| jlomon |
10-26-2006 04:12 PM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by Larry Delor
(Post 1313442)
2. How do I know that I can tell the difference between a wine that is worth $20 a bottle, and a wine that is worth $60 (or more) a bottle.
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I went on a tour of Vinopolis the last time I was in London. It is a permanent attraction and basically takes you on a tour of the history of wine from some 5000 years ago to present. Very interactive, and features prodigious sampling as well. One of the displays made it very simple to understand the difference between a $10 bottle of wine and a $500 bottle of wine. When dealing with "normal" wine (not involving special processing, like Champagne or Amarone or something like that), it is largely a factor of how many grape bunches the farmer opts to keep on each vine. A grape vine only has so much "life" to give to the grapes that grow on it. If you let, say, 30 bunches of grapes grow on the vine, it distributes that energy amongst the 30 bunches. What if you were to only grow 20 bunches of grapes on that vine? or 10 bunches? How about one bunch? The more you remove from the vine, the more energy can go into growing the remaining grapes. The grapes that are left alive will be intensely concentrated and very flavourful. The wine that comes from them is equally flavourful and becomes much more complex.
Of course, it is a fixed ratio of how much wine you can get from a bunch of grapes. Fewer bunches equals smaller production for the winery. The farmer expects to get paid relative to the quality of his grapes, not the quantity. So the result is a much more expensive bottle of wine. You can definitely taste the difference between a first growth Bordeaux and a fifth growth or Vin de Pays. This holds true for wines of the same vintage. When you compare vintage to vintage, it gets more complicated because some years are dramatically better than others.
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