How can I appreciate red wine?

im actually from chile, lol
it was casillero del diablo

Wow, that's a lot of bullshit. Classic wine styles are pretty easily identifiable, and they became classic because they paired well with the foods of the regions in which they were made. Try actually tasting some wines and pairing them with real food before offering as chicken nuggets level opinion about them.

I think you have to drink very tiny amounts to appreciate the flavors people taste in it, but because it's not hard liquor it's tempting to drink it faster than you should.

I used to tell all my customers to start off with a blend of wine. Figure out what they like and don't like about it and go from there. Also why do you want to know more about Reds? There is a lot of science in wine making, which is why I love it so much.
>Wine tastings are your best friend.
>I live in PA which is state controlled so I know every wine heavy Wine and Spirits has a tasting on Friday.
>Don't be afraid to research wineries and grapes. What's in season and climate info can change taste as well as price on the next vintage.
Some wines use stems and leaves while others hand pick to just have the fruit. This effects the taste. You said you like fruity reds so I think for right now you should find wines that don't oak for too long.

it helps to have a friend to guide you through some of it, or do it in a group - you want to be able to taste a number of wines to be able to identify the extremes. once you have identified the extremes, you can start honing in on the smaller and smaller differences.

if you a wine shop or bar that has an Enomatic or other wine-dispensing machines, that can be a good way to taste a little bit from a bunch of different wines.

>I just taste fruit-ish alcohol, which is nice tho, but I feel like Im missing something.
What you're probably missing is varietal character. This is a symptom of drinking too much new world wine, especially inexpensive new world wine. There are no quality controls in new world wine, so it's a leap of faith every time you buy a bottle. Unless you autistically memorize which producers are trustworthy and which aren't, you're SOL. The trustworthy ones become cult wines anyway so you're pretty much fucked unless you have more money than Peter Thiel, Roman Abramovich, and Carlos Slim combined.

In the New World you can legally sell "pinot noir" that contains 51% pinot noir and the rest mystery grapes and an industrial additive called "mega purple" which is basically wine extract to make it taste more fruity and exciting. The MSG of wine.

In the new world you can sell "chablis" that is neither from chablis, nor exhibits the characteristics of chablis (made from chardonnay, steely lean non-malolactic character). "Chablis", to an american, is a pink sweet wine made of mystery grapes. This is considered legal.

The reason European wine is best for a beginner is that you can tell, with a more or less high degree of reliability, what the wine will be like just from looking at the AOC information. It will often be blends, but the types of allowed blends are specified so you can look them up and, later, decide if you like wines made like that.

Then, later, you can try New World wines, where the rule is "buyer beware"

This is all true. Which is why it's a good idea to start with France. They established many classic styles of wine, and still produce them. Many examples are affordable. The only extra bit of knowledge required is French wine is named by region, and there are legal specs for what the wine from each region has to be and how much of it can be produced. It's a quality control system you can memorize the details of in a pretty short time.

My point was more the descriptions of wines.
Stupid shit like "peaches with hints of chocolate."
I want to look at the tasting person and ask if they're fucking serious.
Those descriptions are bullshit.

Take a sip of the wine, then sloosh it around your mouth. Then look at the inner circle of the attached image and see "ok this is kind of fruity" then work your way outward. Then try to identify a couple more flavors.

Wa la, you're now a wine person.

The secret to finding non shitty wine with zero knowledge is to find the one kind on the shelf that has less bottles left than the other kinds because other people who know more than you are buying them

I can tell apart a hundred different beers but I couldn't tell you the difference between a Merlot and Bordeaux.
Don't sweat it.
France lost most of its original vines.

>peaches with hints of chocolate
What wine was that? That's not a combination that normally occurs

It's easy to pick out cherries, strawberries, lemon, green apple, and buttered popcorn in different wines

You don't need an expert palate to pick that stuff out

Do you laugh when someone claims to taste iodine or peat in an Islay scotch? Or, since you've experienced it, it's suddenly plausible now?

>things that aren't in wine to draw comparisons
Cool.
You're the reason people in double blind tests can't tell an expensive wine to a cheap one.
It's all marketing and drawing parallels to things that, not only aren't in wine, but do not taste like it is bullshit.
Wine all tastes different, they all have different characteristics, but no wine tastes like fucking molasses or chocolate.
Get a fucking clue.

Yeah I too have trouble telling American "Merlot" which is 90% from Merlot with a little bit of Cab Franc in it, from Bordeaux containing 90% Merlot with a little bit of Cab Franc in it

Guess we can't all be master somms

>Those descriptions are bullshit.
Sometimes they are. I've seen tasting notes on labels that bore no relation whatsoever to the wine in the bottle. Either they don't give a shit, or they wrote the notes for a past vintage and never updated them.

But that doesn't mean wine cannot display distinct flavors reminiscent of other things. It's easy to taste lychee in Gewürztraminer, grapefruit in Sauvignon Blanc and green apple or melon in some Chardonnays. You can get something like cherry from many reds, especially those from Burgundy. Stuff like tobacco, leather and graphite is a bit more of a stretch, but some wines have flavors that could be described like that.

There is a formalized language of wine, but it's heavily borrowed from French and sounds ridiculous in English to anyone outside of the industry.

The french climate, land and style hasn't changed all that much, though. In typical French fashion style is codified, so it's easy to wrap your head around the benchmarks for each style with a little experience. Because the law mandates the wine has to be made in a specific manner from specific grapes grown in a specific place if it's going to bear that specific name. French wine makers know customers expect a wine with a specific name of the label to taste a certain way, and they strive to nail that ideal year to year. Of course anyone with the right grapes and knowledge could do that, but in France it's a given. That makes it a good starting point for understanding what the classic styles are.

Oz and James's Big Wine Adventure - Season 1: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA039E175F330A505

Bordeaux is the wine that pretty much created the French export wine industry. There are three styles of red made there, and they're probably the most copied styles in the world. It shouldn't be a surprise that some folks outside of France manage to nail these styles. But when you buy a French wine that says Bordeaux on the label you know what you're getting.

Yeah, I was being sarcastic because the guy didn't seem to grasp the distinction between varietals and AOCs

Bordeaux blends are always going to seem to be "evidence" that all wine is the same, because most of the international wine industry has bent over backwards for decades trying to make everything everywhere taste like bordeaux. Of course you're going to think "Merlot" tastes like bordeaux. That's the whole fucking point.

>tfw I have a wine from Pommard

man I have to move to france

The Italians did pretty well making a typical Bordeaux blend and adding a little Sangiovese. Wa la! Super Tuscans for $300 a bottle.

There are cheap super tuscans though. And they're great.

Try various wines as time goes by, make a note (or take a photo on your phone) of the ones that you like. Go from there.

Chilean wines IMHO are a real bargain.

How cheap we talking here? I don't consider $60 "cheap"

I was being sarcastic. Making a Bordeaux blend Italian by adding some Sangiovese to it was fucking brilliant, and one could argue one of those cases where someone else managed to improve upon the highly codified French ideal. But the Italians are almost as stuck in their ways as the French, which is what has allowed Spain to capture a huge chunk of the market.

It's just shorthand for groups of chemicals that are commonly found in those things dude, you think it would be easier if people went around going "yes this has strong notes of 4-methylene-1-(1-methylethyl)bicyclo[3.1.0]hexane balanced with a touch of (2S,3R,4S,5S,6R)-2-[2-(3,4-dihydroxyphenyl)-5,7-dihydroxychromenylium-3-yl]oxy-6-(hydroxymethyl)oxane-3,4,5-triol chloride, with just a hint of 4,8a-Dimethyl-decahydronaphthalen-4a-ol; Octahydro-4,8a-dimethyl-4a(2H)-naphthalenol"?

#REKT

fucking IUPAC

No, I think it would be easier if people described the difference between wines, which all have a certain nucleous they share rather than throwing darts at a dart board where everyone's board is in different locations.

Everyone acknowledges that wines taste differently, but you could ask two people(even professionals) to describe the taste of the same wine and have completely different opinions.
A blind man makes a better taste tester becase his other senses are sharper and not subject to tasting with our eyes. We taste with our eyes when we look at a foods appealing aesthetics, price, and even the name.

I would maintain that most wine tasting "wisdom" is based on heresay and not on scientific or chemical fact.

An opinion is "I think this is 91 out of 100 good boy points"

What you're bitching about is people who make wild and crazy claims like "malolactic conversion lowers acidity and causes chardonnay to taste less like apples and more like butter"

No one disputes this stuff except people who think wine is a conspiracy to make them feel unsophisticated. The chemistry wouldn't work if it was opinions

I agree that a lot of it is certainly subjective. But even I (as a complete wine pleb) recognize certain flavors in some wines (and liquor as well).

I have certainly tasted wine that reminded me of raspberries, oak, tobacco, vanilla, and so on. If you say to me "this wine has notes of peaches" then I know exactly what you mean. And I like said, I'm a self-admitted wine pleb.

Yeah, there's a lot of bullshit when it comes to wine tasting, but that doesn't mean that all of it is.

>I think it would be easier if people described the difference between wines

That's what they're doing. When someone says a wine is peppery, it just means "one difference between this wine and an average of most wines is that this has more of a taste of pepper."

We don't have a standardised way of referring to directions and distances in some hypothetical flavour space, so we have to rely on comparing things to other common points of reference.

>makes fermented grapes taste less like another fruit and more like a dairy product
You're beyond help.
It will taste different between the two, but there's not going to be a consensus.

I suppose one nice thing about the beer world is that there are specific words to describe a beer that would be 100% accurate.
A beer could be described as hoppy, malty, fruity(grapefruit/orange peels added), chocolate(cocao nibs), coffee(coffee beans), yeasty(Belgian), and many other flavours.
It's not some misguided attempt at describing some fermented grapes taste with things that taste nothing like what's in the bottle.

It's not a question of help. It's that the short hand term in the wine industry for the taste of malolactic fermentation is "buttery". It's not something this user just made up. It's the actual term used in the business.

Many of the wine terms commonly used in the industry sound absurd in English (but much less so in French). Hell, "typicity" isn't even technically a word in English, but it's used all the time when talking about wine.

So the wine world outside of France desperately needs new descriptors then because to the layman who doesn't have his/her head so far up the wine maker's ass it sounds, as you said "absurd".

No. It's just that the French codify things, particularly things related to food and wine. There's no reason to reinvent the language of wine when they've already created it. Yeah, it sounds weird to describe fermented grape juice as creamy, buttery, round or having structure. But's only because wine is not part of your culture, so the language of it is unfamiliar to you.

I don't agree with this, they "sound absurd" because retards think anything related to wine is pretentious. Doesn't matter what term you use. The guy is getting mad over butter. What can you even say to that? Someone like that isn't worth trying to appeal to. It's like when you explain a computer term to one of those people who doesn't know or care what a web browser is, and they get mad and ask you to simplify it. There's no point.

There are a very few terms that are legitimately "too french" to not sound funny, like "garrigue" or "cassis", but the vast majority of Anglophone wine words are just fine, and for the rare exceptions, people need to learn to deal.
No

>retards think anything related to wine is pretentious.
Agreed, but the fact that the terms are mostly borrowed from French doesn't help. For a good chunk of the 20th Century anything French was lampooned as being overly fussy and pretentious. So it's kind of a double whammy. You're talking about wine AND using terms borrowed from French. That's too much for some Americans to wrap their heads around.

The internet would be a better place if people stopped getting into full defensive mode when referring to things related to France and Japan

They're real places, and when you walk on eggshells to avoid triggering passportless basement dwellers, it's a huge waste of energy and degrades the quality of conversations

Yes.

It will still be wine, but the way we describe it will be much more informative.

Yeah and let's stop using gendered pronouns. Too problematic :^)

That's a reasonable comparison for certain.

> How can I appreciate red wine?
Brew some yourself. Maybe from a kit. No, it's not gonna be the best wine ever, but that's not the point.

'sides if you find out that unfermented grape juice works better for you that's just as fine.

>France and Japan
I was just talking about this with my wife. Japan and France are cultural refiners and codifiers. They love coming up with standards, and set their standards high enough that people of a populist bent find them irritating. Because they were stratified societies, and their high standards were not meant to apply to everyone, just the elites. So someone sensing that some of this shit was created to expose them as a pleb isn't that far off. But that doesn't apply to the entire wine world. Only a small percent of the wine produced is meant to be laid down for decades and consumed by the elites only. The vast majority of it is vin ordinaire. Even the French blue collar worker taking his summer vacation at the beach is going to wash down his plate of oysters with a supermarket tier white Bordeaux, regardless of the fact he'll go his whole life without tasting a vintage red Bordeaux from 35 years ago while sitting in a two Michelin star restaurant. He'll notice that last year was a good year for white Bordeaux, though.
Just learn the language of the business if you want to get into it, just like you learn the grape varietals and regions associated with them.

>35 year old wine
Wine is best within 5 years.
Even if it was a good year for the grapes, the characteristics will have dulled by then.

It's just bullshit spouted by short-dicked white men with too much money.

>the characteristics will have dulled by then
That's kind of the point of long bottle aging. When you have a wine with enough structure to last a while you can age it until the fruit recedes into the background and the tannins soften up. It becomes an entirely different thing.

No

Wines meant for age can be harsh and not so great when you drink them too soon

Most wines are best drunk within a few years. Some within the year

That doesn't mean they're all like that

Oh good, let's bring race into this
Might as well religion too

This. Some wine is best if you drink it right away. Some improves for a while, maybe a few years, and then goes downhill. And some will continue to improve for decades.

95% of people who sip a glass of wine and go off like "ooh i taste the rich italian soil with a hint of chocolate and the feel of licking a fairies butthole" are just trying to sound sophisticated.

Try different bottles and find something you like and remember that ratings, awards and even price differences are complete bullshit when it comes to wine.

For me, wine pretty much just tastes like wine and beer pretty much just tastes like beer. Sure there are differences but they just don't seem as apparent to me as they are to other people.

I'm in the exact same camp, OP. 2 Buck Chuck tastes great to me and any expensive wines just taste the same.
I feel bad for not being able to appreciate it.

And if you think about it this makes sense in a wine drinking culture. Drink the wine that's best for young drinking right away. Wine that's going to be too tannic and abrasive to drink young gets cellared for x number of years. If x is a large number you can charge a huge premium for that wine when its ready because there was so much extra effort and time involved in making it ready to drink. And those with plenty of money to spend will develop a taste for wines like that, because they do taste very different from young wines. Thus the become prestige wines.

That's where elitism comes into wine - specific vintages with the "right" amount of bottle age - these are lovely things to drink that only a few can afford. People who aren't part of the elite showing off by buying those bottles could be seen as pretentious. But anything less than that is just ordinary wine, and there's nothing pretentious about it, unless you're from a place where even having a passing knowledge about wine would raise eyebrows. If you want to get into wine and live in such a place the first thing you should do is consider moving somewhere else.

>ratings, awards and even price differences are complete bullshit when it comes to wine
This is true more often than not. But region, varietal and weather conditions during a particular growing season, along with the decisions the wine make made will shape the character of the wine. And knowing about those things increases the chance of finding wines you will like.