Don't shake the wine, you will damage it!

>don't shake the wine, you will damage it!
>don't drink it yet, it needs to "breath"
>i am too sophisticated for american wine
>ooh this is a great vintage lol

Why are wine knowers so full of bullshit?

You don't shake because older wines can have sediment that is better left in the bottle, and shaking prevents it from settling

Wine changes flavor when exposed to oxygen, and a lot of wines, particularly big red wines, could use a little time uncorked to mellow out.

American wines can be very good but, besides a few regions, are generally more fruit forward than those who prefer more earthiness or minerality in wines.

Growing years vary and some are better than others.

Go back to your mchicken or 'go za threads.

This guy is right.

Who the fuck is a self-proclaimed "wine knower" saying American wines are unsophisticated? I prefer California reds to most other countries/regions, but I realize that's my own preference. Bit harder to find decent California reds at a reasonable price since I moved to NYC, though.

All the shops tend towards Italian and French stuff, although I see Californian a lot in restaurants. Weird. I figure it must be a distribution issue (blue law remnant) because Manhattan is dumb as fuck regarding that kind of thing.

The only thing on that list that is actually helpful is

> let it breathe first

But that doesn't turn wine into gold

>tfw took a class on wine and people expect shit out of you.

>tfw trying not to be elitistbut since its wine most people assume you are.

Yep. My parents lived in wine country and I got to try all sorts of great wines over the years. And yet.. I still like box wine. It's really come a ways in the past decade. It's just important to know what you like and be able to distinguish that when pairing it with food.

> don't buy wine at the liquor store
> the scanner will cause electrical interfetterence
> only buy wine at specialty wine merchants that know the price by heart

Who cares? Wine just tastes like vinegar anyway.

> Wine just tastes like vinegar
I have never in my life had a wine that tastes like vinegar.

Wine does indeed become vinegar, if you let it oxidised for a month.

>it needs to "breath"

wut

b-but vinegar is made from vine!...
If you can't make a difference between wine and vinegar, just tay with your coke

>implying you aren't just pretentious idiots that circlejerk over price and vintage

Question for wine people, I used half of a bottle of shiraz for cooking on Christmas day and sealed the bottle and left it at room temperature since, is it still going to be ok to cook with or should i have used it sooner?

The wine buyer for Costco has the right idea. At the end of the day wine is a beverage. Pissed off a ton of wine lovers but it's true.

to cook it's still ok ,you can everify drink it but it will have loose a lot of taste

>don't shake the wine, you will damage it!
This is only for quite old wine, which I don't drink. The oldest vintage I've had is 2009.
>don't drink it yet, it needs to "breath"
Wine does taste different when it's oxidised, but it isn't necessarily better. Often, I find I prefer the taste of a freshly opened Bordeaux to one that's "breathed" for a few hours.

It depends on the wine really, but the change in flavour isn't so drastic that you MUST let the wine breathe. It's just preference.
>i am too sophisticated for american wine
American wine, California in particular, is some of the fruitiest, oakiest, boldest wine I've had, and those are all good things. It's less subtle than Old World wine, but if you want bold and fruity, that's what California is known for, and it's great.

I consider Bordeaux the quintessential Old World wine, and California the quintessential New World wine. Nothing wrong with either of them. In fact, I'd say they're equals.
>ooh this is a great vintage lol
I haven't experienced this myself, but supposedly the same wine, from the same producer, is supposedly less good if it came from a bad harvest year as opposed to a good harvest year. Something like 1/4 of vintages are considered sub-optimal harvests.

So if you're getting Mouton Cadet Bordeaux, you should get the 2012 and not the 2011, because in 2011 the weather was off the entire 2 week window the vintners had to harvest their grapes, or some shit.

Again, I've never observed this, and I get a bottle of wine every other week. It doesn't make such a huge difference.

Actually, a lot of the autism around wine is just that: fussing over minute differences. The quality doesn't change that drastically. It's still all, fundamentally, alcoholic grape juice, and you should like the wine for what it is, rather than imagining it as a fragile wisp of gold, because it will never match up to those expectations. You get sick of wine like anything else.

thanks

> shiraz
You're better off pouring that Australian crap in the gutter.

Why would any self-respect human being drink Shiraz when there's perfectly good Syrah from the Rhone valley readily available?

Australian wine is made to be drunk out of boxes, so toss it in the garbage bin.

surely there's a mcchicken thread you should be busy posting in

7 deadly sins Zinfadel is very smooth imo. I really liked the bottle I had the other day. Too bad its 18 bucks or so.

Shaking wine disturbs the sediment.
Most wines benefit from being allowed to breathe.
All wine produced in the USA is objectively, fucking shit.
OP is a faggot.
Thanks.

>American
Do Europeans really shitpost like this?

You guys are all delusional retards if you actually believe you can distinguish flavors among wine. It's the same with craft beer drinkers. You hear in the reviews "oh yeah, I'm getting big big dark fruity notes - definitely some dark cherries, figs, etc". Meanwhile the breweries watching are laughing to themselves thinking "lol we didn't use any of those you idiot"

If I put a $2 bottle of Charles shaw in front of you and told you it was some meme vintage wine, you'd think it was good

>all wine tastes the same
Retard.

But craft beer can be made with aromas!

...

delicious if bait, otherwise you have no tastebuds.

Top Kriek

...

If the wine has a deposit and you shake it, you will drink the deposit.
If the wine is young there's no need to let it breathe.
American wine is shit.
The vintage meme applies only to european wines, especially french.

If it smells good you can still drink it

>i am too sophisticated for american wine
I agree OP, anyone who doesn't like plain and simple grape juice can just fuck off.

Pour it into a chinese food deli container and stick in your fridge. It'll stay good for cooking indefinitely.

The air in the bottle will have oxidised it somewhat - just taste it and see if you like it for drinking. If not, it's fine for pan sauces and for throwing into stews.
I wouldn't serve it to guests.

>I can't tell the difference, that means nobody can!

Congrats on all the free (You)s.

Boxed wine master race reporting. Glass of red every night for health.

>mfw the scene in somm when the guy mistakes some cheapo chardonnay for old world vintage

Yeah, the super cheap kind that's meant for hobos and kids who mix it with soft drinks.

California reds taste like woodchips.

I had a Californian zinfandel that made my dick hard

> all of this anti-california rhetoric
Maybe you don't like Californian wine. Maybe it's not personally what you want out of a wine. But I'll be damned if I'm told that California style wine is bad.

It's just sweeter, more fruit-forward, and oakier - because that's where the American palette tends towards.

French wine is floral, and funky, and earthy because the French palette is influenced by French cuisine, which is altogether more savoury (at least traditionally) than the American one.

American wine growers intially dogmatically mimicked the old world, but they became more experimental, branched out, and found flavours that appeal to their home audience.

This the exact thing that makes wine regions interesting. It represents both the land, and the people and their diets.

That's what you get out of American wine.

Amen

Vintage difference makes sense when you think about it- weather variance year to year changes how the grapes grow, jow much sugar they develop, what yields are like etc. There are definitely differences. Good vintners will be able to make good wine under any conditions, though- it might be different than another year, but it'll still be good. Major quality fluctuation with vintage is a sign of a poor winery.

>palette
Retard.

It's breathe, you retard.

Sommelier here...
There is unequivocally a difference in taste and character between low and high end wines. What effects most pricing is the quality of the soil/real estate/'terroir' (is the soil a backyard in Bakersfield or 100,000 year old remnants of crushed seashells in Chablis, France) (is the location next to an industrial gas refinery in Oxnard or nestled in the Chilean mountains in an area that receives an Earth Porn-level sea dog every morning to moisturize and cool the grapes in early fall?). Things like this effect the profile of the grape, how healthy and ripe they become, how they reach maturity (fast and quick like a microwaved hot pocket or slow and subtle like an 8 hour pork shoulder).
Then the picking and handling of the grapes...does a giant mechanized machine tear through the field or do you pay a crew of second and third generation laborers who take pride in what they do and pick the grapes the same way you do at the store?
Then when they're sorted, did you buy an old used machine from the 60s that ends up keeping bad grapes, stems, etc or do you pick out each grape by hand or using a 200k state of the art machine that picks grapes based off 360 degree cameras and sensors with multiple air rifles that shoot the bad grapes off the line?
1/2

Then the 'artistry'. Many bottles of wine are blends; you aren't always drinking 100% of a single vineyard of one grape. It's usually a blend of multiple vineyards and often multiple grapes. Who's the 'chef' or 'mixologist' you chose? What are their qualifications and track record?
A fun tasting setting is at Joseph Phelps in Napa where you do a tasting of their most famous wine 'Insignia' which is a Bordeaux blend of 3-5 grape varietals. In this tasting you get a beaker, wine glasses and access to the same wine that the master winemaker used and you get to portion your own blend with the same parts to make your own version of Insignia. (Granted you don't get the chance to let it rest and fully integrate) and usually it comes out pretty good which really shows that it's the first few steps I mentioned that really make a good wine.
ALL of the above cost money. Two buck chuck from Trader Joe's and Yellowtail Shiraz are examples of big, mechanized productions. A grand cru Burgundy or Hermitage from France are small plots of land that are on incredible wine growing real estate that have been passed down in families for sometimes ten+ generations.
2/3

When you taste wine you taste these differences and the characteristics of what is 'good' wine. Where new wine people get lost and make dumb comments about their being no difference in wine is when you hold up a cheap wine and ask why it's good and cheap. They aren't mutually exclusive. There are tons of cheap wines I enjoy drinking because the decision making process in creating it was done smartly and with care even if sacrifices were made for cost.
However, you will rarely find something from a Grand Cru that is simply 'bad'. Wine is subjective and it's also something you have to work at obtaining skill into recognize and appreciate its complexity. Think of cheese. Plenty of layman might think a stinky, well crafted raw goats milk cheese is over priced and awful because all they've ever had were Kraft singles...that doesn't make them right.
3/3

>implying grape juice tastes differently

All wine tastes the same, you could pour some alcohol in a bottle of Welsh's grape juice and I guarantee it'd taste the exact same as your meme wines.