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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. |