Are expensive wines really that much better?
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How many of us really know anything about wine? Most people are probably familiar with that feeling you get when you’re standing there looking at the endless rows of bottles, with no idea what it is you’re actually supposed to be looking for. We assume that expensive wines cost more for a reason and cheap wines should therefore probably be avoided, but is there really any truth to this? I have tried both cheap wines that have tasted fine, and expensive ones that have been horrible – that’s not always the case by any means, but they do exist and how are we supposed to know which ones to choose?
It’s like the theory that crystal wine glasses make wine taste better than regular glasses. It’s true that it is definitely nicer to drink out of a crystal glass, they do feel nice to hold and they make that lovely sound when you tap them, but I’ve yet to see any evidence that it actually affects the flavour of the drink. A nasty wine will taste nasty whatever you drink it from – just think of the familiar grimace on people’s faces when they take a sip from their posh celebratory Champagne flutes, only to be reminded that they’ve always hated Champagne and are only drinking it because it’s what you’re supposed to do.
A true wine buff would tell you they can tell the vintage of a good wine and where it was bottled just from tasting it. However in the opening episode of BBC4’s recent mini-documentary series entitled simply (and rather inventively, I thought!) Wine, an interesting scenario arose. A group of professional wine experts were given a taste from a mystery bottle and asked to guess its vintage. Most of them guessed at somewhere around the 1980s, with the exception of one French expert who said 1928. It turned out to be from 1870, proving that they really didn’t have a clue.
So do factors like the age and vintage of a wine really make any difference in terms of the quality of wine? If even these knowledgable experts can’t tell the difference then it would seem that the answer is no, they probably don’t. Older wines are likely to be rarer, which might explain why they cost more, but I bet those experts could have got a whole crate of good 1980s wines for the same price as that one bottle from the 1800s would have cost. And in these credit crunch times do people really want to be paying over the odds for fancy wines when it’s entirely possible they could get one just as good – or maybe even nicer – in Threshers for under a tenner?
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