This Is True #217: Cheap Wine Tastes Better

“The price of a wine is far more important than taste when it comes to the amount of pleasure the wine gives you, a study has found.

Most people prefer inexpensive to expensive wines when served them blind. But if they are given a price tag, even a false one, they will find the apparently costlier one more enjoyable.

The American Association of Wine Economists, in a paper published this week, reports on a series of 17 blind tastings that ended in February in which non-experts consistently preferred cheaper wines.

This finding reinforces the conclusion of a separate study published in January in which student volunteers, tasting blind, preferred the cheapest wine in the sampling.”

Full report from Decanter.com

I believe a similar effect occurs when the wine’s label is visible, or hidden.

COGshifter’s Guide to Wine, Part Two

Warning: Opinionated stuff about wine follows!

Part Two

In Part One, I wittered on mainly about red wine. In this part I’ll quickly cover the process of sniffing, tasting and drinking wine. In Part Three I’ll talk about whites, exotics and desert wines.

First, how to tell if a wine is “corked”. This is very easy: it smells bad, like vinegar. If you take a sip notwithstanding, it tastes awful, too. Don’t make the mistake, like my friend Mick did, of calling the waiter over in a poncey restaurant, and complaining the wine is “corked” if the wine itself is fine, but has bits of the cork floating in it due to an inexpert cork extrication. This was possibly one of the most humiliating incidents I have observed in a restaurant.

Which brings me to tasting wine at the beginning of the meal. Once you have selected your bottle, and the waiter has beetled off to the cellar, and brought it back to the table to examine, you need to check the label. Is it really the same wine you ordered? It’s easy just to look at the label thinking “Hmmm, nice label!” without checking. Given that it’s the wine you ordered, and the year is as specified in the menu, then the waiter opens it and pours a little in the bottom of your glass. There are at least four possible ways to proceed:

• Drink the wine in one swig, then wave the waiter away with the bottle, explaining that you can’t drink because you’re driving. This technique of getting to taste extremely expensive bottles of wine without paying for them is admirably portrayed in a Mr. Bean episode.
• Suck up a little of the wine, swish it around in the mouth, gargle a little, and then spit it into a convenient ice bucket or other receptacle. Although this is fine if you are a) Hugh Johnson and b) in the cellar of Chateau Meursault, it is frowned upon in a restaurant.
• Swish the wine around in the glass, holding it to the light, then taste a little.
• Swish the wine around in the glass, and take a deep (but not showy) sniff

My opinion is that the last method is the best. If the wine is bad, you can tell without drinking it: it will smell bad. The wine needs to breath a while in any case, so what’s the point in drinking it too soon?

By the way, if you are paying serious cash for a good bottle of wine, insist on a suitable wine glass. Drinking a large-nosed red out of a champagne flute just wont do. There is also something about a good quality glass of the right type for the wine that improves it.

And this is so crucial: the look of the wine, the look of the bottle, the smell, the glass, the temperature, all contribute to how enjoyable the wine is. The fact is that most folks cannot tell the difference blindfolded between a Hungarian, Italian or French red wine of any given grape. (Most folks also cannot tell the difference between whisky and brandy while blindfolded). So it’s all to do with the look and feel.

I remember I used to be very intimidated with this whole wine ordering and tasting palaver in restaurants. Now I’m very cool about it: I just remember a) I’m paying, b) I know what I like, and c) I don’t give a monkey’s about what other people think is the “correct” way to do things!

Cogshifter’s Guide to Wine

Warning: Opinionated stuff about wine follows! Beware.

Part One

I first started drinking wine in quantity when I moved to Switzerland in the early ’80s. I developed quite a taste for it, and soon came to prefer it over a pint of “Scruttock’s Old Dirigible”, which had been my favoured tipple in Old Blighty.

I had a lot of friends who liked wine, too. And some of them had copies of Hugh Johnson (a handy little booklet that lists good vintages, vineyards and bottlers), sections of which they had clearly committed to memory. This made for some painful procedures at the start of any meal, along the lines of rejecting the Chateau Chiroply ’95 in favour of the Vigne de l’Enfant Jesus ’96 since the autumn of ’95 had been a little moister than ideal, and the grape treaders in Chiroply a little less enthusiastic due to a bout of Napoleonic ‘flu in the village.

At that time I drank exclusively reds. Preferably full-bodied Burgundies from good years, with an occasional Bordeaux if I was feeling frisky. If you’d offered me an Italian Bardolino, or a Spanish Rioja, I would have declined. I was for the great French wines, the wines of Bergundy, and I would settle for little else. Which leads me to my first rule:

If you want a truly great bottle of wine, it must be French, and it must be a good year.

and its corollary:

If you choose such a wine, you will pay dear.

It is possible to buy great French wine at bargain prices. I have done it. In fact I have about 500 bottles of what is now probably truly astounding wine laid down in the cellar of the house I use to own in France. The trick is to buy it young, directly from the Chateaux, and lay it down. If you salt away enough, then after about 5 years, the first bottles you laid down will be drinking well now and you can start to reap the harvest of your toil and expense. But you have to keep buying and laying it down. Which leads to the second rule:

If you lay wine down, lay it down in the right place!

This means you need a cave i.e. a cool place undergound out of direct sunlight, preferably with space for several thousand bottles (equivalent to a bottle a night for just three years if you set about drinking the contents). There’s no point in laying down a few cases of Chateau Margaux ’03 in the laundry room, only to find it’s turned to vinegar when you crack open the first bottle on New Year’s Eve 2008!

So much for expensive French reds. I fairly soon realised that there were plenty of red wines that were extremely good, and were not French, and specifically not expensive. They were never going to reach the heights of exquisite taste of a vintage Nuits Saint Georges, but they were still very good indeed. In fact at this point I’d had my fill of French reds because, unless you paid a lot, they were awful. Hence the third rule:

There’s no wine worse than a cheap Burgundy. Except perhaps a cheap Bordeaux.

If you’re looking at a wine list and see what appears to be a bargain bottle of French red wine: don’t pick it! There is a very good reason why it’s cheap.

The wines I moved to were the Italian reds. On my way there I toyed for a while with Spanish Riojas, which at their best have that oaky taste, browny-red colour, and humungous nose, that good Burgundy has.

The Italian reds are super, and the epitome of cheap and cheerful. I’m bundling a lot of wines into that statement, but I’m thinking of Valpolicella, Barollo, Chianti, Bardolino. To me, what makes them especially good is that they seem to improve by being drunk slightly chilled. Frankly, on a sweaty Italian night in the Piazza Agostini watching the Vespas buzz around, and i ragazzi saying “ciao”, the last thing I want to drink is a heavy red wine served in a poncy tall-stemmed glass at 80 degrees Fahrenheit: I want a fruity, light, chilly tumbler of Valpo to wash my fettucine down with! E vero! So to rule number four:

Italian reds are reliably good, and should preferably be drunk chilled from tumblers while riding a Vespa

This concludes Part One of the guide. In Part Two I will address whites, exotics (retsina, spumante, frizzata etc.), desert wines and how to tell if a wine is “corked”.