Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better?

[mr x]

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2 ... nob&st=cse

I knew it...

[derek]

The question doesn't even make sense.

I have absolutely no doubt that - to a degree - they're right. Take a random group and subject them to blind tests and ask which wine is "more enjoyable", and you'll get pretty much random results.

Now take another random group - who don't necessarily know anything about wine - and ask them things _about_ the wine (still in a blind tasting). If you ask them which wines have more flavours, sweetness, bitterness, bouquet, etc, then you start to see correlations between price and the attributes that people _say_ make wine enjoyable.

The most enjoyable wines I've ever had have included wines I can't afford - but there have also been a few that I _can_ (but probably wouldn't). The 30 year old Vega Sicilia was everything it was supposed to be, and I believe I could recognize that Clay Station Viognier again, blind.

That said, I've seen a guy, whose knowledge of American wine is so extensive that he can tell you which vineyard a wine came from, be unable to tell whether a wine in a ceramic goblet was red or white.

The late Little Fat Wino (Larry Paterson, http://littlefatwino.com/) made a second career out of boosting the use of hybrid grapes in Canada, and routinely held blind tastings of wines made from grapes grown in places like Ottawa against fine Bordeauxs, and _always_ had the hybrid wines do well. Of course, they were generally hand-made by the best amateur winemakers - if you had to put a price on them based on the time and effort of the vintner, they wouldn't be cheap either!