How many of us can say we really know anything about wine? Most people are probably familiar with that feeling you get when you’re standing there looking at the rows and rows of bottles, and have no idea what it is you’re actually supposed to be looking for. We assume that expensive wines cost more because they’re better and cheap wines should 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 – not all of them, 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 has any effect on 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 guess 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 (rather inventively, I thought!) Wine, an interesting, and quite amusing, scenario arose. A group of professional wine experts were given a taste from a mystery bottle and asked to guess the vintage. Most of the party placed it somewhere in the 1980s, with the exception of one French expert who said 1928. It turned out it was from 1870, proving that they really didn’t have a clue.
So do factors like the age and vintage of a wine really mean anything in terms of a wine’s quality? If even some of the world’s most knowledgeable experts can’t tell the difference then it would seem that no, probably not. Older wines are likely to be more rare, which might go some way to explaining why they cost more, but I bet those experts could have bought 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 possible they could get one just as good – or maybe even nicer – in Threshers for under a tenner?
