Trader Joe’s ‘Two Buck Chuck’ Named Best Chardonnay at Prestigious State Fair
I remember hearing about that.
I have a friend who’s experienced a lot of wines from a lot of places - he’s not exactly a connoisseur, he just drinks a lot of wine - and his biggest knock on Two cough cough Three Buck Chuck is its inconsistency from bottle to bottle. They use a lot of grapes from a very wide area of vineyards, he says, and even bottles from the same year the quality can range from surprisingly good to merely drinkable.
That could also explain the results of the two wine tastings described in that article - the double gold rating and the dead last finish.
I don’t know wines very well but for whisky I’ve found that there is often very little correlation between cost (or age) and quality. Even looking through guides like Jim Murray’s Whisky Bible, his ratings can vary widely within the same distillery*. There are so many factors going into the development of a good barrel that remain unknown until the whisky is drunk (the process is perhaps more opaque than for wines, since the effects are more due to the distilling process and individual cask than to weather patterns and vineyard quality), that it’s nearly impossible to know how good a whisky will be just based on region and age.
And then of course, there are personal preferences. Whisky can vary greatly in taste depending on where and how it’s made, from mild, sweet, fruity or very harsh or smoky. I got to try Yoichi 20-year-old (the first non-Scottish whisky to be named Whisky of the Year, and which runs about $200 a bottle) on Sunday at the Whisky Live festival, and while the smell was incredible, the taste was distinctly sulfur-y (an unfortunate effect of using sherry casks (which get disinfected with sulfur) to age the whisky rather than bourbon casks) and mediocre. There were other whiskies, both similar in price and far cheaper, that I thought were much better.
For me at least, this variability makes things all the more fun. Knowing that a whisky costing X has to have Y quality would be boring. And anyway, being able to ferret out little-known great whiskies at $30 and recommend them to friends based on what I know they like, is a more impressive bragging point than simply being able to afford a $500 bottle. It’s like treasure hunting.
*For the Lochside section, from his 2008 Bible:
Cadenhead’s Authentic Lochside Collection Aged 23 Years - 95 rating (world class)
Cadenhead’s Authentic Lochside Collection Aged 24 Years - 75 (average)
Old Malt Cask Lochside Aged 14 Years - 94
In this case the students were clearly suffering from damaged palates or Wine B spectacularly vile. Blue Nun, with it’s dead rat drowned in sugar taste, is as distinctive as it is disgusting.
Their used to be a programme called I believe,Ffood and Drink on British TV.that had two truly awesome wine experts (I think Oz Clerk and Julie Goulden or something)they could tell you just about everything about the wines just by taste.
They were at avery prestigous wine tasting event with all the top wine tasters there and Oz said on leaving,whatever wine you give them they will argue from diametrically opposite vantage points on its merits,
So drink what YOU like.
I have never ever been intimidated by wine since.
Washington used to have a wonderfully UN-stuffy French restaurant in Adams-Morgan (You could see the outside of it in nearly every movie filmed in Washington; a brownish-yellow building with a huge mural of a Toulouse-Lautrec painting over the entrance). A waiter there explained to me the difference between the $6 bottle of chablis and the $20 bottle: The $6 bottle will give me a splitting headache the next day. Screw the “fulsome effervescence” and the “fruity afterbite.”
That’s kind of the beauty of it, I think.
For many who spend big bucks on very pricey wine, they’re paying for a finite and un-repeatable experience. I was fortunate enough to be able to have a very very expensive (a few thousand dollars, I believe) bottle of wine earlier this year. It was quite old (40+ years) and a very unique drink. It was not the best wine I’ve ever had, but it was clearly unique and different. And now it’s gone.
The wine was gifted to us, so I can’t say whether it was ‘worth it’ or not, but I could certainly see spending money on fine wines if I had the sort of disposable income that would allow it.
I think there are two different questions going on here:
- Can wine experts taste different flavors, techniques, grapes, vintages, barrels, etc.?
- Are more expensive wines better?
The answer to 1 is yes. The answer to 2 is, “depends on who you ask,” I think. Like beauty is in the eye of the beholder, taste is on the tongue of the taster, so to speak. I think an inexperienced taster would probably lean more toward the cheaper, simpler wines, and begin to appreciate the expensive, complex bottles as they gain experience.
Getting back to question 1, I heard a story on NPR about 2 years ago about “The Golden Nose Award” - I’ve never been able to find much about it on google. What I remember from the story is that it was a smell-only competition - no tasting, and you had to identify the vintage (year made), grape, and vineyard just to get through the first round. Once you won the award, it was yours for life, and you cannot compete again.
Makes you wonder if there is a “Golden Tongue Award”. 
I make my own wine, as well as consuming plenty of varieties of commercial wine. In my case, I prefer strong, dry, leathery flavors. The more a wine tastes like a good pint of Guinness poured into a longshoreman’s workboot, the better. I’ve had wonderful 5$ bottles, and terrible $50 bottles. At the end of the day, I’m really only interested in paying money on things that make me happy.
My point, simply, is drink what you like. If you are judging wine based on its listing in a wine guide, or its price, or to gab about the data minutiae with fellow data hounds, then knock yourself out.
The human nose/tongue can objectively taste ridiculously tiny variations in taste and texture. Whether they are good or bad, however, is purely subjective to the individual taster.
Does anyone think taste is correlated to price? If that is the metric, then one bottle might as well be Pepsi. Or Thunderbird.
Unless you taste a lot of wine, when it is clear there is such a variety of tastes, how can you decide you know what you like? Even within a single price point this seems true to me, so price is not the issue.
Obviously there is some expectation, or bottles of wine over $5 would not exist.
I used to be a wine merchant, specialising in fine and rare wines. I’ve been lucky enough to attend wine tastings where I’ve tasted some of the finest wines in the world, in the prescence of some of the finest palates in the world.
Part of the many pleasures of the job was to discuss with, listen to and learn from those experts. Deciding if a wine is any good, and whether it’s worth the asking price is down to many factors. The people who can differentiate between wines are able to do so because they’re blessed with the ability to detect many nuances in the wines, are able to identify why there are those particular tastes, and can store those tastes for future reference and comparison. They’ve drunk thousands of wines and devoted a lifetime to studying wine. It takes time, commitment and perserverance to learn to appreciate those differences.
Wine, like other arts, covers a broad spectrum, from white to red, from sweet to dry, from young to old and from cheap to expensive. People’s tastes vary, and just because an ‘expert’ likes a wine and you don’t doesn’t mean that your opinion isn’t every bit as valid as his. In the same way that some people like classical music, and some like rock, or that some prefer renaissance art to pop art doesn’t invalidate their opinion.
Expertise allows you to evaluate the skills (or lack of skills) that went in to the making of a wine, and to be aware of the factors that contribute to the resulting wine - such as the soil, the way the grapevines were trained, the climate, when the grapes were picked, how the juice was matured (whether in oak barrels or porcelain or steel tanks) and so on. The more interest and knowledge you have of a wine, the more you’ll appreciate and enjoy it. But it musn’t be ignored that what you want from a wine may be the simple pleasure of knocking it back with friends with out having to analyse it. If the wine does the job, then it’s a good wine.