[eszed]

Agree with everything you say. Wine experts do try to use a common vocabulary, but it's a bit of the competing standards problem [relevant XKCD goes here]. Most of the wine training I received working in the restaurant industry was vocab words to generate up-sells, and most amateur wine snobs don't know enough not to fall for it.

I did have a fascinating experience, a bit more than twenty years ago, which pulled back a curtain onto a more interesting reality. I was working in private dining for a winery, one of the perks of which was getting to take home quite a bit of wine and food. One time I got offered the leftovers from a vertical tasting - that's every vintage of a particular wine - from their top-end estate-grown bottling. It was 15-20 bottles, I can't remember exactly, all half to three-quarters full.

Anyway, we decided to do it properly, and tasted them all blind. (I mean, how often do you get a chance to do that with close to five retail figures of wine? Most of us were in wine or food or associated industries, anyway, so it was going to be a good story, and bragging rights, if nothing else.) I think there were six or eight of us - me, my flatmate, the three girls from next door, and a couple of hangers on - and we all (without conferring) agreed on the three best vintages. Some of us ranked them ABC, some BCA, etc, but it was those three in all cases.

I went back to work a few days later, and told the wine maker 1) Thank you, and 2) you might be interested to know, blah blah blah. His immediate response? Oh, yeah, it was years ABC, wasn't it? Which it exactly was.

So, there's a lot of wine bullshit, but not all of it is.

[lisper]

Thirty years ago I started a wine-tasting group with the person who is now my wife. There were twelve of us, and one day we did a blind tasting of six California cabs, with Barefoot on the low end ($3/bottle at the time) and Silver Oak at the high end ($50). Everyone in the room ranked the Barefoot first or second, and everyone ranked the Silver Oak dead last. That experience knocked the wine snobbery out of me for good.

It's possible we just got a bad bottle, but I don't think so. I think a dry full-bodied wine is just an acquired taste which none of us had yet acquired. Thirty years on I like Silver Oak better than I did then, but I can list a dozen wines I like better that cost half as much.

There is no such thing as a good wine in any absolute sense except in a few very broad brushstrokes. Beyond that it's all a matter of personal taste.

[adamredwoods]

I agree. In my humble opinion, there's two general red wine tastes:

1. jammy (like a fruit spread jam)

2. earthy

Over time I've moved more to earthy, but in reality, red wine taste changes drastically with food or other items added to your palette, including other wines, so I've never prescribed to one ideology. Just find what you like and there you go.

[lisper]

The flavor dimensions I can distinguish are:

1. Acid

2. Sugar

3. Tanins (in reds)

4. Malo-lactic acid (the buttery flavor in some chardonnays)

5. Oak

6. An aroma that I call "barnyard" that is present in many old-world wines. I think this is what others refer to as "earthy". Some people seem to like it but I find it very disagreeable.

7. Everything else. Many of my favorite wines have a certain je-ne-sais-quois that I can recognize but not quite put my finger on.

I like low acid, tannic, oaky, and just the tiniest hint of residual sugar. I think this is what most people call "jammy".

[alistairSH]

I've found my best bet for getting a solid, enjoyable wine for whatever occasion is visiting my local wine shop, telling them what we're eating/celebrating, and letting them pick (I give them a price range too). They haven't let me down yet.

Or for just a drinking wine, any of the Trader Joes Reserve bottles.

[samus]

Even if they are of the same variety (California Cabernet Sauvignon), there is a vast difference in flavor profiles and it would be surprising if the ranking would not come down to personal preference. It would be more fair to compare wines from the same year, variety, and terroir.

[CPLX]

Not sure Silver Oak is the best choice for this. It’s a super mass produced wine that basically occupies the market niche of “expensive” at chain steakhouses. I actually like it but it has sort of a specific taste that’s intended to match with big greasy meals.

[donavanm]

Has Silver Oak changed much in the past 20 years? It’s been a long while since Ive lived in CA, or really been “in to” wine. But I do recall quite liking silver oak as a “go to” cabernet circa 2000-05, alongside compatriots like jordan, ridge, or alexander valley vineyards.

[lisper]

> Not sure Silver Oak is the best choice for this.

At this point I can confidently say that Silver Oak is overrated, at least as far as my taste buds are concerned. But it seemed like a good idea at the time.

[eszed]

Heh. Yeah, price and quality are tenuously correlated at best. For years, back when I was a starving artist, but went to parties with people who cared about wine, I had what I called a secret weapon. One couldn't show up with two-buck Chuck, of course, but Trader Joe's also carried a Chilean wine, for $4.59 (or something like that. It was cheap, is my point), which regularly gathered approving comments when drunk alongside wines which retailed at 10x or more. (It was Santa Maria? Santa Clara? Santa something, anyway, and they sadly no longer sell it.) I wouldn't let on, but would mutter something about how underrated Chilean winemakers / terroir could be, and no one ever called me out for being poor!

In our case, with the blind tasting, those wines were all from the same grapes, from the same vineyards, made with the same process, and (for the previous decade or so) under the direction of the same winemaker. (For the record, I would neither then nor now ever consider buying that wine. It was and is stupidly overpriced, in my opinion, and isn't a style - fruitbomb California Cab - that I particularly enjoy.) What made it such an interesting experience is that style and flavor profile had been entirely factored out of our preference equation.

What did form the ground of our opinions was something one might best term Interesting, composed of things like depth and complexity and balance. Like, when it hits your tongue you taste a lot of different flavors, as you hold it in your mouth some of those flavors change, after you swallow some flavors linger and/or change, but none of them ever dominate or become unpleasant. That's still somewhat subjective, of course, but much less so (and more broadly recognizeable) than anything to do with the vocabulary words for particular flavors.

I think that's most of what "experts" are looking for in things they call Good, even though they seldom explicitly put it that way. I can identify those qualities even in foods and drinks that I don't particularly care for, and recognize their absence in things I do. For instance, I can't stand hoppy beers, but Pliny (Elder and Younger) has those qualities, so I can acknowledge that it's good, from a culinary perspective, even though I'll never order a pint; I can crush an order of tater tots, but they're not any of those things, so I'll happily call them crap, with my mouth stuffed full.

[BashiBazouk]

I went to a wine tasting party about 15 years ago. All blind and everyone was to bring a red. I think that was the only requirement. Silicon valley techies so most the wines were in the $30 to $50 range with a few closer to $100 and 20+ total bottles. The most chosen bottle was 7 Deadly Zins, a not particularly expensive old vine zinfandel.

[fragmede]

Xkcd 927