Probably not. Everything I know about wine I learned from watching the tv show FRASIER.

I have hosted a 10 bottle blind tasting with a range of $8 to $225 and everyone in the room had a different ranking at the end with only 1 out of 12 putting the $225 bottle in the top 2 and 4 out of 12 giving the top spot to a $20 bottle.

Send me a couple of each, and I'll let you know. You'd thinknthatnwith all the woot!wine I would have been a lab rat at least once. :-P

It would be easy to tell, even though it was a blind test, I could tell my wallet was much thinner with the more expensive one.

I attended a Nickel & Nickel tasting, twelve different single vineyard Cab's and all at the same price point. Some held up to the price but about half fell short. On the same hand I have had some outstanding budget($10.00 retail) wine. This is probably why no one I know actually drinks Scarcrow wine.

I think WOOT should send me a bottle of each and I will have my wife run the blind test with me so I can see if I can tell the difference. I would be happy to do this free of charge, being the nice person that I am.

Freakonomics has an excellent podcast on wine ratings and blind taste tests (full transcript).

The economist host chose two expensive wines and one cheap wine, put them into decanters, then poured another decanter full of one of the expensive wines. Then he had his classy Harvard colleagues taste and rate the wines.

"The data could not have cooperated more completely with my hypothesis. So for starters the four wines received almost identical ratings on average. Although there were a wide spread among individuals, on average, tallied up, people did not prefer the expensive wines to the cheap wine. On top of that, and this was the thing I was hoping for and dreaming of but didn’t believe would actually come true: It turned out among individuals if you compared how differently they rated any two of the wines that they had, it turned out that by a small margin, people actually rated the same wine from the same bottle but presented in a different decanter as being the most different among the two wines (so the two wines that were absolutely identical, when you looked at the gap between the ratings that the individual gave to those wines, the gap was bigger than they did between the other wines, which actually were different."

Disclaimer: I put "Probably not" on the survey because there is a non-negligible chance that I would accidentally guess the correct answer.

Make it beer and I'll tell ya..

papamochi wrote:I have hosted a 10 bottle blind tasting with a range of $8 to $225 and everyone in the room had a different ranking at the end with only 1 out of 12 putting the $225 bottle in the top 2 and 4 out of 12 giving the top spot to a $20 bottle.

We hosted a tasting as well. For the $20 bottle of wine, most folks could not distinguish it was the more expensive wine. We came to the conclusion that if you are drinking a cheaper wine on a regular basis, that will aline more with your taste buds and you will pick it out as the best tasting wine of your group selection.

Having attended numerous wine tasting parties where there were up to 100 wines on offer, I can tell you that palate fatigue sets in within three tastings, making it near impossible to discern a fancy-shamancy wine from vintage Ripple.

The takeaway lesson is that it is not the wine that impresses people. It is the label. So chum up with an upscale bartender to score some expensive-labeled empties, get yourself a wine bottle corker, then refill the bottles with two-buck Chuck. Everyone will be impressed, you'll save big dough. Win-win!

I have been to a number of tastings. What I have learned is that I can tell an aged $100 bottle of wine from a young $10 bottle, but not from an aged $20. And I can't always tell a $10 from $20. A lot depends on the wines. Young wines high in tannins are hard for me to distinguish.

I would say the one bottle of $100+ wine I've had was by far the best.

But I switched to beer. The amount of money extra you have to pay for a great beer is nothing compared to a great wine. (I'm looking at Founders Curmudgeons Better Half which only set me back $35)

While in Italy we learned that the house wines were typically much better than the $$$ wines. And personally I'd rather dump a bad bottle of $10 wine, than a $35 bottle.