Okay, I’m in Eno, a wine bar on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, and I’m imbibing one of their half price happy hour wine flights as I type this.
The three glass wine flight comes with a card citing fulsome descriptions of each sample. The first is a French Beaujolais, the second, a New Zealand Pinot Noir, the third is a Monastrell Roble from Spain. The first mentions raspberries, the second, cranberries and strawberries, the third, plum. There’s various terms like vibrant, smoky minerals, earthy finish and a reasonable amount of oak.
And this is what I get when I taste: Harsh and astringent drink that will at least get me buzzed, so it’s not a total loss.
That’s what all wine tastes like to me. Some are a little sweeter than others, but that’s about it.
What am I doing wrong? Not all food tastes alike to me, so why can’t I get more of a range with wine?
I’m sure you could develop your palette to the extent that you could tell the difference between wines if you made a concerted (and expensive) effort. But then you’d be stuck spending more.
With practice, you could tell the difference between well-made wine and crap, and between very different styles like a Beaujolais versus a Pinot Noir. Telling the difference between cheap and expensive wine is a lot more difficult (or impossible), and many professionals are fooled.
But the first step to any of this is, you have to enjoy wine. Maybe you can develop a taste for it over time. Or maybe it’s just not your thing and you’ll be happy with other drinks - there’s nothing wrong with that.
Get yourself some Night Train or Thunderbird. You won’t ever make that claim again.
You got wines that are all very fruity and easy to drink even for non wine lovers (it sounds like you may be one right now). It is no wonder that they all taste similar.
Wine tasting in general is a demonstrable scam according to many blind studies but that doesn’t mean that all wines taste as much alike as the ones you got. There are some really oaky, aged reds that are very different from a lighter Beaujolais. Champagne and dessert wines are wines too and anyone should be able to taste the difference between those and other types of wine.
Basically wines just have a few qualities to them, and if you find out the wines that have the qualities you like (if any), the price is meaningless.
Like, how sweet is it? How acid? How tannic? How fruity? And a bottle of 3 buck chuck from Trader Joe’s that you like is better than a $30 bottle you don’t like.
I can’t stand rum drinks, they all taste pretty awful to me. A good G&T is lovely, but the only fruit mixers I have with hard liquor are orange or tomato juice with vodka. Wine, OTOH, I always enjoy even if it’s a cheap bottle of rosé.
Studies with professional wine drinkers suggest many cannot identify white wine that has been dyed red, or differentiate between wines placed in other bottles. Though I like wine, and think there is a difference between bad, good and great wine… I tend to buy bottles for 20-30 dollars that are well regarded. Wine tastes better with cheese, and perfect pairings for special meals make sense, but despite inherent snobbery expensive wines often are not much better than very good ones IMHO.
You might also want to read about “hyper-aeration”, basically putting wine in a blender to put air into it. Blind taste tests can dramatically increase a wines rating.
It’s all just fermented grape juice. I don’t really drink any alcohol for its taste (although an agreeable taste is preferable to a nasty one, obviously), just its alcohol content.
I can’t tell one wine from another, either. Blindfolded, I’m not sure I could even tell a red from a white wine.
Now beer, I can tell lots of nuances. Probably because I like beer, and pay attention, but I don’t much care for wine. Just like I can tell a Ramones song from the opening chord (I love the Ramones) but can’t tell one rap song from another (I hate rap).
I love wine. Good wine. That’s not the same as expensive wine, either. I know what I like, and know what I don’t like. I just don’t know how to express what I like or don’t like.
What Alessan and Balthasar said. There are most definitely wines I do and do not like. I can’t really put into words what I do and do not like about them.
All those three are reds, and based on the descriptions they actually have very similar characteristics. A bit sweeter or a bit dryer, but quite similar. It’s kind of like asking “you know, I had three dishes of different pastas with tomato sauce and they frankly tasted all a lot similar, how come?” - well, yeah, they would. If one of them happened to be arrabiata, then yes the difference should have been much more noticeable, but tomato sauce is tomato sauce is tomato sauce.
Try some moscatel, Galician green or pinot grigio: if that still tastes the same, see a doctor. If it’s very different from the reds (specially the moscatel, which should be quite sweet), then there is nothing wrong with you.
