Comment by Udo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Udo | Hacker News Reader

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I can tell good wine from bad, I just can't tell the expensive from the inexpensive.

The expectations game is played by pretty much every single product on the market, but it's only working if the product image is something you choose to care about. Most people do choose to care about it simply because it serves as a reasonable filter and this combined with social proof can reduce the problem of choice with minimum effort. People choose a certain "class" they want to represent and they just go along with whatever is on the menu for it.

But it's also important to notice that, while we all might be doing it to varying degrees, this does not necessarily apply to everything you do. If you can live with the stigma of forceful association to these classes, you can make decisions purely on the personal merits of a product, though that doesn't mean it's always worth the effort.

I live in one of the wine-themed states of Germany, close to France. A significant amount of our agriculture is wine, mostly from small family-based winemakers (oh the cliché). Everybody drinks a lot of wine, and there is an insane amount of variants to choose from. I know what I like when I taste it, but I know this applies to my personal taste only. Like the article says, it's not really possible to tell how expensive a wine is by tasting it. But that doesn't mean it all tastes the same. Wines are hugely diverse and everyone would be well-advised to just decide based on personal preference. However, high-profile wines are often designed to offend the least number of people, so they're an easy choice to serve when you're hosting a dinner - as a common denominator they do have a purpose.

I think one of the points of the article is that the perceived 'goodness' of the wine comes from whether the wine is expensive or not. I don't remember where I read this, but packaging of a food product apparently has a non-trivial impact on the perceived taste.

I asked a sommelier in Paris once about what makes a good wine. She told me "A good wine is one whose taste you like".

>>A good wine is one whose taste you like".

Haha, indeed. I studied abroad in Italy, and one of my classes was a history and culture of food class, which included a day of wine tasting. I remember the "culture" part of that lesson was that Americans like their crazy expensive wine, simply because it is expensive, and fancy. Whereas Italy it is more generic, red or white, sweet or dry. Some go with red meat, others with fish. You go to the risterante, and pretty much get red or white "table wine", no expensive wine list or anything of the sort. The culture was not expensive fancy wine, just a good taste to compliment the flavors in your meal.

Now, I've put down a good bit of wine in my time, but nothing quite hits the sport for me like an $8 bottle of Chianti. I can tell a difference in brands too, and have my favorites, but the price per bottle for a great wine never seems to need to go above $10.

Sweet or dry, maybe, but red and white taste the same in blind tests. (Not that there is anything wrong with wanting a color coordinated meal.)

I wouldn't say they taste the same - there's an overlap area with some where there would be confusion. But there will be whites that are simply not likely to be confused with reds, and vice versa.

Though if you handed a white wine from that overlap area and colored it to look like a red. I'm pretty sure all but the experienced blind tasters would just accept it as being a light red.

I am studying Enology at the moment, and have no doubt that I could be confused with the right wine. My pallet just isn't good enough. But having done enough bind tastings in the past I really feel like some wine types really do stand out enough to be recognized.

Quite so. I had typed up as many or more words in a similar vein before abandoning them.

Wine is a subjective taste, just like all foods. There is no objective ranking of it. Don't worry about prestige or class or appearance of sophistication, find out what you enjoy and ignore all the baggage. I can't guarantee that I can reliably tell you anything about a wine just from tasting it, partly because I just don't care that much, but I can reliably tell you which wines I enjoy more than others.

"Most people do choose to care about it simply because it serves as a reasonable filter and this combined with social proof can reduce the problem of choice with minimum effort."

This reminds me of the most obnoxious question I have been asked by a salesman (in this case at a high-end audio shop): "how much are you looking to spend?"

This question was so backwards to me that I didn't know how to respond. To me, each product is a cost/benefit value proposition. How much I'm willing to spend depends on how much the product offers.

The theory is that everything in stock is a great proposition, and you will get the best item in your budget. They aren't going to negotiate on price.

But the truth is that for every piece of home A/V gear that's expensive because it's well-engineered and provides a tangible benefit in exchange for its high price, there's any number of pieces of gimmicky, overpriced garbage which the salesman would be equally happy to send home with you. Need I mention Monster cables?

I imagine the first X covers cost of production, where cheapo brands cut corners to satisfy the quantity crowd. After that, you start to see price heavily affected by market segmentation, and availability. The small batch shop need to sell above a certain price. At some point, it starts to mirror high fashion or art.

This may be true in the US but it's not true in Germany and Austria.

In Vienna, you can get a very tasty bottle of local white wine for $3, at any grocery store. Spend $10 and you'll have something amazing. It'll be fresh, crisp, and tasty. You can get giant jugs of wine for $15 or less, again local, again delicious. Maybe not what an expert would consider wonderful, but nothing like the sickly cheap whites you get in the US. (At least, all the ones I've tried.) In many restaurants in Austria, the house wine is the cheapest beverage other than tap water and single espresso.

The thing is wine is both a bigger industry, and a smaller industry, compared to the US. It seems like half the restaurants in Vienna have a house wine (and I don't just mean "their cheap brand" -- but house wine they, or their family, or their friends, make and sell).

There are practically infinite "brands" because making wine is such a tradition. And yet it's not super commercialized. Most of the time you go to a restaurant, you just order "white" or "red". With few exceptions, there's not the worshipping of the brand names or prices.

Heuriger are a kind of biergarten, but for wine; they make their own, that's all they serve to drink, and often you can dine among the grape vines that provide the grapes to make the wine you're drinking.

In the summer, you drink weissweing'spritzt… wine with soda water, with Almdudler (a local herbal soda), apple juice, or elderflower syrup and soda. You order the wine to the table by the liter (it's not coming in bottles), and you share with your friends. This would send a snobby wine aficionado into conniptions and I myself thought it was a bit sketchy at first, but damn, it's delicious (and fun - and cheap).

Every fall, sturm arrives in every lokale -- the fresh, immature wine. Suddenly everybody is selling it and everybody's drinking it (and everybody's got a raging headache the next day).

Wine is part of the cultural landscape there in a way that I've not seen anywhere in the US. Wine is practically like hot & cold running water in Austria -- practically a utility. It's omnipresent and, in true socialist fashion, cheap enough for everyone, all the time.

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