For The Love Of Port

Is there really a difference between expensive and cheap wine nowadays?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/katiebell/2 ... ive-wines/

The price.
A short but reasonable and good read.

I couldn't get the page to load in either Chrome or Opera

Sorry Peter. I just tried it from the link above and it is working for me and if I can get AOL to cooperate, I am pretty sure ANYONE can open this.

Works for me on Safari on the iPad.

The most interesting comment in the article was at the beginning. Temperature confusing experienced wine tasters into thinking they were tasting two different wines is very telling. How often have you been at a port tasting and wished that the wines were a little colder or a little warmer? It has a massive impact on the experience and is one of the reasons why I dislike grand tastings in the summer months.

Temperature is a biggie, for sure.

Part of the difficulty of being a wine critic, i guess, is to try to evaluate objectively a number of wines / wine styles that don't really appeal to your particular palate.

And i'm suprised that the article does not mention age / drinking windows - so much of the high-end stuff that is "tasted" by professionals seems to be very young and require a guess about the intrinsic qualities of the wine and where it will be in 10-20 years time. But for immediate drinking, they can often taste unattractive, disointed or closed.

For instance, I am completely lost at Nebbiolo / Barolo tastings - and often i find it is the cheaper "early drinking" wines rather than a producer's marquee wine that appeal because of this. Whilst i'm sure that this is a skill that can be learned by professionals, can they realistically do this to a high level for more than a few wine regions / varietels?

Likewise I've had a number of very light bodied scicilian wines which i can quite imagine guessing as a white wine if i had drunk them blindfolded!

The other thing is not just individual but collective experience - a phenomenon that sometimes occurs at our tastings is totally different impression of the quality of a wine at one end of the table from the other. I suspect this is becuase people are influenced by (and in turn reinforce) each other's first impressions - so whether a good or bad quality is first picked up in the wine can take on a snowball effect.

Weird. It worked today.

I have been the victim sucker subject in a non-wine version of one of those fool-you tests. The results were much as described. My perceptions were completely altered. (Red-dyed orange juice served as tomato juice; I couldn't figure out what had happened to my taste buds! The texture was right. The experience was horrible.)

I buy (relatively) expensive wines (when trying an unknown-to-me wine) because I have found that I am more likely to get a wine that I will enjoy if I do that. I probably miss some excellent wines that are less expensive, and probably pay a premium for some fairly ordinary wines at times. However, I tend to get wines that I like most of the time. I expect that this makes me look like a wine-snob to my friends occasionally, but that is a price I'm willing to pay. (And I expect that I sometimes "like" a wine simply because I have paid a bit more; I expect it to taste good, so it does.)

Rob C. wrote:Part of the difficulty of being a wine critic, i guess, is to try to evaluate objectively a number of wines / wine styles that don't really appeal to your particular palate.

Beer judging is all about adherence to a particular style, and in this realm I find it easier to judge the styles I'm not particularly fond of. It is easier to be objective.

If you drink from a winemaker’s portfolio, you should taste a progression in quality as you start from their basic offering to their top offering.

Novice wine drinkers I have included in port events are pretty close in their scores as more experienced drinkers.

Serving totally blind does make for an interesting evening, but I prefer to have some context to what I am drinking. “It tastes great for a 40 year old BDX” or it would be “tastes pretty mature for a 2005”. Different impressions based on additional knowledge of the wine. I am all in for throwing a ringer or two, but I would have to fess up early on and let them figure out which one that is.

I once served a Scotch to a self-claimed Scotch expert. He got it wrong. I served him the same Scotch again and he guessed something different and was wrong again… And this was from a bottle in his collection!

I’d love to be tested if I can tell inexpensive from expensive wine. Feel free to invite me over. If I am made a fool of in the process, so be it!

Some day I'll host a 1994 horizontal, for which I have a 1994 Heitz "Port" and 1994 SW LBV to throw in as ringers.