The €200 wine even the sommelier can't tell apart

The €200 wine even the sommelier can't tell apart

A French winemaker with his own vineyard swapped the contents of two bottles and, according to the story doing the rounds in the thread, the professional tasters were left with the face of someone who has just paid the bill. The amateurs correctly picked the good one. The anecdote, repeated in tastings around the world, sums up the state of a market where price stopped measuring the pleasure in the glass a long time ago and started measuring something else: scarcity, brand, ratings and collecting.

The discussion about wine snobbery doesn't deny that there are real differences between grape varieties, ageing and vintages. What is questioned is the straight line many people assume between what a bottle costs and how much the person opening it enjoys it. On that, the consensus is broad: above a certain threshold, the correlation breaks down.

How much do you need to spend to drink well in Spain?

The range that comes up most often among enthusiasts with years of drinking behind them is €6 to €8. Below that figure there are young Rioja reds and garnacha wines that hold up perfectly well for everyday drinking; above it, you enter gift, celebration or vanity territory. A €30 bottle bought this Christmas, one participant recalled, was «worse than the €5 ones».

The extreme case came from another: a €180 bottle given as a gift in 2015. «It was good, just barely, but I wouldn't have paid more than €5 for it». That's not contempt for wine. It's a statement that pleasure doesn't scale linearly with price, and that beyond a certain point you're paying for something else.

There's a geography to this. Calle Laurel in Logroño comes up as an example of a place where you can drink plenty of young reds and the odd crianza that are «wonderful, and cheap». And a €5-a-bottle red from the Guadiana valley, in Badajoz, described as spectacular. The conclusion that keeps coming up: «Good wine is the wine you like. Full stop».

The experiment that debunks the experts

The name at the heart of the most uncomfortable part of the story is Frédéric Brochet, a French winemaker with his own vineyard and wine shop. His thesis, as reported in the thread: from €10 a bottle upwards, the difference between a €10 wine and a €200 one is imperceptible, even to professional tasters. His tastings, with bottles swapped around, left the «experts» exposed and the amateurs getting it right.

The bias has a name. Anyone tasting with the label in their head isn't tasting the wine: they're tasting the price, the winery and the rating from the critic of the moment. Prejudice comes before the palate. In one of his most cited demonstrations, he dyed a white wine red so it looked like a red, and not a single sommelier realised they were drinking a white.

The domestic anecdote points the same way: a wine-tasting course where all the students smelled wood and the teacher explained to them that it was peach. In the end, everyone smelled peach. Tasting as an exercise in aligning with what you're expected to say.

Supermarket medals and the ratings business

Behind the prestige there's an industry. Competitions like Gilbert & Gaillard are geared to the supermarket range: wines with a maximum price of around €5 are submitted en masse, and that's where the gold medals that adorn the labels of wines from Castilla-La Mancha come from. It's not the same as Wine Spectator or Robert Parker tastings, where sending in bottles is expensive.

The critics have their cracks too. A taster who worked for a Spanish wine guide pointed out that another of the big ones tasted «label in view», with the influence of the winery and whoever pays for advertising hanging over the score. That's why the national ratings of certain wineries consistently sat above the international critics' scores.

The market does correct itself, though late. Critics withdrawing their backing from very expensive Bordeaux châteaux have triggered downward corrections in the secondary market. And there are Spanish wineries that launched «the most expensive wine in Spain» and didn't sell a damn thing: being expensive isn't enough.

The same con as hi-fi and watches

The most frequent comparison is with high-end hi-fi: equipment costing thousands of euros that sounds the same as anything else connected to the same speakers, but with a vocabulary of «body» and «nuances». Also with watches: celestial navigation requires an accuracy of one minute of time per 15 nautical miles of error, and a practical Casio delivers where a Rolex adds nothing measurable.

The defence of the craft exists and is not to be sneered at. There are world-class sommeliers able to identify a wine, even the vintage, in two sips, without knowing the grape or the appellation. It's no different from the noses who work in perfumery: a gift that also takes years to develop. The difference between «fruity» or «tannic» —real chemical characteristics, with furaneol and lactones in the grape skin— and «daring» or «velvety», which is already literature, marks the border between oenology and marketing.

How much of that flowery language is description and how much is folklore? One critic summed it up with an imaginary tasting note: white and stone fruit, medium body, light passage, acidic and lively finish, «aromas of rape, and possibilities of traseril sens». Pretty accurate, he said. Like bullfighting correspondents.

The business of liturgy

The liturgy sells well because there's a demand for belonging. Wine has been part of the diet and the culture for thousands of years, and that makes it a comfortable social language: knowing about wine is a cheap way of seeming to know about something. That's where the consumer who pays for the label comes in, the one who orders from the wine list without looking at prices, and the one who repeats the adjective he read in a magazine.

The result is a market where two things that are not the same coexist: that objective sensory differences exist, and that price works as a signal of quality. The first is chemistry. The second is faith. And faith, in a market with supermarket medals, guides that taste with the label in view and critics who correct themselves late, has a price that is almost never paid by the person doing the drinking.

How many of the bottles peine in Spain this weekend are chosen for what's inside, and how many for what the label says?