Originally posted by: Descartes
Originally posted by: SampSon
Originally posted by: HotChic
$5 chard, ouch. I don't like chardonnay that much anyway, but $5 chard... ouch.
What's the alcohol content on the wine? They tend to be between 12 and 14% (you can find it by looking on the front label, usually printed in tiny letters on one of the borders, or on the bottom.)
Sub $10 bottles of wine are constantly tasted and voted the best.
Unless you have an incredibly rare and specific vintage, price has little to do with quality.
This is actually not true.
Wine is one of the rare commodities that has a relatively accurate reflection of quality in the price. There are always exceptions to the rule, but largely a more expensive wine is simply going to be better.
I'll get to the reason why in a moment, but consider the following: What makes a better wine better? Relative to what? There's no bar of quality; rather, there's a bar of experience... your experience. That experience ultimately reflects what
your palate understands, and so for most people an exceptionally complex wine doesn't add any additional value to the palate of most. This is
not suggesting that only wine snobs can appreciate complex wines, but it does suggest that if you don't then there's absolutely no point in buying them.
So, as to the why: I'm not going to speak in terms of economics, because I'm sure most of you are more familiar than I am; however, in the context of wine, the value added to it ultimately equates to the care taken to produce it. Some examples:
1) How you control the yield. This is ultimately the supply. Pinot, for example, is notoriously low yield; you simply can't get the same yield out of a hectare that you would with a grape like Cabernet. In most cases, there is a concerted effort to
reduce yield so that the soil nutrients (namely water and nitrogen) aren't depleted thus giving more to the remaining grapes.
2) Aging. This includes duration, type of oak (new oak is often cheaper, but new oak gives you a discernably toasty/spicy character that simply isn't suitable for many varietals).
3) Quality of the grapes. This seems obvious enough. Certain areas (the Cote d'Or being the most famous) have the terroir (sorry, had to say it) to produce fruit that far exceed that of its neighbors. This is a combination of soil type, elevation, climate, irritagation, etc. etc. All of this has to come together to produce a quality grape, and if you're wanting the best it's an enormous investment in time and money.
Those are just three key things. I'm leaving out many on purpose. The point is this: Value is added to the product in multiple ways, and that value translates into a more complex, often "bigger" (like the notoriously fruit-forward Cali wines).
This is getting long, so I'll try to wrap it up. There is ultimately a diminishing return on value that you get from more expensive wines, because it requires increasingly more acute awareness of depth in a wine to actually appreciate it. For example, you might appreciate the nuance of terroir in the more expensive wines, but you only get these in single-vineyard wines; you might appreciate a Vieilles Vignes French Burgundy, but can you really tell the difference between 20-year old single-vineyard wines and 100-year old? I can't. Some people can, and those people might be willing to pay $200/bottle to taste that difference.
So, the problem isn't that more expensive wines aren't the best as they almost always are; rather, it's the diminishing return you get for the value. This is why QPR (quality to price ratio) buys are more popular, and this is why ~$20-$40 is the space most advanced palates can appreciate without spending $100 for that subtle nuance.
Sorry. Sometimes I wish I could just keep things short. Alas the art of brevity escapes me.
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