/ck/ - Food & Cooking

>>19793974

>>19793974
start with boxed wine in order to establish a baseline. in time move up to more expensive wines. compare as you move up.

>>19793974
Cabs that are 10-15 bucks a bottle and worth a try:
Radius
J. Lohr
Carson Ridge
Edmundo
Josh
Hess Select
Substance CS
Cruz Alto

And a shitload more.

>>19794093
Based. Thank you.

>>19793974
Any Beaujolais.

So one thing about wine when talking about "good" is that people mean all kinds of things, but when wine enthusiasts say that one of the baselines for "good" is that it tastes "like it's suppozeduh taste". For example, imagine you got a hamburger, but the burger part tasted like chicken sausage. Maybe it tastes like really good chicken sausage, but you're annoyed because you expected ground beef and you figured you'd be splitting hairs over fat ratios or how heavily salted it was, and not whether it was chicken. It's about expectation as much as it is about "good vs bad"

In the wine hobby people might say "typicity" in a broad sense. Other terms are "varietal character" (especially when asking if, say, "this pinot noir tastes like I expect of wine made from pinot noir"). Arguably the term "terroir" encompasses this as well, though that also picks up connotations of "people from this area tend to mash the grapes up in such-and-such a way" and that lends its own flavor characteristics.

There's plenty more that can go wrong but the other stuff is a lot less liable to make people catty and sound pretentious and elitist because everyone can probably understand that, say, "brett funk" probably is undesirable to everyone (except natty wine hipsters but fuck those people). But not everyone grasps that "this wine is shit" could just mean that it doesn't contain the tastes that the words on the bottle lead you to expect

All this to say, there are some wines that "suck" below a certain price and an important part of getting good wine is knowing what you can and can't afford.

>>19794119
Rather insightful post. I'm not out to be a sommelier or impress others; rather, gain a greater understanding of the whole thing and thus make educated choices. Really, I drink a lot of beer, and liquor to a lesser extent, and I want to branch out.