On the Nature of Wine
I don&#x27;t expect this article to give rise to insightful commentary; articles on wine invariably have two kinds of commenters, the dismissives and the aesthetes, and they usually talk past one another.<p>The dismissives mention things like blind taste testers not being able to distinguish red from white or blind tasters preferring cheap wine to expensive. Look into this a bit further, and you find that the first study was actually about phrases used to describe wine falling into two categories, one associated with reds and another associated with whites, and the colour of the wine appeared to be the distinguishing factor in which set of phraseology was chosen; while the second has curious echoes of Coke vs Pepsi leading to New Coke. Small samples don&#x27;t give the full effect of a wine, wine will taste different when you have it with different food, or in a different order compared with other wines, on a cold palate vs a warm palate (i.e. is this your first taste of alcohol of the evening - first is usually harshest), or straight out of the bottle vs aerated, and indeed it&#x27;ll taste different depending on what you think the relative price is - especially so if you have fewer other criteria to judge it with.<p>I&#x27;m on the aesthetes&#x27; side. I&#x27;m far from an expert, and only drink about 20 bottles a year, but when I do it&#x27;s either in a taste test situation, or as paired wines in a tasting menu, or vintages selected from appellations and grapes chosen for their typical character. I wish I could find whites that taste like reds, but I dislike almost all unaccompanied whites, with some exceptions around sauternes, some Rieslings, Gewürztraminer, etc.; and I wish I could find cheap reds that taste like intense Cote Rotie syrah or savoury Burgundy pinot noir, but the same grapes grown elsewhere come nowhere close. Most New World syrah &#x2F; shiraz is too alcoholic, while pinot noir is a completely different beast when it&#x27;s grown in too sunny a climate. Slovenia has come closest to making some decent Burgundy-style pinot noir to my taste.<p>My point being that the &quot;hierarchy&quot; in wine is, to my mind, at least a local optimum or close to it. Within the appellations that I prefer most, I&#x27;ve observed a reasonably strong correlation between price and my preferences. I think winemakers have been doing a kind of local gradient ascent as technology improves their product - it would be unusual for them to do otherwise - and the argument that preservatives etc. improve ageing ability as well as transport is fairly strong to my mind, as my preferred vintages are usually not younger than 4 years. I&#x27;m not big on fresh fruit flavours.<p>I would expect &quot;natural&quot; wines to have higher variance (though unblended wine has a fairly high variance between vintages already). If the winemaker is good, and the product is good in spite of less ability to control the end product, great; whether such wine could survive hanging around Amazon&#x27;s warehouses and reaching customers in good condition, I&#x27;m less convinced - I&#x27;ve had bad tawny port from Amazon, it takes some effort to make such a hardy product go bad.<p>So all in, I think this article is mostly a marketing effort for the few winemakers who think they can create a decent product following the schtick; I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s likely to actually produce a significantly better product; I don&#x27;t buy that the existing hierarchy is particularly wrong (but it is warped by big money in things like Bordeaux, for sure); and I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ll be inclined to buy more natural wine since I think the probability it turns out mediocre is much higher.