I once did buy Thunderbird decades ago because the price was right. I couldn’t believe how horrible it was, couldn’t choke it down.
I am a fan of American and Australian wines, probably a bit out of habit. I know French wines are good, but the reds to me seem a bit thin and vinegary. I have probably ruined my pallet with more commercial wines.
I like cabernet sauvignon as it is soft and accessible. I consider $20 about what I am willing to pay. There seems to me that there is a lusciousness to better wines that does not exist in cheaper wines but again would not promise to pass a taste test.
This is really good advice, assuming you can find such a place. As many others have already said: until you start trying different wines, it’s impossible for any of us to make suggestions other than “this is what I like,” and the best way to figure out what you like in wine is to try a range of different wines.
This is also good advice, and it gets back to your question about “how can I tell the difference between a good wine and a bad wine from the picture on the label?” A lot of smaller wineries (and some big ones, too) rely on cute or funny brand names, or engaging pictures on the label, to entice novice wine drinkers to buy their product. Sure, some of those wines are probably pretty good, but a lot of them are average-to-poor, and the wineries are using the funny names and the cute labels to get you to buy cruddy wine.
Hey, don’t slam mass-market glog! Gallo Hearty Burgundy is a great food wine, and priced for everyday consumption. There’s some very drinkable stuff out there in gallon jugs and boxes. A tremendous amount of insect repellent too, of course.
A lot of this advice is good, but since you are at the very beginning of your appreciation, you’ll need a practical approach to what you might like. Maybe spend some time online looking up “types of red wine” and “types of white wines”
Within each one of those there are different ones. In red wines a Cabernet Sauvignon is very different than a Beaujolais. In white wines a Sauvignon Blanc is very different than a Gewurztraminer.
To start you would really have to buy a handful of different types, one of each, in the $20+ range (so you would have a better chance of avoiding crap). See what you like, and then focus on that type trying out different price points and brands. Eventually you would be able to tell someone, “Oh, I like xxx wines because of yyy, my favorite is zzz…”
Personally, I like most all types, each for their own qualities, and for different purposes. Different wines paired with different foods. Different wines on a hot summer day vs. a cool fall evening. Whereas my spouse is bold reds only, no exception!
But, I’ve tried several whiskeys and lotsa beers…it turns out I like Crown Royal and Coors light.:rolleyes:
I tried slightly better, and WAY better as judged by recommendations and price and, I like what I like.
I’ve learned to be happy that I like what I can afford.
$110 is as high as I’ve gone with wine. Partly because I’ve had some pretty mediocre $70 wine and thus don’t want to risk being burnt, and partly because the $110 wine was easily in my top 5 wines ever. So either way I am in trouble because either I waste a lot of money or I want even more of it and waste even more money.
I really didn’t understand wine till I tried a really good Cabernet Sauvignon (that someone invited me to enjoy their birthday party as I was thru hiking the Appalachian Trail), and it tasted amazing, and I understood what wine was all about, and what the common wines were trying to taste like. Once I understood what wines were striving for, especially in the Cab Sav. category it really helped me understand the taste, before that I was equally clueless.
I have encountered wine retailers that regularly offer free samples for tasting. It’s hard to get ripped off if you try before you buy. Other than that, I second the advice of frequenting a small shop where the staff know all the wines. The wine has always been exactly as described. And if you tell them what you personally prefer, they will make an effort to suggest something that meets your criteria.
$50 seems firmly on the really expensive side, by the way. Maybe some American wines are inflated in price compared to their European counterparts? Though there are things which do really increase the price of a given wine, like aging, rare terroir, and good-quality barrels.
ETA it is impossible to reduce the taste of wine, or of anything, simply to “good” versus “bad”. For example, how would you feel about a comfortable wine that takes care of you, versus one with a more complex taste?
There’s a legend about Alfonso X “the Wise” of Castille:
shortly after he became king, he got lost while hunting. Eventually he arrived to the hut of a coalmaker, who fed him the only thing he had: sopas de ajo (thin broth, chunks of old bread and a couple of garlic cloves).
Days after returning to his court, he asked the cook for some sopas de ajo, but didn’t find them satisfactory. After making a huge ruckus and cursing the skin off the cooks, he eventually sent for the coalmaker. When he asked the coalmaker for his soup, the man said “but milord, the one thing that was special about my soup was the sauce YOU brought!”
“What? I didn’t bring anything!”
“Yes milord, you brought your hunger.”
The king facepalmed and apologized mightily to everybody involved.
And that is why we say that “the best sauce is hunger.”
ETA: what is a wine that “takes care of you”? Does it tuck you into bed?
I am not in any way a wine expert, and I hope I’m not a wine snob, but I’m someone who has enjoyed wine for many years and gradually learned to appreciate its many pleasures. I was thinking of posting some rule-of-thumb hints but there’s so much to say that it’s kind of futile; you can literally write a book about it, and many have, and you might consider picking up one or two of them.
But most of all just try a lot of wines – variety is more important than high cost or quality when you’re learning – and use some general guidelines that you’ll find in books to pair them with appropriate foods. The exact right wine with the right food is not nearly as critical as some wine critics seem to imply, but it is absolutely a fact that most wines – especially reds – not only taste far better with food but in fact are a completely different experience with food, the food and the wine when well matched reinforcing each other in a truly glorious harmony.
What’s a “good” wine? I think the posters who tell you that it’s whatever you like are on the right track. Nevertheless, as you become more knowledgeable and more sensitive to the nuances, you develop a sense for recognizing a enjoying a really great wine. It’s always going to be highly subjective, of course. Personally I like robust dry reds with strong balanced tannins, so I’m a fan of both California Cabs and Merlots and many modern Australian reds, not so much French reds which tend to offer character only in stratospheric price ranges, although there are some surprising exceptions once in a while.
What happens with experience is that you become familiar with the subtle nuances of how all the different aspects of the wine work together to produce the taste experience. Not having any aspirations to being a pretentious wine snob, I would have no idea how to describe them properly, but I definitely know a great wine when I taste it, in exactly the same way that I know a great musician when I hear one, despite knowing little about the technicalities of music. There is just a sense of mastery, of tastes that are bold yet with nothing dominant, everything in perfect harmonious balance – what wine tasters sometimes call “authority” – a wine to be taken seriously, with layers of complexity coursing through every mouthful. I rarely have wines that good, but I feel privileged to have had some now and then.
This is true but not at all surprising. Exactly the same is true of food, which is why good restaurants go to such great lengths to create a pleasant ambience. Wine is much like food in that sense, and as I said, the two are very much complementary.
Then you are totally missing out on all the fun to be had playing party pig tennis/volleyball with the bladder after said box is empty.
There are some decent box wines to be had, though.
OP, if you do a little research you’ll find certain varietals tend to have certain flavour profiles. Gewürztraminer tends to have notes of lychee or citrus and a bit of minerality and Australian Shiraz will have a certain sweet, cherry or raspberry jam kind of taste.
This can be harder with French wines as they tend toward blends to get a balance of notes whereas North American tastes tend to run toward single grape varietals.
I know that the same thing is true of food, which is why I mentioned it and why the professor discusses the effect on food in the linked transcript. He even describes a restaurant in Switzerland with two Michelin stars where the diners show up at the appointed time to find the tables empty, except for a cheap plastic cow at each. They’re confused, until someone picks one up to find that the plastic cow makes a mooing noise. This amuses everyone, and thereby improves the mood of everyone in the restaurant.
BTW, some people think that “good wine” comes in bottles with corks and “bad wine” comes in bottles with screw tops or in plastic bladders in boxes. But that’s not necessarily the case. The metal screw tops avoid the problem of “cork taint” and the wine in plastic bladders in boxes is exposed to less oxygen than wine in an open bottle.
My sister and B-I-L are winemakers, producing quite good wines on the north fork of Long Island. My BIL is Australian, and they have the longest history with screw top capsules, so all their wine is bottled that way. It certainly lasts longer and preserves wine better, and he cares above all about how the wine tastes. Yes, there is a bit of theater with pulling a cork and the little routine about it, but that contributes nothing to the taste of the wine. They also sell a good amount in pressurized kegs for single glass servings in restaurants - very popular and results in better tasting wine for longer. Other wineries are beginning to produced canned wine, great for backpacking.
There are excellent wines at pretty much all price ranges. You’re going to get more complex wines when the winemakers are spending more time with them, and that usually translates to more expensive wine. But plenty of $10 bottles can be found that pair excellently with food, they’re the equivalent of everyday table wine in France or Spain.
About 95% of wine sold in the US is meant to be drunk right away. There’s little benefit to putting a case up in the basement for later. Buy and drink, that’s a good motto.
Many experts can do so reproducibly. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, check out the movie Somm or the TV reality show Uncorked, both about people going for the Master Sommelier tests. These folks can take a sip of wine and tell you the grape varietal, region, year, the type of soil the grapes were grown in, and on and on. It’s a real skill, and it takes both a very discerning palate and many hundreds of hours of study.
The ridiculous-sounding explanations are exactly what you would do if you were forced to give a lot of verbal or written wine reviews - imagine reading the other kind of wine review: “Well, it was pretty good, I guess”
Exactly because the explaining is so hard and seems so nebulous, here’s advice: Drink wine more often, and (making sure to stay easily within your budget) try a lot of different ones, especially concentrating on trying ones you think you might not like. This puts you in a judgmental frame of mind, and from that you will learn something, no matter whether your guess turns out right and you don’t like it, or you get a pleasant surprise. When you aren’t feeling judgmental, then you learn less, because the simplistic three categories have come back into force: Amazing, Pretty Good, and Horse Piss.
And yet, in repeated double-double blind tests, most experts can’t even tell reds from whites. That’s the paradox - there ARE people who can do that. Almost everybody else on the planet can’t.
