What's your top price point?

[GordonCooks]

seems to me , an "expert" should, @least, know how to spell the sauterne in question!

Wouldn't that be "Sauternes"?

[baruch]

excellente! my french is a little rusty & was trying to notate the difference bet the village & the sauternes, but correct syntax (not spelling) is correct syntax & sauternes IS, in fact, both singular & plural despite the appearance - touche!

[Steve Plotnicki]

I guess that some people know more about spelling then they know about food and wine. (rimshot please. you guys need a rimshot icon)

[Toby]

baruch, I think my point is that personal attacks are unnecessary and unpleasant, detract from real points being made, and further have a way of rebounding.

[baruch]

merci, is that what u meant? pardon, i thought u were concerned with syntax. O. & i see chief winsob has chimed in from the peanut gallery, gee, what would we do without him.

love your restraint

[Fat Guy]

Baruch: You've given me a rare opportunity to defend Plotnicki. Please leave the guy alone. Personal attacks of this nature are not permissible under our rules. This will be your only warning.

[tommy]

i reluctantly agree.

[stefanyb]

merci, is that what u meant? pardon, i thought u were concerned with syntax. O. & i see chief winsob has chimed in from the peanut gallery, gee, what would we do without him.

love your restraint 

What means winsob?

[Steve Plotnicki]

It was an affectionate short hand for wine snob.

Edited December 4, 2002 by Steve Plotnicki (log)

[Wilfrid]

It's an anagram for wine snob, except ingeniously omitting two letters. Cunning stuff.

[stefanyb]

It's an anagram for wine snob, except ingeniously omitting two letters.  Cunning stuff.

kind of like ahole, huh.

[baruch]

don't worry, this will be my last post. i find it insulting that u would take sides on an exchange - free speech? u mean your free speech! some site - u allow the pompous ass, "Chief Winsob" to continually dominate & browbeat, then when someone calls him on it, u come out of the shadows with your BS.

if u will objectively notice, the exchange did not turn until the Chief decided to attempt to browbeat further & then when he could not, it was the CHIEF that resorted to cheap attacks.

be that as it may, my comments have always been constructive, not self-serving, & if that is how u feel & prefer to perpetuate the superficiality, then so be it.

stefanyb: winsob is the official name for the wine snob society which is headed by the Chief Winsob who i believe u should be able to figure out on your own. if not, ask the F-G since he is so good @ clarification

[stefanyb]

don't worry, this will be my last post. i find it insulting that u would take sides on an exchange - free speech? u mean your free speech! some site - u allow the pompous ass, "Chief Winsob" to continually dominate & browbeat, then when someone calls him on it, u come out of the shadows with your BS.

if u will objectively notice, the exchange did not turn until the Chief decided to attempt to browbeat further & then when he could not, it was the CHIEF that resorted to cheap attacks.

be that as it may, my comments have always been constructive, not self-serving, & if that is how u feel & prefer to perpetuate the superficiality, then so be it.

stefanyb: winsob is the official name for the wine snob society which is headed by the Chief Winsob who i believe u should be able to figure out on your own. if not, ask the F-G since he is so good @ clarification 

Baruch,

What you fail to realize is that the so-called browbeating is nothing more than someone stating their opinion, right, wrong, or otherwise. There can always be a response to it by the other person stating his/her opinion. These exchanges only add to the information a thread may contain.

On the other hand, name calling and personal attacks do not add anything to the site and are not permitted anyway.

[britcook]

Baruch: You've given me a rare opportunity to defend Plotnicki. Please leave the guy alone. Personal attacks of this nature are not permissible under our rules. This will be your only warning.

I am in total agreement about personal attacks but (and there has to be a but in this sentence construct) there has to be some amount of interplay, gentle prodding, call it what you will to allow a certain amount of robust argument. At the moment, for instance, I'm too much of a relative newcomer to work out whether my occasional disagreements with Mr Plotnicki are the result of me failing to adequately explain my points or the result of him sticking to his own "interesting" agenda come hell, fire or high water. But the threads have a certain frisson which distinguishes this forum from the bland masses. But said gentleman (Mr P) is not immune to personal attacks, when called to account for his wilful misspelling of d'Yquem retorts

I guess that some people know more about spelling then they know about food and wine

a cheap shot which implies that those of us that CAN spell must somehow be ignorant in matters of food and wine. If one is going to establish oneself as an arbiter of quality, which Steve clearly aspires to do, then surely that quality should extend to being able to spell well known names correctly, disregarding odd typos. And casting aspersions on those that attempt to assist his education should be very much frowned upon.

[tighe]

What I'm talking about are business dinners, where perhaps the European Managing Director feels a need to establish cultural authority over his Yankee underlings, so he picks a wine without consulting the table about what's been ordered, and he chooses without regard to real quality, and even though he knows less about wine, especially North American wine, than I do, which is saying something. (Later, you find out that this guy's favorite U.S. restaurant is Red Lobster.)

This reminds me of a particularly heinous account of this type of behavior I read about in the WSJ a number of years ago, when the Asian economies were riding high. Apparently it had become fashionable for business men to buy very expensive Bourdeaux and Burgundy vintages for dinner parties. However, since the taste was often not to the liking of the guests they were routinely mixed with Coke or had sugar added to them at the table.

As far as the topic at hand, I can't imagine ever spending more than about $75 for a bottle of wine, unless it was special in some way other than the quality of the wine itself (why do I feel a drubbing coming on here?). For example, I might be willing to spend a couple hundred dollars on a very old bottle of Madeira, but mostly because I think you are getting so much more than simply the Madeira itself. In my opinion much of the price of very expensive wine is in fact due to the quality of the "back-story" or "legend" if you will and has little to do with it being definitively "better" than less expensive wines.

[baphie]

don't worry, this will be my last post. i find it insulting that u would take sides on an exchange - free speech? .............if not, ask the F-G since he is so good @ clarification  

Am I the only net veteran here who keeps expecting baruch/B1FF to post "I AM 3LITE GIVE ME WINEZ D00DZ!' ?

[amandam]

Being in the industry for a very long time, bartending, retail and working for an importer, it is difficult for me to spend an exorbitant amount of money on a bottle of wine in a restaurant or in a shop, knowing the cost compared to the markup. Anyway, for great value wines, try Chilean. You can buy a great bottle of wine for $8 or $9. Any knowledgeable, honest member of a sales staff working in retail will tell you that you really don't need to spend more than $30 to get a great bottle of wine. There are so many out there.

[MartyL]

I find that with most people, as they gain more tasting experience, they become increasingly receptive to nuance and complexity and tend to enjoy and appreciate higher-end wines (and lower-end wines too) more than they did as novices.

So while an $80-$100 bottle of Chave Hermitage may not mean much to a person who is just starting out in his or her wine tasting experience, and will seem at that point to be a rip-off, after a while, that same person may view it it as a bargain relative to the experience it delivers.

[marcus]

Interestingly, tastings held with very inexperienced wine drinkers have shown that many people can accurately rate the relative quality of a set of wines, in line with expert opinion, despite their lack of experience. What they can't do is explain their decisions and there is no implication that they would be willing to pay the premium required to drink the finer wines. This tends to indicate that wine quality and value is to a considerable extent an objective characteristic, and not an extraneous one driven by snobbery, etc. No doubt, the real enjoyment of wine will come from greater knowledge and experience along with a love of gustatory things.

I believe that food lovers, as participants in eGullet are, who wax eloquent about all aspects of food, should be equally interested in wine. The issue is that as expensive as fine dining may be, fine wines are far more expensive, and restaurant markups further exacerbate this problem. This is the underlying theme of this thread. The solutions are to either find better value wines, not an easy thing to do on most restaurant wine lists, or to spend much much more, which is not an option for most.

Faced with this dilemma, many posters strike out against both the wine industry and the consumers who are perceived to be driving up the prices for "wrong reasons". There have been many assertions, but overall they are not valid. The wine market is a fully rational supply and demand market where there is a lot of demand chasing a very small and inelastic supply of top quality wine. Prices are so high, that the vast majority of buyers are only in it because they love the stuff. Steve P's point that there is a level at which wine transforms from a commodity to art is quite profound.

There is no overall solution, but there are ways of obtaining the same quality for less. To oversimplify, the price of a wine is based on its brand name, production volume, vintage year, quality, flavor profile and region. Let me focus briefly on bordeaux, which is what I know best, to illustrate. Petrus is a great wine, but its extravagent price is to a large extent driven by its small production. Gruaud Larose is an excellent wine that often sells for less than its peers because of its very large production. Graves, such as Haut Brion, typically sell for much less than their peers such as Latour and Cheval Blanc becuase the flavor profile is considered less desireable. I am not an advocate of buying fine wines in off years, this is really often just paying for a label, but in every year certain wines outperform others for a variety of reasons, but will sell for less than their quality value if that year is considered less than great. Pichon Lalande 1983 is an example. I recognize that these are all relatively expensive wines, but the same technique can be applied to the next level down as well.

[mogsob]

Anyway, for great value wines, try Chilean.  You can  buy a great bottle of wine for $8 or $9 . . . you really don't need to spend more than $30 to get a great bottle of wine.

[oraklet]

mogsob, what does "overextracted" mean in this context?

[hollywood]

Anyway, for great value wines, try Chilean.  You can  buy a great bottle of wine for $8 or $9 . . . you really don't need to spend more than $30 to get a great bottle of wine.

I agree and disagree. Certainly, I can buy many wines that retail between $20 and $30 that will knock the socks off of wines priced at 10 times the prices (German riesling is a fine example here). But Chilean wines?? Please. Chile produces some nice, drinkable table wine. And on the upper end, some very promising wines. But, for my money, there is only one great Chilean wine, and that is Domus Aurea, which retails upwards of $50 (it is currently on the wine list at both Metrazur and March, for those interested).

Moreover, the Chileans have unfortunately embraced new world winemaking, producing the overextracted crap that defines much of California these days. These wines do not display the balance that is essential to creating a great wine.

Coincidentally (?) my wine calendar talks up Weinert (Argentina) today. Any tips?

[Steve Plotnicki]

Well I might as well take advantage of my resident expert/wine snob status and say the following.

I'm trying to say this in a way that doesn't sound insulting but, these conversations always remind me of the conversations with people who don't understand foreign films telling people who do that they are crap and have nothing to them. That might not be the best analogy but it's as close as I can come at eight in the morning after a wine blowout (to be reported on later) at Craft last night. And for some reason it gets even more adversarial when the people who understand foreign films try to explain it and they say to those who don't, try and view it in the following manner the next time you do it. Invariably they get all bent out of shape as if you attacked their dignity.

There are people who taste wine for a living. Not that I do it or anyone else here that I've seen, but there are all sorts of people from sommellers to reviewers to buyers to masters of wine who have palates that are trained to detect the various characteristics in a wine through the process of tasting. I assure you they do not do their jobs subjectively. They have very objective criteria they impose on a wine when they taste it. Then there are an entire bevy of wine consumers, whether they be collectors or restaurants or anyone else who mimic what the professionals do and calibrate their own palates along the same objective scale. And indeed among these people there are amatuer tasters who are every bit as good as professionals and possibly better in certain circumstances.

For some reason unbeknownst to me, there is an entire group of people who reject that tasting wine is a matter of a skillset that needs to be practiced. They insist that all palates are equal, and that their annointment of what constitues quality wine is just as good an opinion as anybody elses. The ultimate proclamation of this point of view is the "I know what I like" or an "X is in the eye of the beholder" statement. And what's strange about it is that the same exact people wouldn't ever dream of taking that position about other things. Would someone say they are a good opera singer when they can't sing? Or a good potter? Or as good an art critic as a professional? Never in a million years.

So inevitably on Intenet chat rooms or bulletin boards, these two groups of people clash. What happened in this thread is the personification of the dispute. Having seen this happen doezens of times there isn't much to say about it other then people shouldn't get defensive when people with more experience assert their opinion about things like quality. And I know that isn't always an easy thing to do. I have been guilty of the same behavior myself. It's hard to hear your expertise challenged when you have a personal investment in it. But I know for a fact that those who argued so vehemently to defend the Guigal will one day themselves be more experienced and they will conclude the same thing we concluded. I've seen it happen 100 times before.

The other thing that gets people worked up is the topic of money. And it isn't that money doesn't have a place in the discussion, but it's just the case that quality and money have nothing to do with each other. Yes, price is a good indicator of quality. But things aren't better because they cost more, things cost more because they are better. And I've often see questions asked by people about price and QPR (quality price ratio) that are really surrogates for justifying the price of wine they can afford. Invariably when that happens a fight breaks out. Because The simple fact is that the difference in price between d'Yqueeem and Guirard is only an inidicator of the amount of money people who can afford to will pay for the incremental increase in quality. But the relative quality of one wine compared to another resides outside the world of economics. Money has nothing to do with quality.

Finally as to personal attacks, there is no room for them because they are against the rules and for a good reason. Quite often when people feel their dignity has been attacked as I described above, and the details of the conversation goes to a level they don't really understand, they become abusive. And while it helps to get steam off their chest, it certainly doesn't advance the conversation any. And this goes for the type of tirade that went on yesterday, or Britcook's comment about my spelling. Because clearly no matter hopw puurly I spell it doesn't impact on the way a bottle of wine tastes. And that is what the conversation is supposed to be about. But I'll gladly join anyone who wants to go to eSpelling.com for some fun.

Oraklet - After they press the grapes the wine goes into tanks where it ferments. There is more then grape juice in there. There are all sort of bits and pieces from the grapes in there with the wine like the skins, pulp, etc. When you leave these pieces in along with the juice, the wine is extracting what the OED describes as;

The sum of the non-volatile solids of a wine: the sugars, non-volatile acids, minerals, phenolics, glycerol, glycols and traces of other substances such as proteins, pectins and gums."

So when someone says a wine is over-extracted they are meaning to say the winemaker allowed this process to go on too long and the wine doesn't taste right. And within wine there is a big argument on what proper extraction is. For example, Robert Parker is a modernist and he loves highly extracted wines. Traditionalists think the same wines are flawed because they are over-extracted.

Edited December 5, 2002 by Steve Plotnicki (log)

[britcook]

Steve I really don't care how well you spell, although I find it strange that you seem to misspell words which are directly in front of you but no matter, I've seen worse. What ticked me off was that you linked the ability to spell to the inability to appreciate food and wine (if you can spell you must have no taste), which is a direct insult and not the first time you've done it.

Now yet again you have hijacked a thread to parade your own agenda and I now am thoroughly confused as to whether you think paying more money for wine is a good idea or not. My original question was about how good (or otherwise) my palate was and how much I'd spend to keep it amused, and how others valued their palates. Nothing about quality or absolute values, just personal views.

Mind you I do agree with you on the "professional" palate, some people have more educated palates and as one of my friends is an MW I would bow to him every time on descriptive and analytical matters and, to some extent, enjoyment. One of the reasons I set my price point where I did is that he has pointed me in the direction of some damned fine stuff over the years, none of it over £30/bottle, most of it under £20. Now whether it was "good" wine, "great" wine or "quality" wine matters not a jot, I enjoyed it, it came within my price point and I've shared that pleasure with others, which is, at least to me, the point.

[Steve Plotnicki]

My original question was about how good (or otherwise) my palate was and how much I'd spend to keep it amused, and how others valued their palates. Nothing about quality or absolute values, just personal views.

What does this mean? How does one you value their palate? Does Lloyd's insure it? And why is how much you would spend to keep it amused about wine and not about you? Isn't that irrelevent in a food chat room?

If the point of this thread was to offer the advice to the people who post here that they don't need to pay $500 for a top sauternes but they can pay $100 instead, now that's valuable information. But if the point is to say that people who pay $500 are idiotic and have more money then sense, well I don't think that's an appropriate comment for you to make because you are talking about people and not wine. This forum is called "Wine" not "Rich People."

Therein lies what you call my agenda. I fight hard for the accurate information to be disclosed as a fuction of quality (there's that word again) and not as a function of class. And you can post things that are percieved as being informative, or you can post things that are percieved as reverse snobbism. What's been going on here over the last few days is a display of the latter. People with more experience and better opinions were derided and belittled and were called names when all they wanted to do was to get the correct information out in the marketplace of ideas. Which by the way was always offered as friendly advice so the reverse-snobbists could learn something.

Then you raised the money issue. Why did you need to do that? Nobody cares about it. If you read the NY board and look at the thread I just started about Craft, five of us at a single dinner drank wines that probaly equal the annual wine budget of some other posters here. So what? Nobody did it because the wines costs a lot, they did it because they love wine. In fact during the dinner nobody raised the issue of what the wines cost once (except I busted the chops of our cheapskate importer friend .) And there was somebody who brought a bottle that sells for more then $1000.

We are all well advised to leave money out of the discussions. It's only relevant in terms of consumer advice when it is used as a way to illustrate comparative quality. Yes the d'Yqeeeeem is worth the money, no it's not. It is because I can't find anything that is near the requisite quality or it isn't because I can get 95% of the quality for 20% of the price. Anything else, even if it's not intended and just perceived the wrong way, is going to start a fight.