Drinking Wine - What's It All About

I understand some aspects of wine.

In my time I've been involved in the massive underground wine cellars in Corsham, and also worked for some time in Paulliac, near Bordeaux, where I participated in many wine tasting sessions in the area, where there was top-notch wine tasting school, and where many famous names such as Chateau Latour, Chateau Lafitte and Chateax Rothschild come from. Life in Paulliac is 100% about the wine, and I lived there for six weeks.

I marvelled at how experts could identify which vineyard produced the wine, sometimes the year, etc of when it was produced, merely from blindly swilling the stuff around the mouth and spitting it out.

Amazing.

But when it comes to drinking expensive wine, I am completely underwhelmed. Despite these "experts" telling me just how much it is worth paying that bit extra, I struggle to agree. I enjoy many cheap bottles of wine,. And when I say cheap, I mean £4 to £7 from Aldi or Lidl.

I've got a small cupboard full of expensive stuff, white, red and champagne, mostly accumulated through presents or prizes, not wanting to open them. I know I'll be disappointed, so there it stays, sometimes to pass on as presents to someone else.

I am such a Luddite, that I now prefer to drink red wine chilled, even with ice in the glass.

Am I alone in my lack of enthusiasm for more costly wine?

 

I agree with you in some aspects. At home I tend to drink red wine rather than beer, although I have had chilled red it's not something I do often. As for buying preferences I tend to go for the £7-£9 ranges from Asda or Sainsburys, I find the cheaper stuff not so nice and quite gut wrenching. I rarely drink white wine these days as most types give me heartburn. I am with you that there's probably little difference between a £7-£9 bottle compared to a £20-£25 bottle (i.e. they're not 3x better), so they're not really worth it unless you are a serious connoisseur.

 

Theres' some cracking stuff between £5-£10 supermarket prices.

I'm not a fan of Champagne or much french or white wine but like a good Rioja or other Spanish grape (the Ribera del Duero area is worth looking out for). Some of the heavier Aussie/NZ stuff is also very good.

Had some very nice expensive wine, had some bloody awful expensive wine as well. There's vinegar available at all prices.

I was told on a brewing course once that there's more varieties and combinatiosn of hops & malts than there is grapes, so I don't really have any time for wine snobs that rubbish a decent real ale or suggest they have a better palate. If it tastes nice, drink it. The ability to determine grapes and areas from taste is quite impressive though. Theres a classic episode of "Tales of the Unexpected" based on that skill.

edit:

 

This is a few years old in terms of tax rates, but it’s more or less accurate. There is definitely a sweet spot in terms of what to spend to get the best bang for buck. If you spend £5 on wine you’re only getting just over a quids worth of wine, but spend £8 and you’re getting nearly 3x the value of wine.

 

And serious connoisseurs are not even interested in the £20-£25 range either!
It's often worthwhile spending a bit more on a 'better' bottle in its region of production, as a lot of very good stuff stays local at reasonable prices & doesn't get drawn into the global wine circus, where cute marketing (over many years) persuades people they are buying 'class' when very often they're not. So what you'd see on sale at £30 a bottle in UK is often not as good as what you can get for 60% of that price close to the producer.

 

Saw a program once detailing how some wine is shipped. Basically they get a big bag inside a shipping container and fill it up like a massive wine box, bottling over here to save on transport costs.

 

Stick a straw in it

 

Took advantage of a recent Tesco offer where you buy 6 bottles of wine, (that cost over £5 each), and get 25% off the total. Great offer. Got it home delivered.
When the delivery took place they'd substituted one of the bottles for another that was cheaper thatn £5, (they say they'll never send a cheaper substitution), so the offer was withdrawn. B*stards!

Anyway, as others have said, there is a great deal of snobbery around wine. If I like the taste then it's worth the money. Red wine opened for a couple of hours 100% tastes better when allowed to breath, that's all I can offer the thread.

 

When I was working in Paulliac, it was partly with a shipping company that bulk filled small tankers, of about 3,500 tonnes, with wine, took it to Liverpool, where it was bottled with fancy French labels.

 

Love a drop of the old Blue Nun myself.

 

absolutely love this. No bitter aftertaste you sometimes get with a cheaper red.

 

And what wine do you like?

 

The Vivino app is good if you’re looking for something different to your usual or know chuff all about wine and grapes and that but enjoy drinking it very very much, like me.

Snap the label using the app and it tells you what to expect taste-wise. Ignore the star rating. Read the hilariously pretentious waffle that some people leave with their reviews.

 

I keep coming back to Cabalié. Some find it a bit on the sweet side so may not be for everyone.

I think I might cry when I order a bottle of wine in a restaurant or bar again and it sets me back £40 when you can get the same for a tenner at home.

 

They take the pi55 for sure. I don't mind a 50% markup but 400% would be the end of my business there for certain.

 

So wine from the Medoc, the most exclusive part of Bordeaux, is sold in bottles with French labels? What did you expect, Ch*teau Scousère? Of course they could have bottled it in France and shipped an extra 2,000 tonnes of glass to the UK...

 

It could be bottled locally like most wine grown in the region? But instead it was transported in bulk zinc silicate coated cargo tanks that could have held any type of chemical just before, then pumped to uncoated tanks ashore in Liverpool that usually held molasses.

Stop being an arse GOBE. Take a break.

 

Cifriana likes wine, but only really white.

I have rum instead, as I consider drinking wine, like playing the piano and such, to be a bit effeminate and unmanly.

 

I get my wine via brokers so probably one of the idiots . I do agree with what you say though on price although I’m drinking different stuff. Most of my everyday drinkers are in the £30 to £60 range and I prefer many of them to the £100-£200 bottles.

I’ve got a few in the £500-£1000 range - they are really nice and you can taste the uniqueness in them but are only for special occasions/celebrations of course. I also buy en primeur Bordeaux as well which means you buy them before they are bottled. You have to wait 2 years but you get a much better deal than buying the ready to go stuff (although you have risk that the vintage turns out to be poor).

I prepare to be flamed.

 

Coño!

£1000 on a bottle of wine.

Imagine that.

It's a different world, isn't it?

 

It's not really taking the pi55. It's restaurant economics. If a restaurant marked up its booze by just 40% it would likely be out of business by the end of the year. The price of a dish is usually about 3-4 times the cost of the raw ingredients. Wine can be 4-5 times wholesale price. Lots of reasons for this. There's some interesting breakdowns on where you money goes on a bottle of wine. On a £5 bottle of wine about 31p is the actual wine itself, £1.07 is the profit margin, the rest is vat, excise, logistics etc. [Source: Decanter]

 

A vanishing small percentage of my collection and certainly haven’t bought one for anything near that since Covid happened!

 

They ship scotch whisky in a concentrated version and then water it down when it gets where it's going, before bottling it. I know this because a freight train carrying it derailed at Willesden once and the tanks went over on their side.

Every railwaymen for miles around was filling up empty plastic bottles or any other container we could carry it away in. Tremendous stuff. I remember someone tipping some on the draining board in the mess room and setting light to it. It went up like petrol.

 

I often wondered what it must be like to taste something really fine like that. Can a £1000 bottle really taste 200 times better than a £5 bottle?

There's a 15 year old havana club rum called selección de maestros and that costs a fantastic amount. But in Havana there is a place that sells it by the single glass. One single glass costs $22!

On my birthday I decided I would pay the money and try it, so I could resolve, once and for all, my curiosity about what these very fine things taste like.

Well, when my birthday came, I lost my nerve about doing it, just with the thought I could buy 6 bottles of perfectly decent 'train sparks' unlabelled rum with the same $22 and still have enough left over for a peso cigar and a cone of peanuts on the way home....

 

It definitely doesn’t taste “that” much better.

If I blind tasted wines between £10 and £200 I’m pretty sure I’d pick a number of the cheaper ones as my favourites.

I only have two left of the very expensive ones and doubt I’ll buy any more after they are gone. I’m pretty happy in the £30 to £50 range and if you use brokers you can get all sorts of stuff you don’t see in the supermarkets.

 

A few years back on holiday in France I thought I'd hit the jackpot when I discovered a very drinkable red that worked out at about 80p a bottle! It tasted like cat's pi55 when I got it home, so I gave the half a dozen boxes of the stuff that I'd filled the car up with to my brother-in-law. The b@5tard got revenge by insisting that we share a bottle every time I went round to his for about 2 years!

I wish I knew more about wine - God knows I drink enough of the stuff - but I don't. I usually order in bulk from Majestic and, if I read a decent review of a supermarket plonk and can remember what it's called when I'm out pushing the trolley for her ladyship, I'll top up with a few bottles of that

 

It’s great in restaurants too, you can scan the wine list and it will give you some recommendations and give you the ratings. Plus also depressingly tell you the retail price.

 

If I'm looking for something different, I look at the Wine List from Gordon's Wine Bar at embankment. You can never get a seat in there unless you take a midweek day off, but everything they have pairs perfectly with a cheeseboard. Saves a) going b) spending a fortune and c) reading reviews.

I do recommend going though, lovely place.

 

That takes me back, used to go there regularly back in the 90s.

 

I do wonder if humanity never discovered alcohol you'd have the same people comparing 20 year grape juices at £30 a bottle. I think not as that wouldn't be "mature"

 

The 80s in my case.

 

Does anyone remember the very elderly waitress who'd worked at Gordon's since about 1940? She'd probably gone down there during an air raid and been waiting for the all clear ever since!
Still a regular haunt of mine - as is Champagne Charlie's over the road. CCs has no atmosphere at all but serves the nicest pint in London. Old Wallop in a pewter mug.

 

I also am a bit of a fool for expensive wine. My thoughts:

Simple economics easily explains that there is no way expensive wine will ever be “worth it”. The more luxurious the wine, generally the less is made of it and the more people want it, inflating its price several times over. In the same way that an Aston Martin isn’t 20x better than a VW Polo, despite both performing their key functions pretty well.

That’s not to say all expensive stuff is better than cheaper stuff. Far from it. I think there is probably a very loose association between price and quality. Just that really good wine will often be rated very highly, and therefore will be more likely to have a higher price point.

Aldi is a very good place for daily wine, and is only looked down on by people that don’t understand their business model. They stock a much smaller range of wines which perform very highly on taste tests, buying it in greater bulk to provide better value than other supermarkets.

If you want a cheaper bottle of wine at a restaurant, the golden rule is to always go for the house, which is bought in far greater quantity, and is therefore about 10-20% better value than those around it. The second cheapest wine is normally the worst on the list.

For £30+ wine, I’d use Wine Searcher over Vivino. However it’s a bit like the difference between Metacritic and IMDB, in that WS will give aggregated critic scores (if you have a more complex pallet). Vivino is more likely to give the everyday persons choice, so you’ll see wines which are equivalent of the obvious bangs and crashes of the Avengers, I.e. sugar and plum, scoring (in my opinion) disproportionately more highly, even at the higher price points. For cheaper wines, Vivino is often very good.