Up to a point. The correlation is not good, and I've had some horredous expensive wines, but for a weak-medium price-quality correlation I'd say the cut off is more like $50 or so, after which it gets a lot weaker! This is because there are better wines, but you can't tell the nuances until you hone your palate... practise a lot! It's just as a professional skier gets more use out of the nuances of his or her skis for greater performance, so does a mindful and interested drinker (aesthete?) of wines, beers, or eater of good cheese for that matter, find more depth in the aesthetics because of the attention to the process over time.
Now, there is a lot of bull inovlved in some wine places, but don't commit the baby and bathwater fallacy by saying it's all rubbish!
> 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:
jag - see above reply.
So the markets are such that some wines are heavily underpriced and others overpriced, often because of extrinsic social variables! Absolutely! I'd be very surprised if the correlation was zero, however! Show me the data!
I'm interested to see how they did it. I'm open to new data and changing my mind (I have done several times already, and used to be insufferable!) but I want to see several studies with good method.
I see you're not denying that more expensive wine can taste better, and I misread this at first to think that you were denying any possible objective (conventionally-agreed at least) values for "higher quality" wine and that it was all bull. You haven't said that, and so I think you're not contesting that, but just noting the market's strangeness, that there is no relation in price and a wine's agreed quality.
> but just noting the market's strangeness, that there is no relation in price and a wine's agreed quality.
Correct! Price correlates with rarity and place of origin and all sorts of other neat stuff, but as far as 'will I like this wine?', ain't no there there.
That said, individual people should buy based on their tastes - but a $20 bottle of Burgundy wine has even odds to be better than a $40 bottle of Burgundy. The only way is to try it!
We'll then just have to agree too disagree. Until you can show me some good and extensive research to demonstrate otherwise, I'll go with the extensive soft data there is out there to support the consensual position.
Gilette. During WW2, they didn't have anyone to sell their products to, so they started marketing shaving to women. Before this, a woman shaving was akin to claiming yourself to be a prostitute. Now, it's a cultural norm for women to shave...all because of manufactured desire.
"The gist of the article is that U.S. women were browbeaten into shaving underarm hair by a sustained marketing assault that began in 1915. (Leg hair came later.) The aim of what Hope calls the Great Underarm Campaign was to inform American womanhood of a problem that till then it didn't know it had, namely unsightly underarm hair."
"In July of 1915, the first Gillette razor for women came on the market. But where Gillette had responded to a clear void in the men’s hair removal market, he now faced the dilemma of promoting to a market that did not yet exist. Hence Gillette was responsible for introducing to American women the revolutionary concept of shaving."
What other manufactured fairy tales have huge quantities of humans swallowed hook line and sinker?