Expensive wine and tasting: selling a story more than a flavour

Paying 180 euros for a wine that is no better than a five-euro bottle

A 2.50-euro supermarket wine won a blind tasting organised by a Belgian TV show, according to the account running through this discussion. The experiment, with a sommelier helping to set it up, was meant to find the worst wine and ended up revealing something else: price does not measure pleasure. The anecdote is the starting gun for a broader suspicion: around wine there is a prestige market that sells story far faster than flavour.

The figure that best sums up the scepticism comes from an enthusiast who worked in smart agriculture: he was given a 180-euro bottle in 2015 and would not have paid more than five for it. "It was good, it just lacked something," he admits, before setting his price ceiling at everyday Garnachas. He is not alone. Another confesses to having bought a 30-odd-euro wine this Christmas that was "worse than the 5-euro ones".

How much a good wine costs in Spain

The range the pragmatists work with is narrow: between 6 and 8 euros there is plenty of room to drink well. A stroll along Calle Laurel in Logroño, with its young reds and the odd crianza, works out cheaper and more satisfying than many pretentious restaurant wine lists. There is even a red from the Guadiana valley, in Badajoz, at five euros a bottle, described as spectacular.

The underlying argument is not that all wines taste the same. It is that the price includes things you do not drink: scarcity, brand, scores, distribution, history and collecting. The clean test is simple and almost nobody does it: same styles, same temperature, same glass and blind service. If the cheap one wins, you buy the cheap one and case closed.

The medal contest and the circus of scores

Here is the detail almost nobody looks at. Many of the gold medals sported by supermarket wines come from competitions aimed precisely at that range, with mass participation from bottles under five euros. It is not the same as the tastings of the international reference publications, where sending samples costs thousands of euros and a critic judges blind behind black glasses. Below a certain score threshold, the money has been wasted.

The conclusion is uncomfortable for the industry: the awards system distinguishes less between quality than between the ability to pay the entry fee. And the consumer reads the medal as an objective endorsement.

The peach smell nobody could smell

The most revealing scene comes from someone who took a wine-tasting course. The whole class could smell wood; the teacher said it was peach; everyone then smelled peach. Tasting, he argues, is more about sensing what others are going to say than about your own perception. And he adds with a wink: as a way to pick someone up, one of these courses works.

The parallel with high-end audio appears on its own: equipment costing thousands of euros that sounds the same as anything else plugged into the same monitor, with the same vocabulary of "body" and "nuances". The scam, they say, is identical.

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What remains is the trench of those who insist that a trained palate can tell a 100-euro wine from a 5-euro one, and that anyone who cannot has an atrophied sense of taste or has been conned. Maybe. But as long as blind tastings keep springing 2.50-euro surprises, the story has a problem.