Hacker News Reader

Comment by WheelsAtLarge | Hacker News Reader

A while back I spoke to a winemaker who told me that her job was to make a wine that would match any of the price winning wines for less than $40 a bottle. They would buy the wines that won, analyze and match the flavor profile anyway they had to. She would blend wines from different areas and come up with the best flavor she could.

Wine making is not what it used to be. At one time the difference between good wine and great wine was huge. Now with automation and know how it's possible to have great tasting wine be inexpensive.

There's also the situation where winemakers sell their excess wine to bottlers so it's very possible that a great wine is sold cheaply simply because the wine maker needs to sell the excess inventory.

This situation where a very cheap wine wins a contest is not surprising. The big difference is that the flavor of a more expensive wine is more consistent than one you buy very cheaply.

View on HN

I wonder if there is a word for this kind of trickle-down knowledge. I see it in games (big in Dota, even baddies are pretty good now), and suspect the same thing has happened in software.

Not to say there aren't differentiators between good and bad still, but the floor has risen so high compared to what it once was.

A uniquely American take. Great wine for cheap has always existed in Europe. Before much of it started being exported to the USA, even more so.

This is what I was thinking, too. I can usually tell between cheap "jammy" wines from the US, which I don't like, versus the cheap Cotes du Rhone I buy, which tastes delicious.

The big difference is that the flavor of a more expensive wine is more consistent than one you buy very cheaply.

Not really. Cheap wines are made in laboratory like conditions by experts in food chemistry, with grapes sourced and blended from a wide area and 'enhanced' with all kinds of chemicals and additives to consistency and stability. They also use plastic corks or screw corks and aren't really aged, which removes another potential source on inconsistency. More expensive wines are often made with grapes from a single vineyard and made using traditional methods and with minimal additives. This means that the resulting wine is much more susceptible to fluctuations in things like local weather conditions and other 'random' events. In fact one of the 'fun' aspects of wine is tasting how wines from the same grapes, vineyard and wine maker made 1 year apart can end up tasting really different.

You're correct, though I'd push back a bit on "all kinds of chemicals and additives".

They do use them: sulfites for preservation, fining agents for clarity, yeast energizers, acids and bases. But the way you phrase it, it sounds like they're making pop-tarts or chewing gum. A lot of these additives are used even by fine winemakers. Even French winemakers, who have a whole host of rules they have to follow.

Still, I'm picking on your phraseology, but not disagreeing with your point. Modern winemaking is all about control, which produces consistently good but rarely great wines. More expensive wines are more expensive in part because they risk failure -- though few take enough risks to produce a truly undrinkable wine these days.

There's nothing wrong with those "good" wines, though I'm puzzled about the cheap supermarket wine winning a contest. Cheap supermarket wines are entirely drinkable but don't even try to have the qualities that win any genuine prizes. It doesn't take a sommelier to notice that; it tastes like every other wine. Contests usually reward what stands out.

Perhaps some fine winemaker sold off surplus stock. It happens; they have a good year and don't want to dilute the value of their prize brand.

These stories keep coming up about how wine judges are easily duped, and indeed, there is plenty of chicanery surrounding wine ratings. There is a lot of snobbery, and a lot of envy around that snobbery. But there's no reason to pay a lot for a wine unless you've gotten bored with ordinary table wine.

This is all possibly but it works to a limited extent; there are taste descriptors of aged wines, for example, that are impossible to imitate cheaply.

All winemakers are capable of designing wines to a broad set of possible tastes with remarkably latitude, but money gets you way more options.

Yea, I feel like that's true of spirits as well. It's easier to get an acceptable Scotch or Rum than it used to be, but at some point, the cost to age something for 5, let alone 10 or 20 years just isn't something you can shortcut, and it produces different flavors. Not to say that a 10 year aged spirit is better than a younger one, but if you do like that flavor, then there's not much else you can do to get it.

I always wonder if/why pressure aging hasn't become more common

Seems pretty solvable to replace t through P or A in a barrel-aged liquor

I believe it's been tried some, but it both doesn't produce quite the same output in important ways, and it's expensive enough to do that just having a larger building and racking the barrels for longer isn't that much more expensive.

For most spirits, a lot of long-age stuff is about the extraction of wood flavors from the barrel it's in, which I'm not sure anyone's found a great way to do with pressure.

I know there's some difference in temperature though - higher temp aging, either just in a warmer area, or more normally with rum, creates very different aging conditions than normal Bourbon/Scotch/Cognac aging that's traditionally made in more temperate climates. The complaint about a lot of southern US bourbon is that it ends up uncomfortably over-oaked for its age.

Buffalo Trace has an Experimental Collection where they try to isolate one variable in the aging process (temp, wood, mash bill, rickhouse location, etc.). It's interesting if you can get access to a flight of them, but they're pretty rare and expensive.

Quite a few people have tried. Generally the reviews are terrible. The barrel aging process is more complicated than most people think. Lost Spirits (now in Vegas, formerly in LA, Salinas, and Barcelona before that) makes some pretty drinkable stuff that I like, but I'm never going to argue with someone who hates it, because it's noticeably different. There's also some marketing gimmicks like Blackened, where they claim to play Metallica at the barrels to vibrate them or something. This probably doesn't help the reputation of the segment much.

The aging process is somewhat accelerated by temperature, but it's not a simple relationship. This is one of the stated reasons that whiskey made in hot climates (e.g. Amrut in India, Kavalan in Taiwan) tend to be aged less.

Why is it so bad in OH, USA then? Absolute rubbish, they can’t or won’t come close to good. It’s cheap wine that can’t be paired with anything. Objectively , what are the steps they need to take to blindly pass for good?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com