Friends run an annual blind wine tasting with $12(ish) bottles of red and one $40 “ringer” bottle.
In a field of about 15, the top-rated wine was Ava Grace Merlot 2015 from California, closely followed by a Moncaro organic Rosso blend from Italy and the $40 Gary Ferrell 2014 Pinot Noir (equalled by a Robert Mondavi 2016 cabernet; maybe the “private selection” that is about $11?).
People truly hated a popular Rioja and modestly priced Cotes-Du-Rhone and Bordeaux wines.
If you prefer wines crafted in Virginia you’ll be pleased to know that the Trump Winery’s 2014 Sparkling Rose earned 96 points in a competition in California (press release). From a recent Trump Winery email: “At the largest international wine competition in the world, our 2016 Sauvignon Blanc received a Double Gold medal with a 96 point rating. Of the nearly 200 Sauvignon Blancs entered from around the world, only 12 double gold medals were awarded: 10 from New Zealand, 1 from California, and ours!”
I must say I don’t like the trend of overly oaked fruit bombs courtesy of Robert Parker. But it seems to be yielding to something less bombastic in more recent years.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n03/steven-shapin/hedonistic-fruit-bombs
My own very favorite wines have come from champagne and burgundy. The latter is admittedly difficult, since you can easily overpay (a lot more than $40) for a bottle that turns out to be a dud, and there are many obscure producers. A bit like Russian roulette. Makes you feel alive if you’re paying.
A friend of mine has had great success in collecting wines from the south of France. Admittedly extraordinary at a more reasonable price than other regions.
In 2007-2008, when the sky was falling, there was a brief opportunity for hoi polloi to join the Screaming Eagle list, but I didn’t take my shot. In retrospect a big mistake. It just seemed like such an expensive commitment … Ugh, regrets.
It’s not surprising that the moderately-priced Bordeaux would be unpopular since Bordeaux is so expensive across the board; in general anything affordable is bad. I gave up on trying to find Bordeaux worth a crap for less than $100 years ago.
Overall, the experiment described is interesting, but it may be that the tasting group simply happened to be people who prefer Merlot-based wines on average.
A more interesting test, if you really want to get to the bottom of “is a $40 bottle of wine worth the premium over a $12 bottle of wine” question, would be to pick a bunch of bottles of the same wine type, region, and vintage.
At tasting course I watched as wanna be sommeliers could not distinguish between even white and red wines when blindfolded.
What’s the taste of red? The main difference in practice seems to be tannines, so look for those.
It’s unfortunately true that tasting abilities can vary widely, even among wine professionals (some turn out to be haplessly taste blind when tested). Personally, I’d assume I’m about average. However, you learn as the bottles go by.
$40 is kind of a sucker price point—enough more as to feel expensive for those used to three- (formerly two-) buck chuck, but not so much so as to be really out of reach as an impulse buy. At this price point the signal to noise ratio for quality is unfavorable.
philg: What’s your point? That tastes vary, and that price is not well correlated with individuals’ tastes? Or that region is not a good predictor of quality?
Is any of this a surprise? Lots of modestly-priced Riojas, Bordeaux, and CdRs are terrible, but some are very good. I taste hundreds of wines a year and only like a dozen or so enough to buy them (again). And only 1-3 a year are such great values *to my taste* that I buy 5+ cases.
The only way to be sure you will like a wine is to taste it. The appellation, the price, the reviews, the vintage year, the producer, etc. are only loosely correlated with whether you’ll like it and whether it’s good value for money… though there do seem to be a few producers who are pretty consistent.
anon: Yeah, that’s why they’re “wanna be” sommeliers.
Alex: I disagree. I find that many Bordeaux at $15-25/bottle are a great value.