> This is because there are better wines, but you can't tell the nuances until you hone your palate... practice a lot!
How do you know that after "honing your palate" you you'll calibrate your sense of taste to actual quality of wine, rather than to whatever the difference is between more and less expensive ones? People can learn to see any kind of patterns if they try hard enough, but that doesn't mean those patterns are in any way useful or relevant.
It happens in a similar way to anything: you see what works, and create sense with symbols and consistent repetition as in any semantic field. Why is one burger better than another, or one steak? I can't say we have the science yet for exact measurement, but it may come. Sometimes it's obvious: cheap industrial plastic supermarket cheddar really is full of less decent chemicals for your senses than pricier artisan ones like Humboldt Fog. That can be demonstrated, and I suspect in the future more will be demonstrable with wine. So far you can realise why that cheap Zin blend from Lodi doesn't really do it for you with the most obvious of measurements: yield! They get even 10 tons per acre there rather than 1-3 tons in a high-quality vineyard. Fewer nutrients and flavours to go around, and more water, sugar and untasty components have to flesh it out (poor overburdened vines, eh!) that's just the first variable: I know some more, but there are good soil scientists who can tell you a lot about all of the other variables too. Feel free to ping me for pointers, as I don't have time to write about it now.
I frequently prefer cheaper wines to more expensive ones, and agree price-quality correlation is not good, depending on what your wine source is, but at the same time you're going to have to find good data to demonstrate no correlation: for price is one (flawed but still input-data-rich) indicator!
We do fool ourselves with patterns, but also we do not. AFAIK there is not enough research to rove it either way, but qualitative methods can point us to better theories to work with until we have good enough constructs for quantitative analysis for our minds' perceptions.
So far you can realise why that cheap Zin blend from Lodi doesn't really do it for you with the most obvious of measurements: yield! They get even 10 tons per acre there rather than 1-3 tons in a high-quality vineyard. Fewer nutrients and flavours to go around, and more water, sugar and untasty components have to flesh it out (poor overburdened vines, eh!),
I don't understand this. Flavourful chemicals aren't a scarce resource to "go around" -- they're organic compounds plants synthesise "from scratch" (or their reaction products, after aging). Perhaps scarce soil nutrients influence this, for better or worse (I don't know), but this isn't a priori obvious.
Look up, for example, why top Napa vineyards go for low yields. It's also basic chemistry. There is a finite number of nutrients in the soil, and the plant can make a finite amount of such things out of these nutrients (like phenols in the grape skins and... er.. this is not my subject, but I can look it up again myself should I have to).
Look up, for example, why top Napa vineyards go for low yields.
I tried and failed (wikipedia) -- can you point me to something informative? I don't know what I'm looking for.
There is a finite number of nutrients in the soil, and the plant can make a finite amount of such things out of these nutrients (like phenols in the grape skins and... er.. this is not my subject, but I can look it up again myself should I have to).
In general they're not finite. Phenols are just C,H,O -- they're made from water and CO2. All of these compounds, as far as I can tell:
How do you know that after "honing your palate" you you'll calibrate your sense of taste to actual quality of wine, rather than to whatever the difference is between more and less expensive ones? People can learn to see any kind of patterns if they try hard enough, but that doesn't mean those patterns are in any way useful or relevant.