[ a can of worms]
A popular notion “a bottle of good wine” doesn’t make sense to me just another cliché
[ / a can of worms]
I mean it’s not just about quality .
Wine drinking is a social thing.
It’s who you are drinking wine with that counts.
I remember times at uni when we used to drink the cheapest wine made from rotten apples or whatever , those were the best times of my life and no amount of Château Margot or Martel will ever compensate for a bad company.
Related question:
those wine tasting judges ( people who do it for a living, you know … sip a bit then spit it out ritual ) are they for real or all this is yet another marketing ploy?
I don’t understand the question. There is good beer and bad beer, good pop corn and bad pop corn, good BBQ and bad BBQ, why not wine?
Bad wine is easy to tell: vinegary, too sweet, too puckery, watery, tastes like jam, etc. What makes wine extradordinary is up to debate. I like wine with food. When I take a bite of my food and it makes me want to take a sip of wine, and the wine makes me want to have another bite of food then I am in heaven.
Of course when I was younger I just drank wine to get drunk. That was fun too.
I echo the “I don’t understand the question.” Is there such a thing as bad wine? You betcha! Bad beer? Sure. I’m an experienced, trained beer judge, and I can tell you from first-hand experience that there is a metric buttload of bad beer out there. But understand that there is a big difference between “bad” and “beer I don’t like.” The same goes for wine. There are objective standards for these beverages, and trained palates can tell exactly where the maker did and did not achieve these standards.
Does the company you are with make the wine taste better? No. You just don’t notice it because you are having too good a time.
I am not sure I understand the question either. Everything from wine to beer to diamonds to purebred dogs can be judged to trained people. That doesn’t change the fact that people like what they like, even if the experts think it is swill but the standards are there and are as much objective as they are subjective.
I never cared much for “cork dorks” (amateurs that get a little too into the esoteric aspects of wines) but the professional wine tasters have a real skill. For that matter, professional coffee tasters have a similar skill. There are qualities that a good quality wine that they can identify. Some of the positive characteristics are rare and, in the case of red wine, may take years to develop before they are drunk. Sommeliers and other wine experts can easily tell a great wine from a mediocre one in blind tasting and they will all tend to agree on how they are different. Where it gets harder is comparing two supposedly great wines for example.
Anyone with an average sense of smell and taste can learn to judge wine in a rough manner given a little experience. Some wines have a vinegar taste or a harsh oaky taste for example that makes them not very good. Very good wines need a flavor balance with several different notes that compliment each other.
OK ,I admit the title (question) is a bit misleading.
Let me rephrase it.
What is more important to drink a bad ( whatever that means …) wine with people you like or
to have a good wine with people you don’t particularly enjoy being with.
When people describe their restaurant/party experience as : We had good food , nice wine
it more often than not means they enjoyed people , conversation … and generally had a good time.
It has very little to do with the quality of wine .
What I’m saying is being in a good company ( as social gathering of guests or companions not as a firm/factory) it’s much more important that so-called good wine.
The quality of wine is pretty much irrelevant.
I taste good wine and bad wine every day. Sometimes with other students or co-workers, sometimes with my husband and/or son, sometimes with tourists/customers at wineries, but more often than not, right here at home. Alone.
I judge the wines I taste based on the wines themselves, their characteristics, their flaws, etc.
Who, where, when, and how has nothing to do with it.
And spitting is very important. There is simply no way one can taste 50 or 60 wines, swallow them, and have a clear enough head to judge them.
I think the OP is saying that the whole thing is a trick question with wine only used as a proxy.
I think it translates as:
Would you rather eat at McDonalds with a person you adore or would you rather eat at a five star restaurant with people you don’t care about that much?
I guess it depends on how often you get to see your friend versus how much you like good food and how often you get it.
Personally, I would just drag the friend to the 5 star restaurant and call it a complete victory.
Just popped in to say that, for me, when the wine makes me want to have *more ** wine (Food? What food?), then I know that I’ve found a good wine, and I’m in heaven.
*Y’know–just in case this point hasn’t been made yet, since I haven’t yet read the entire thread.
I think I gotcha. Given the choice of hanging out with my sisters (who are across the country and I see every couple of years now and miss terribly) and drinking Arbor Mist, or some dickheads I either hardly know or hate and drinking Chateau Latour, I ummm, I ummm… I’d pick my sisters and the Arbor Mist, I guess.
As an example, my wife and I had a very nice time at our neighbor’s house for New Year’s Eve. They’re not particularly knowledgeable about wine, as they readily admitted when they opened two bottles of a not-very-good pinot grigio and a merlot. Both were pretty much undrinkable. While we still had a great time with them, the wine still sucked.
Appreciating the difference between higher quality wines and lower quality wines is a matter of experience, plus people’s tastes change with time. Hell, fifteen years ago, my wife and I were drinking Sutter Home white zinfandel. You couldn’t pay me to drink that cloyingly sweet crap wine now, no matter who I was with.
