I started this blog because I wanted to share that high quality wine doesn't have to be expensive. A LOT goes into the price of wine... you have the acreage costs, growing costs, yields, overhead, storage, shipping, middlemen, market pricing, etc. If you really start to calculate, it's amazing you can get a quality bottle for $10! But I digress..
Recently I was encouraged by a friend that knows a lot more about wine to splurge on a premium bottle. This wine was not only expensive but it was suppose to be top rate. Normally $60 a bottle, it was marked down to $30, a "steal" for some. Running an affordable wine blog has it's responsibilities. I really want to practice what I preach, so several times a year I will splurge to see if the extra cost brings the added enjoyment. Usually I'm disappointed, perhaps the expectations don't live up to the hype. Was the $60 bottle good? Yes. Was it $60 good, no. Was it $30 good, debatable. Perhaps my palate still needs more refining, but I wouldn't recommend the bottle to my readers at that price.
All this price-to-quality issue got me thinking, there must be a way to equate a general increase in price to overall enjoyment. I've been toying around with an unscientific model. Humor me here because this probably very silly. Say you have a $10 bottle of your favorite wine. In my experience a $20 bottle would not be twice as good, but it would probably be 20%-30% better. So the extra $10 in cost gave you a 20% bump in enjoyment. Perhaps an accurate perception will temper our expectations and thus improve enjoyment as well? Or maybe I shouldn't do math equations while drinking wine...
Cheers!
1 comment:
I recommend reading "The Wine Trials" and "Mr. Cheap's Guide to Wine". The first was based on a year-long series of blind tastings of wines in three price catagories: Under $15, ~50, and ~150. Tasters included everyday wine drinkers as well as "pros" (chefs and wine dealers). The book lists 100 wines under $15 that beat $50 wines. Mr Cheap is supposedly the pseudonym for a wine critic for various wine magazines who goes into how to read labels, get a good value wine, even sound like a wine snob. Both good reads and available on Amazon.
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