Buy california wine, it's the best in the world, they said

realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infamous_study_on_wine_tasting.html

theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-tasting-junk-science-analysis

youtube.com/watch?v=bdcG7PlkAg0

io9.gizmodo.com/wine-tasting-is-bullshit-heres-why-496098276

tl;dr: wine is for pretentious faggots who can't tell the difference between a 3 buck chuck and a 300$ merlot.

freakonomics.com/podcast/freakonomics-radio-do-more-expensive-wines-taste-better/

winos btfo lol

why would anyone enjoy things now that science has shown things don't real

get that $2 australian shit, real tasty, good value

Americans hate pinot noir. They may say they love it. They may tell you it's their favorite grape ever. But what they love is the idea of it, the image that it has.

Wine makers are not dumb. They know what Americans want. So Americans get what they deserve. Something crafted to please a people who were fed Coca Cola before even having teeth, and whose strongest opinions on food relate to regional drive thru menus

The dog should have finished the job

Its decent

I live in New Zealand

>apparently good quality Marlborough, Otago and Martinborough wines

>sell in Asia and America for hideously inflated prices

>12 nzd a bottle here

>I still buy Australian cask wine

NZ wine isn't very good
The SB tastes like fruit punch spiked with cat piss
Kiwis and other aussie states should stick to shitty shiraz in a bag

I think we have potential, our terroir is quite good, but we just don't have the history or the experience. Give us another couple hundred years and we'll see.

You seem to have a very black and white picture of the entirety of a population of 300 million+ people.

>paying more than 15€ for bottle of wine

Show me the good American pinot noirs, then. I know which ones they are. They are so rare as to be statistically insignificant. Do you know of any? Doubt it. Your idea of "good" pinot means coca cola grapes and gag-inducing amounts of vanilla extract. You probably unironically drink meiomi.

>it's cheaper than euro wine but decent

Well, that's at least half correct.

yuropeen here.
I have no clue about american wine culture, can anyone run me through the basics?
I've always wondered how wine works in the US

I've seen this at walmart but never tried it.

There are only a few small enclaves where people actually care about wine (as in, they don't have a "favorite wine", they drink wine regularly, they don't subscribe to wine "lifestyle" magazines). These people have a simple $5 corkscrew and a small assortment of glassware. These places are in New York, Seattle, and San Francisco, with a few small clusters outside of those zones. These are places inhabited by people that the common NEET might call "cucks" because they care about food enough to eat real food that doesn't come from a frozen microwave-ready container. Unfortunately these areas in aggregate still do not consume nearly enough wine to influence the domestic market so the majority of the good wine is imported.

Outside of those areas wine is a "lifestyle choice" and is perceived as something you do to be "fancy" or "upper class". Despite having piles of magazines and expensive gadgets related to wine, people are too intimidated by it to drink what they enjoy, and therefore choose wine based on a 2-digit numeric score found in one of several similar magazines. The primary drivers of these scores are alcohol levels, opacity, and charred new oak smell, and therefore any winery that wishes to survive slowly evolves so that its portfolio of wines asymptotically approaches the ideal of a glass of smuckers jam dosed with a teaspoonful of artificial vanilla extract. Individual varietal characteristics become faults, and under American law significant amounts of adjuncts and unlisted grapes/grape extracts (besides the actual oak) are permitted to be added, such as syrah juice to pinot noir, or just straight up Mega Purple which is still legally considered grapes. (continued)

In most of America wine drinking is a highly ritualized affair like the cargo cult people of post-WW2 south pacific. Most can't necessarily explain why one might want to serve a cabernet sauvignon at a warmer temperature than a sauvignon blanc, they just know it's The Rules. Most don't necessarily know or care why a small splash is poured at a restaurant before pouring the rest of the bottle, they just know they must follow the process or be humiliated. They lurch through all aspects of wine drinking in perpetual fear of being humiliated, for the purpose of wine to most Americans is to "be classy" and if you don't follow the rules rigidly, it defeats the whole purpose of wine. (note another subculture of wine appreciation is the "The Price is Right" game, in which the purpose of wine is invalidated if you can't guess the retail price of the bottle down to the last significant digit. There is a large body of pseudo-academic journalism dedicated to "The Price is Right" wine subculture.

Finally, in most of America the nicest meal anyone can imagine is a big piece of salted cooked beef on a plate. Since wine is "fancy" and salted cooked beef is also "fancy", logically it follows that the most ideal wine is wine that goes with salted cooked beef. Therefore pretty much any other style of wine, such as medium-bodied or light-bodied reds, let alone white wines or more "exotic" varieties like orange wines, late harvest wines, fortified wines, or sparkling wines, are perceived as being defective. A knowledgeable sommelier in these areas will patiently explain why drinking such wines is "wrong" and possibly "low class". God forbid anyone enjoy a sweet wine, that's for women lol!
(continued)

(continued)
Oh, and lastly, the gender thing. Rural America has a strong preoccupation with a superfluous frontier masculinity, our analogue to your political Islam. In this world drinking is not something to be done for pleasure, but is instead an act of bravado done to show off ones capacity to endure hardship, and the most noxious beverages (moonshine, Islay malts with minimal barrel age, DIPA, etc) are considered to enhance one's masculine status thereby confirming one's standing in the community and therefore minimize the risk of being killed for your mate/resources/etc.

So wine can only be enjoyed in rare, highly ritualized situations like The Steak Dinner, where the presence of steak (very manly) can safely neuter the dangerously non-unpleasant characteristics of the wine. Note there are also many other Rules with The Steak Dinner (like, must always be served blue-rare, must not have sauce, etc). So even if one accidentally breaks one of The Rules for wine, the total score at the end of the dinner is what determines how successfully you acted classy and therefore how successful the meal was.

I hope this was useful.

Damn, this seems a little bitter but accurate to what I've seen from american media. Thanks for the insight.

I'm not really an expert but this kind of behavior is also present in places where wine isn't grown locally here in Germany, mostly just city kids that never really left their town or comfort zones.

We're lucky that Germany and central europe in general is pretty small, so amazing wine is everywhere and people won't fall for the price=quality-fallacy that often.

You should come over and visit the Rhineland Palatinate area around here. Amazing white wine, lots of variety and creativity. Red wine in Germany is shit though unfortunately, although imports from spain, france and italy are totally affordable due to the vicinity

I live in Argentina.
Wine is a cultural staple here.

Nothing like a nice malbec with a steak BBQ or a classy sauvignon blanc with your sushi.

We are a major consumer and a major exporter. I can get Malbecs, Cabernets and Syrahs that are sold in Europe for $15-30 USD inflated prices, at $8-15 USD instead, so life is good.

I never had Californian wine. Is it any good? Or was it? All I know about it is that meme movie with Paul Giamatti.

I had pinot noir but I'm not sure it was from Cali.

Pic related is what I recommend you.
Skipped all the meme wines and went straight to the proven, good stuff.

Of all our "normal" export wines (not elite) this is probably the best. You should be able to get it somewhere north of $15 USD for the 2014 version.

On the down side, you live in Argentina.

This is my Patagonian town.
It's pretty comfy all things considered.

I showed you mine so you show me yours.

Looks cozy. Does it really snow in the summer or is that an old picture?

Look up "the judgment of pairs" California wine was rated better than any wine in the world

Our winter is in July during your summer. (Southern Hemisphere)

But yeah you can get snow in the summer sometimes. It's rare but can happen.

You can spot people who don't give a shit about wine because they act like nobody has heard of the judgment of paris

1976 was 41 years ago.

WHY DO NORTHERNERS NOT KNOW ABOUT HEMISPHERICAL SEASONAL DIFFERENCES

I have a problem with this study. Not just the small sample size but who they used for it. These were "wine experts in training". I would guess that they made decisions based on the color of the wine just so that they didn't get the wrong answer (even if what they tasted didn't match). They should do it with distinguished wine professionals or just regular people (although regular people probably would not be able to describe it properly) instead or people who had something to prove. Also they should have done the same test while blindfolded in order to rule out any other factors.

Also don't get me wrong, I agree with the conclusion just based on my own experiences. This just seems like a bad experiment.

REMINDER that French wines are no longer french because of the fires.

I don't drink California wine for these two reasons:
- Lack of restraint. The style established is what this user described and that's not what I want to drink.
- Price. If you want something that isn't a high alcohol fruit bomb with too much residual sugar the price is going to be outrageous compared to bottles from Spain, France or Italy.

This is typical of the race to the bottom we see in many American foods. So much emphasis is put on making mass market cheap shit that anything better commands a luxury price. There is no middle ground. You're either drinking mass market garbage or something where half the price is the prestige of the vineyard. When you see the market as extremes - box wine and prestige bottles, you ignore the vins ordinaires. I understand this as a consequence of American history. Until recently the only people drinking wine in America were snobs and bums, so there really wasn't a middle market to appeal to. As that middle market emerged over the last few decades California winemakers had no idea what ordinary wine was supposed to taste like, so they just put fancier labels on their fruit bombs and upped the price of them.

American here, can confirm truth.

wine tasting notes are bullshit. people get so hung up on tasting pear and rose and currant in their wines that they can't reliably describe the wine based on acidity/sweetness/body. Of course 99% of the people you sell wine to just want you to tell them that they are going to like it. I've always had more success telling people what I think they want to hear or what I think I'm supposed to be "tasting" than telling them what I'm actually tasting. What I'm actually tasting is fermented grape juice

>What I'm actually tasting is fermented grape juice
Congratulations! You are a pleb.

gotem

>American here, can confirm truth.
Really depends on where you are and who you are. Wine drinking is completely normalized among the urban affluent, as well as many sons and daughters of 20th Century European immigrant heritage. It's more of a "fancy" thing in suburban and rural places.
>wine tasting notes are bullshit.
As printed on bottles of mass market wines? Totally agree. But that doesn't mean some fermented grape juice is a more interesting, complex experience than others. Some has a nice finish. Some has a pleasing aroma. Lots of it has off flavors that kind of undermine the pleasure of it. Tasting your way through a bunch of wines to find what you like is completely legit, as is understanding the established styles of the stuff.

This.

And another thing regarding tasting notes. It's a fuck of a lot easier to convey the taste of a wine by saying "it has notes of blackberry" compared to "it has a faint taste of 1,1-Dimethoxyethane, 2-Hydroxy-2-methyl-3-butene, and Cyclohexanol"

wine is just a meme for pretentious Eurofaggots and snobs to drink while they browse art galleries or discuss stock prices or whatever other bullshit snob white fucks do, while they talk about the 'tanins' and the 'notes of citrus' or whatever made up bullshit, pretending to find flavors while its all the same fucking grape juice.

give me a real drink any day of the week.

This assumes that you are actually "tasting" blackberry in the wine, rather than just making an association between the colour and the and the fruity character of the liquid, and judging based on what you know red wines are "supposed" to taste like. Have you looked at this study

>This assumes that you are actually "tasting" blackberry in the wine

And you are. Wine contains thousands of individual chemicals. Some of those overlap with other foods which is the whole point of saying that such-and-such wine has peach (or whatever) flavor. That happens because the wine and peaches (or whatever) contain some of the same aromatic or flavorful compounds.

Color and texture/mouthfeel is a separate thing altogether, and it would be fundamentally incorrect to make a flavor statement base on color or physical characteristics.

I have read most of those studies. The problem is that people are drawing the wrong conclusions from them. Yes, it's certainly true that in some cases even wine experts can't tell one thing from another. But many other times the results are the opposite. There is certainly a lot of bullshit in the wine tasting field--no doubt about that. But it's equally incorrect to assume that ALL of it is bullshit.

>Posts a picture of piss water
"Muh hops"
"Mmmm muh triple-brewed distilled notes of oak"

al/ck/ needs to fuck off and stay fucked off. Chocolate milk is the best.

fair enough senpai

similar studies have been made with beer in the 70s with the same results, everybody uses their knowledge and opinions when judging food, its no different for any other drink, meat or whatever

Better than that French swill. You know the whole country is in the process of replanting their grapes because their wine is $2.99 garbage, right?

>tons of California wineries
>I but the shittiest, overpriced bottle
>Cali wine sucks, huh?

Wow you should write professional reviews. You're bringing a lot of perspective that people will find valuable.

snobby white guy detected

Eagle Creek is pretty gud.

Shut up you asshurt irrelevant peasant. Just be glad an American boot hasn't stomped your head in... yet.

people who earn lots of money working at california tech companioes

Why would an American boot stomp my head? What brand do you mean? Red Wings moved production overseas, maybe Allen Edmonds? Dalton or Fifth Street?