Wine: Save your money?

Blind Tasters Can't Tell Cheap Wines From Expensive


Oenophiles will never accept this as a general statement. The methodology as reported is wrong, anyway, because it assumes a high correlation between quality and price in the sample of wines tested. The question to start with is whether people can tell the difference between bad wine and good wine, as rated by taste experts. Once it's established that people can discriminate differences in quality (and I think it would be), then you can go on and investigate the correlation between taste and price.

Fact is, that correlation is far from perfect -- there are some good cheap wines, and some bad expensive wines. I've always thought the purpose of a wine club should be to ferret out the wines that are both cheap and good. It would also be useful to expose the big-name, over-priced wines that are actually pretty poor in certain vintages. (The ones that used to be shipped to Japan, maybe still are. I guess the theory is/was that if you drink saki, you'll drink anything.)

I can tell the difference between good wine and bad, so I never buy anything but good wine that's also cheap. I don't get the best wine that way, but what I get is good enough, and never bad.

Byron