Discussion
Some people in my office were just discussing wine.
After listening to a completely inane conversation going on for the last 30 minutes, I just have to have a little rant about this subject.
1) You're drinking fermented grape juice. So what you are tasting is... GRAPE. You're NOT tasting raspberry, freshly mown grass, violets, earth, mushrooms, etc. It's all GRAPE. End of.
2) There are only two types of wine. And I don't mean red and white. There's wine you can drink which doesn't taste unpleasant and gets you nicely tipsy. And there's wine which you can't drink and is only good for putting on your chips.
3) If a wine costs more than, say, a couple of quid a bottle - then you're paying for the label. Think about it... petrol is £1.20 a litre. To get petrol you have to explore under seabeds using seismic equipment, analyse the geological data, build an oil rig, drill for oil. If you find it (not guaranteed) then extract the oil, pipe it to land, refine it, etc etc. All of this is not cheap to do, and yet the price of petrol is less than a bottle of wine (and even then, most of the price of petrol is tax!) What do you have to do to get wine? plant some vines. Wait for grapes to grow. Pick them, crush them, store the juice, wait some more, bottle it, sell the wine. Hardly an expensive process...
Ok, rant over. Feel free to discuss...!
After listening to a completely inane conversation going on for the last 30 minutes, I just have to have a little rant about this subject.
1) You're drinking fermented grape juice. So what you are tasting is... GRAPE. You're NOT tasting raspberry, freshly mown grass, violets, earth, mushrooms, etc. It's all GRAPE. End of.
2) There are only two types of wine. And I don't mean red and white. There's wine you can drink which doesn't taste unpleasant and gets you nicely tipsy. And there's wine which you can't drink and is only good for putting on your chips.
3) If a wine costs more than, say, a couple of quid a bottle - then you're paying for the label. Think about it... petrol is £1.20 a litre. To get petrol you have to explore under seabeds using seismic equipment, analyse the geological data, build an oil rig, drill for oil. If you find it (not guaranteed) then extract the oil, pipe it to land, refine it, etc etc. All of this is not cheap to do, and yet the price of petrol is less than a bottle of wine (and even then, most of the price of petrol is tax!) What do you have to do to get wine? plant some vines. Wait for grapes to grow. Pick them, crush them, store the juice, wait some more, bottle it, sell the wine. Hardly an expensive process...
Ok, rant over. Feel free to discuss...!
Davey S2 said:
In my experience A £10 bottle is at least twice as good as a £5 bottle and a £50 bottle is at least twice as good as a £10 bottle.
So if a wine producer puts wine in one bottle priced at £5 and puts a pretty much identical wine in a different bottle priced at £50 (and I can guarantee that kinda thing does happen - there are plenty of unscrupulous people out there!) does the more expensive one suddenly becomes 4 times as good? Surely there's a massive placebo effect, i.e. your brain telling you "this is more expensive so it must taste better", and therefore it does?This doesn't only apply to wine of course but to pretty much anything you can buy these days...
miniman said:
No doubt were the group of wine enthusiasts in your office listening to a conversation between you and some other petrolheads... *snip*
Yep, fair point indeed. You're right, I don't get the whole "wine" thing (or the "coffee" thing for that matter), because I don't drink wine (or coffee). But I'm passionate about cars and also about meat (steaks in particular), so I can understand how it is.Bebs said:
calibrax said:
So if a wine producer puts wine in one bottle priced at £5 and puts a pretty much identical wine in a different bottle priced at £50 (and I can guarantee that kinda thing does happen - there are plenty of unscrupulous people out there!)
You seem extremely well informed about the wine trade - I mean what with not drinking the stuff and seemingly knowingall about it
I suspect you probably know even far more than me - despite my 25 years in the wine trade.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8520980....
But regardless... as an accountant I know a lot about business, and there are people in every business who will try and rip people off in one way or another. And if you don't believe that then you're living in a dream world!
Edited by calibrax on Wednesday 24th March 10:48
Gargamel said:
Perhaps the phrase he knows the price of everything but the value of nothing, is appropriate here.
Well, perhaps when it comes to wine. But my passion is for steak... I would be perfectly happy spending £50 on a Kobe fillet steak, so I can certainly see the parallels. Each to their own I guess!Davey S2 said:
calibrax said:
But my passion is for steak...
How can you be into steak and not drink red wine????Thats like night without day, the sun without the moon, Barry Chuckle without his brother.
My last meal would be steak and proper hand cut chips with a quality bottle of claret
Gassing Station | Food, Drink & Restaurants | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff