Wine whine

Is there any good way to tell if a beer is good? Are the notes "citrus and piney" or "skunks scent gland on a hot day". Cheap beer can be good even if manufactured in insane quantities, but how much difference is there between Rainier, PBR and Coors.....we all have our favorites though.

With the increase in wine consumption in the US, so did the manufacturing of wine. Wines made to be the same from bottle to bottle, year to year with literally no variance because of a heavy handed chemical process. Doesn't mean the wine is bad, just always the same.

When it comes to crafted wine, you just have to identify what you like. High alcohol and sugars with low tannins? High acid, high tannin? Somewhere in between? In this area it gets really tough to try and figure it out. In the beer realm if Im drinking an IPA i generally like them if they are sub 7% on alcohol, often closer to 6.5% and modest IBUs. For wine there are clues if they describe the process in making it. Alcohol can be a good starting point on the label, but then you beed to look towards things like....Was the white wine aged in steel or oak? Was the pinot noir crushed with whole clusters? What words to they use to describe the wine, bright? smooth? juicy? rustic?

At the end of the day it's subjective as hell. If you're buying at a grocery store it's a game of roulette, but once you find what you like stick with it, but there is no tell on what is going to be good. When you know what you like it's often best to go to a decent wine store and see if a sales rep can guide you to your preferences. For cheap wine, $10-15 a bottle it's best to look towards Italy, France or Spain...even Portugal. The old world countries do inexpensive wine so much better than we do because we tend to corporatize our inexpensive productions.
 
I was gifted a couple bottles that are ~$180 and ~$300 based on an online search. Not sure I want to open them and subject them to my lack of sophisticated taste buds. Have talked about doing a blind taste test with some friends to see what everyone picks as a favorite.
 
I was gifted a couple bottles that are ~$180 and ~$300 based on an online search. Not sure I want to open them and subject them to my lack of sophisticated taste buds. Have talked about doing a blind taste test with some friends to see what everyone picks as a favorite.
nah. Use them to braise some short ribs, maybe lamb shanks.
 
I was gifted a couple bottles that are ~$180 and ~$300 based on an online search. Not sure I want to open them and subject them to my lack of sophisticated taste buds. Have talked about doing a blind taste test with some friends to see what everyone picks as a favorite.

Blind tastings can be super fun and educational. I was at a dinner many years ago and the host put out a bottle in-between our flights. One of the individuals in the tasting was a pompous #*^@#* of a wine maker and everything thats wrong with "wine snobbery". We taste, we discuss, my wife raves about it, he says she's wrong, he doesn't like it....too simple and plain. Others start to echo my wife, then we reveal the bottle. A 1985 Domaine Romanee Conti Grands Echezeaux.....in gun terms, slightly above an entry level Perrazzi. Red in the face he got quiet, then after another 15 minutes "this is really coming around in the glass".

If you care to share, what bottles do you have?
 
If you are an adventurous wine person though, you are bound to run into some you don’t like.

It varies for me. Most of my “likes” and “don’t likes” fall into gross generalizations, but there are definite patterns. I can say that I pretty consistently don’t care for Chardonnay. I tend to like South American reds. I don’t tend to be big on Australian wines. I tend to like PNW
Gewurztraminer and Reisling.

There are always outliers, and even after you have a list of go-to bottles, you never run out of new things to try. That’s fun, at least for me.
 
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