pour all the wine down the drain in the bathroom. He said, "Quick--the Security guys might pop in?"

We poured all that expensive wine down the drain. To this day; I feel weird about the waste.

From end-to-end, I think the whole pipeline is a waste of human talent. I'm not ashamed to say, I'd be happy to hear about more people getting fleeced over bullshit like this.

Of all the things they expend time and effort worrying about: nuanced preferences for getting drunk.

Let it all burn, I say.

Moreso than adtech?

More so than anti-virus?

Why answer a question with a question?

If you're drinking expensive alcohol just to get drunk, you're drinking wrong.

Hell, if you're drinking alcohol just to get drunk, you have a problem. (And that problem is called alcoholism.)

I spend hundreds of dollars a month on bottles of spirits and liqueurs to make cocktails at home, not because I'm trying to get drunk but because a good cocktail is like a good meal: It contains flavours and textures which are interesting and exciting, that I can share with the people around me.

Wine and beer are similar, in that a good wine or beer paired with a good meal can make both taste better, and be another element in the experience I'm sharing with the people I'm with.

I think that very quickly there's an upper limit to the price-to-palate ratio on a bottle of wine, but there's also studies done that show that people straight up enjoy drinking wine that they've spent more money on. If that's how you enjoy yourself, and that's how you want to spend your money, more power to you.

If you don't enjoy the experience of drinking, or you don't enjoy the taste, or you have any other objection to it, that's fine, but you should recognise that responsible drinking (expensive taste or not) is not a moral failure.

Collecting wine can be come quite an addiction. My wife and I both love wine and living in NorCal we have easy access to tons of great producers. We would taste a wine, like it and say, well lets get a few bottles. That turned into a case, then a few cases. Right now we have around ~3000 bottles and are in the process of building a cellar for them. The cellar will hold 4106 bottles. It is nothing fancy, just a room above the garage that has been well insulated (spray foam) and as a dedicated AC unit. The unit is pretty cool as it has a probe you put in a wine bottle full of water and it uses that to set the temperature.

We have in the last few years had the opportunity to taste and acquire some older wines from France from the 1960s. It is a completely different taste profile then anything from CA. Then need to open and sit for awhile (a few took 6 hours to really open up).

As far as cost go I think the most expense bottle I buy is around $200 (750ML). I just have never been able to justify the cost vs taste difference. Heck, one of my favorite bottles was $6 from Trader Joe's (a Chilean that they do not sell anymore).

If you live in the Bay Area I and want to try some very interesting wines that are not stupidly priced there are some great producers in the Santa Cruz Mountains area. Try one call Storrs or Silver Mountain.

For Napa - Corison or William Cole on the high end. Both can be aged for years. We had an opportunity to taste 25 years worth of Corison at a dinner and it was amazing to see how the years changed the wine.

I tried Screaming Eagle at a friends. Amazing wine, but not that that price point. But to each their own.

At the end the best wine is the one you like to drink, preferability with friends and family over a good meal.

I've met more than a few wine fans who can afford to drink 300 dollar bottles of wine, that will be as excited about a particular 12 dollar bottle as you'd expect them to be over something in the 300 dollar range.

Right it is the taste and the experience. Part the reason we collect wine is to just have lots of stuff to drink over time and see how it is.

Drink what you enjoy!

I have a ton of wine but still love going to Trader Joe's and buying every random bottle I have never tried and seeing how it is. Thats the fun part.

Heartily agree!

In California alone, there are over 4,000 wineries [1]. It's hard to buy genuinely bad wine here.

If you can spend ~$8/bottle and take the opportunity to sample stock from stores like TJ's, you can find delicious wines with excellent (enjoyment/$) values.

[1] https://www.wineinstitute.org/resources/statistics/article12...

Sometime you like to waste a little money and sometimes you like to waste A LOT of money, to each his own, thats the fun part!

Which Chilean wine was it?

I think it was Santa Ema, but it has been years.

Can I come to one of your parties?

[1] But don't you know by now that everything you are saying is BS? No one can tell the difference, there is no "opening up" it is all in your head, your 1960s bottle or your $6, its not just "personal taste" there is no taste difference, it is proven over and over again.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-ta...

So you are telling me that the taste of wine does not change over time as it is exposed to oxygen? Hum, I guess I should call all my chemistry professors and tell them what shame all that chemistry is.

You can find studies that say anything. I would agree that a large number of people including experts can get it wrong, on the other hand a spectrum anazlizer will prove that the make up of a wine changes as it is exposed to air and those changes is something your taste and nose can dectect.

Also I have sat a completley blind tastings and watch as some where able to ID the grape (or mix) and the region it was from.

I suggest you try it for yourself. Go buy Pinot Noir from let's say Burgundy France, CA Santa Cruz and Washington State. 2 different bottles from each area. Then take one set and taste taking care to note how they are different. Then have someone open the 2nd set from the same region and pour a taste of each. You should easily be able to pick which wine was from which region based on what you learned from the first tasting. This is no different then anything else that picks up the characteristics of the input. Grass fed beef vs corn fed for example.

I promise you if you open a 62 1st growth and let us sit for an hour and then open the same bottle and pour a glass from each I will be able to tell you which is which. Heck the color of the wine even changes a bit as it is oxidized.

I just watched Red Obsession. The documentary gives you some perspective about the recent price hike of the wines of Bordeaux, the Chinese and the expensive wine markets.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2419284/

I was at a business dinner in China once. This guy ordered a very old and $$$ wine and then mixed it with Coke in his glass. I wanted to cry.

The last of my pre-scarcity pappy van winkle was drank with diet coke by my ex. It was a sad day.

I can understand why she is the ex! That is sad.

A level of eccentricity and quirkiness that inhabit almost every high end collecting industry, I would think.

I see similar traits in the top end of guitar and amp collectors that I sometimes associate with. People spending as much as their house is worth on gear that can give them a similar tone to a scratchy 60's recording...

Somewhere at the very peak of the dollar graph of diminishing returns, a level of mysticism, voodoo and ethereal subjective qualification tends to creep in.

It's interesting that the conclusion serves the opposite purpose of what one expects from a conclusion. Usually the conclusion serves to put the preceding argument or analysis in context, but in this case the conclusion does the opposite by invalidating the subject of the analysis.

Oh cool, finally an article related to what I've spent the last ten years working on as a side project.

The way wine and spirits are regulated in the United States can make it very hard to find any specific bottle that one might be interested in.

So I've created a search engine for wine and spirits. It's called 1000 Corks, https://1000corks.com

It's useful if you read about a bottle of wine that you want to try, or try a wine in a restaurant and then want to order a few bottles to drink at home.

The backend is Python, Postgres, and Redis.

For anyone interested in the intricacies of fine wine trading I would suggest the documentary "Red Obsession". It interviews a lot of Bordeaux producers and shows how the economic explosion of China led prices to skyrocket.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2419284/

BTW, one thing that always troubles me. What if you start collecting wines but you lack the infrastructure for storing them? Can you rent storage at a cellar? If someone could build a subscription service for that I'd certainly pay for it.

Yes this is a thing. E.g., http://vintagewinewarehouse.com/

These guys make wine molecule by molecule.

Could shift everything.... utilizes 100 times less water.

http://avawinery.com

Hmm, I wonder if they're doing anything to limit or prevent the use of molecules with an inorganic chirality bias (judging by New Scientist's comments on the smell, I imagine not enough).

I was really looking forward to a true 538 treatment of wine pricing data, but this is cursory and superficial at best. It would be fun to see how the first growths compare regarding appreciation and risk, or how they compare to the top grand crus from Burgundy (DRC, Leflaive, etc.), or whether Pommard is inflated relative to other premier cru in anticipation of promotion to grand cru.

Sadly doesn't seem to be at https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/data

Mumble something liquid assets exchange values.

How much of this stuff sits in duty-free vault storage?

Ethanol and... juice.

An Hermès bag is a tiny slice of dead cow with some cheap metal and string to hold it together. Yet the bags go for thousands of dollars.

Any luxury product can be reduced to absurdity this way, but it's not very useful in understanding the culture that produces and values them.

Well, value is only what someone will pay for it. Usually it goes hand in hand with scarcity but often propped up by brand (eg if you didn't know it was a Hermes bag, could it demand the same value?)

Every time people make fun of luxury products I wonder what cars they're driving: 20 year old clunkers? What shirts they're wearing: $5 for a 10 pack off Ali Express? Burlap sacks? Are they typing on $5 cheap unbranded keyboards? Of course not.

Hell, their computers probably cost twice what most people would be willing to pay, even though 90% of the time, they're doing little more than surfing the web and checking emails. But since it's something they're interested in, luxury is justified.

usually you spend a lot more in what you are highly involved in. Your comment is spot on.

Are there any good, cheap laboratory wines that can pass blind taste tests?

Judging from the Wikipedia article on blind wine taste tests [1], I'm not sure they're all that reliable.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_wine_tasting

Numerous double-blind studied have shown experts can't tell the difference between common table wine and expensive bottles.[0][1] The whole thing is absurd.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgment_of_Paris_(wine)

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-econ...

I don't think those links support your claim. The Judgment of Paris was between high-end California and Bordeaux wines. The received wisdom of the time was that California Bordeaux-style wines (or, more generally, anything from the New World) were inferior to true Bordeaux wines. The Judgment of Paris showed that wasn't true. But they certainly didn't use California table wine.

And the study you link to just seems to show that judges don't rank wines in competition very consistently. I don't think that table wines are often entered into these sorts of competitions. I'm fairly confident that someone with a good palette could distinguish between a high-end Bordeaux and Two-Buck Chuck.

Do you have any science to prove your hunch? I've been following this for a while and nothing I've ever read showed that judges can distinguish two buck chuck from high end wine.

Uneducated drinkers wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Once you've tried enough wines, the difference is obvious and nobody debates it anymore. If you drink beer, it's not much different than mistaking Coors Light for your favorite microbrewed Stout.

I'm neither a big wine or beer drinker, but I must say it's way easier to tell a microbrew from a coors light than it is to discern a $10 cabernet from a $1000 cabernet.

That is certainly true. One of my professors in grad school was really into wine and would periodically host a wine class for the grad students. According to him there is not much difference between a $1000 bottle of wine and a good bottle of ~$30 wine. The main difference is in consistency. A $30 wine could be okay, excellent, or bad. But if you buy a $1000 bottle of wine, you know that it will be excellent.

...unless it's been kept poorly, in which case it will be vinegar.

I used to live in Singapore, which is full of rich people who collect wine and wine shops that cater to them, completely with regulated-humidity cellars etc. Problem is, Singapore is in the tropics, meaning wine often sits around baking in containers for weeks or months on its way to the shop...

Yep. Although given the current trends, we'll soon be able to say the same thing about a $3 Belgian-style and a $30 Belgian-style.

There are dozens of styles of Belgian ale, and differences between them are obvious. There isn't much difference in price. It ranges from https://www.uvinum.co.uk/beer/leffe-brune (£1.22/33cl) to https://www.uvinum.co.uk/beer/westvleteren-12 (£10.76/33cl), the reason for the high cost of Westvlereten being low volume production. https://www.uvinum.co.uk/beer/st-bernardus-abt-12 is very similar and sells for only £1.84/33cl.

Well, part of the reason is that your local microbrew (unless it's a light pilsner which few are) is probably a very different style from the Coors Light. Compare Coors Light to a low-alcohol non-hoppy craft lager and telling them apart will be a lot harder than distinguishing it from a hoppy IPA.

Again, I would love to see your science. This is the whole point - the expensive wine thing is simply not about taste. Take a $15 chianti and a $150 chianti, blindfold yourself, have someone else pour them, and try and tell which one is more expensive. It will be a 50/50

Agreed. After $30-50 dollars, you're paying for something other than "higher quality" when you pay more. Collectibility, brand, etc...but for $30/bottle a winery can afford to sort every grape by hand, etc.

50/50 on knowing which is which or which one you like?

My wife without fail in blind tasting can tell you which one is which from an age perspective.

Telling the difference between a $10 wine and a $50 wine is not that hard. Getting above $50 it becomes more about how it ages and the complexity of the taste from age. In general a $10 wine will not age well as it is made to drink as soon as it is bottled. If you are paying more it is because the wine will age well.

I'd be interested to see any study you have that shows judges confusing two buck chuck with high-end stuff. I'm guessing any such judges are just random people off the street... which doesn't say much about whether or not someone with experience can tell the difference, and thus doesn't say much about whether there is a difference.

Rather than being confused with them, 2 buck chuck beat expensive wines at the 2007 California State Fair Commercial Wine Competition: http://abcnews.go.com/WN/story?id=3372578

Wow.

Lol, can confirm. I know this won't appeal to our lovable cadre of HN contrarians, but there is a major difference between most high-end bottles and anything you can get for $8 and under. That's not to say that those $40-and-up bottles are always worth the price...or that you'll even like it as much as everyone else paying that price! But the whole thing is not a complete farce. Scarcity, collectibility, buying as investments, and mostly the novelty factor of something you've never tried are what drive prices on individual bottles into the ludicrous range.

> Scarcity, collectibility, buying as investments, and mostly the novelty factor of something you've never tried

None of those are "what it tastes like".

Yes they are. Scarcity - it is hard to find something that tastes like it. Novelty - it tastes like something you've never tasted before.

The most expensive drink I've bought by volume was a '72 to '74 aged sake, and that was most certainly for it scarcity: and because nothing else tastes like it.

That quote was about the difference between a $40 bottle and a $ludicrous bottle. Across the $8 - $40 range, there's definitely a meaningful difference in what it tastes like.

There's a lot of absurdity. I've also (rarely) done premium tastings in Napa and Sonoma and really appreciated the experience. I've then also left thinking I get a lot more total enjoyment out of the $80 bottle of whiskey than the $80 bottle of wine. (Both of which I realize don't really qualify as high-end.)

Those absolutely qualify as high end. If anyone tells you differently, reach for your wallet because you're being had. The difference between a $10 bottle of wine and a (good) $50 bottle of wine is huge. Beyond that I agree, it all seems like a farce.

Oh I would never pay more than that--or really more like $50-60 myself. And those very rarely.

Agreed. My partner is a Wine Educator and this is one of her favorite rants. Consider the costs of getting wine onto a store shelf:

- Glass bottle

- Bottling & Labelling

- Transport

- Cork/closure

- Taxes (29% here in Aus)

- Retail Markup - 25-50%

- Promotions, payment processing, business overhead, etc.

An eight dollar bottle of wine does not leave a lot of money for grape growing, harvest, wine making, aging etc, all the good stuff that makes wine tasty. Probably under one dollar.

Some grape varieties cost a lot more than others, e.g. Pinot Noir is expensive to grow and harvest because it has thin skins and so is easily damaged. However, any recent vintage bottle that retails for more than $100 is about meeting a market price point, not production costs.

You can even dye white wine red and even professional tasters will be fooled[1].

1: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-ta...

Yes, but that's a statement on the distinction between (certain types of) red and white wines, not on the distinction between cheap and (worthwhile) expensive wines.

It's sort of like saying that because you can install Windows on a Mac, there's no difference between an Inspiron and a MacBook Pro.

Students, not professional tasters. "The wine comparison test was carried out by 54 undergraduates from the Faculty of Oenology of the University of Bordeaux."

http://www.daysyn.com/Morrot.pdf

Wine students. I'd expect them to know a lot more about wine than most people.

The wine's colour is part of the experience of drinking wine and affects the perceived flavour. They probably wouldn't have been fooled so easily if they were blindfolded.

Knowing a wine's price also affect its perceived flavour: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/baba-shiv-how-wines-pr...

and any living form is just carbon, nitrogen and oxygen and a spray of metals. So your point is ?

Look up Frank Lin Distillers sometime.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com