0:00 Can Professional Wine Connoisseurs Really Not Tell the Difference Between Expensive and Cheap Wines? 17:26 How Alcohol “Proof” is Determined 21:00 Do Drunk People Really Survive Car Crashes More? 32:10 Why Would You Add Antifreeze to Wine? 46:15 Do Wine Makers Really Walk Over Grapes With Their Feet? 51:10 Does Canadian Beer Really Contain More Alcohol Than Beer Made in the United States? 55:12 How Did Oktoberfest Start? 1:03:55 Why Isn’t Beer Sold in Plastic Bottles? 1:08:30 Who Invented Tequila and What about the Worm? 1:13:30 What is Eggnog Made Of?
I have been trying to refine my sense of taste over the years and can say with confidence that blindfolded I can now distinguish between a rich, full bodied Barolo from the Piedmont region of Italy and a crisp, fresh Budweiser from the St. Louis region of Missouri , especially if the wine is served at 17 C in a glass and the beer is served at 50 C in a can. My palate is more like a pallet - flat and woody.
Way to flex on us uncouth unwashed masses. Maybe if I win the lottery I’ll be able to tell the difference between Dom Perignon and Mad Dog 20/20 banana, but I doubt it.
@@chitlitlah The secret is to cleanse the palate between tastings. I suggest a double bacon chilly cheese dog smothered in aged Sriracha sauce followed by a slightly grey pickled egg and a small to medium sized bowl of heavily salted peanuts you have pocketed from your local pub two weeks, three days ,four hours and seven minutes (here seconds are not so important) prior to the sampling. Bonne appetit et bonne chance. PS If you want to take this to another level, crawl upstairs at least two flights and end the tasting with 6 shots of Don Julio Blanco tequila straight from the bottle quickly chased with a generous sampling of chilled Almdudler lemon drink and an unfinished all-day sucker you rescued from the cup holder of your best friends car. Cheers.
Nailed it! 🤣 Although it did trigger a thought; I wonder if I could tell the difference between Bud and Bud Light? They're both godawful abominations and remind me of one of my favorite sight gags from the Simpsons. Homer goes to the Duff brewery and at one point we see them bottling Duff, Duff Light, and Duff Dry - all three are coming from the same singular pipe which splits into three just before being bottled.
I worked with a Sommelier at an upscale restaurant for a number of years. He was really cool and had an amazing sense of smell and taste. He could break down a blend almost by percentage and was able to nail geographical sources and vintage with mind boggling accuracy. Being a Sommelier was just a secondary interest for him. Chemical engineering was his thing. But he was absolutely brilliant in a wide range of fields and subjects. He would hold study classes for all the college students who were employed there. After the restaurant closed on an early evening, he would get in the middle of the bar and all the employees would bring their text books all around the bar that was almost a full surround. It didn’t matter what subject. The students would ask questions on subjects they were struggling with. He would bounce a few qualifying questions back at them then completely break it down and explain it in a way they could understand. It was a trip watching him going around the bar helping everyone. Dude was just brilliant. And he was only in his late 20’s at the time. And he wasn’t a square. He partied like a rockstar. No crap drugs like blow or ketamine or other crap that was going around. More of a mushroom, ecstasy , lsd and any kind of mind expanding hallucinogenics. He was funny AF too. Good times.
Yeah, that seems about right for the 0.01% of people who can actually differentiate between box wine and "good" wine. He was probably some sort of neurologic deviant, and a great trip buddy.
The better outcome evaluation than saying he only took “nice drugs” is knowing how he ended up. In a gutter somewhere or succeeding at an executive desk?
@@cjb8010everyone has a different measure of success. Yours is apparently sitting behind a “corporate desk”. Last I communicated with him he was traveling extensively with his son. And he’s happy. The last time I worked with him was over 15 years ago. All I know is he is a cool dude that likes to help people and enjoy life. I don’t think he measures his success by whether or not he sits behind a desk.
The comment at the end of the sommelier section, "The only thing that matters with regard to a wine is whether or not you like it", reminds me of the motto of a whiskey channel I watch: "The best whiskey is the whiskey you like to drink, the way you like to drink it."
@@loopbackish It's made by the same company that produces Nutella, so there definitely some of that in there as well. I mean, who doesn't love Nutella wrapped in gold paper, sign me up for some of that!
Real wine professionals can absolutely tell the difference between most cheap and expensive wine, assuming the cost came from winemaking and not marketing. There are plenty of cheap wines that over-perform their cost, and there are a ton of not great expensive wines.
Yeah that is a good point, and there is no way around it. Price is arbitrary. Some cheaper wines are actually made with quality as well. Business Insider black bald guy does a decent job of comparing two wines to say what one is cheaper.
I like the phrase "over-perform their cost". Thank you and I will definitely use it going forward. My current favorite Pinot Noir is a $6.99 bottle from North Macedonia that out performs a lot of the $25+ wines from the Willamette Valley.
The problem is wine pricing is based on a ton of factors (land/labor cost, marketing, supply/demand, etc.) and not just tied to quality. A better way to phrase the question is "Can wine professionals tell the difference between low-quality wine and high-quality wine?" We know the answer is yes.
@@hectorsmommy1717 In whisky we have a nice layman's term for it: Bang or your Buck. Some cheap whiskies are very decent (for their price) and some very expensive ones are very much worth it. But there's always a law of diminishing returns at work and quite often the $30-50 range isn't half bad and a lot more accessible than the 100+ stuff. Most people are ignoring the 1000+ stuff completely, and rightly so.
As with many things in this world, it varies. Some people can smell a flower and tell which one it is, while others are only somewhat sure it’s a flower.
I doubt that there’s very many people on the entire planet who have had real absinthe, considering that it was banned for decades. I think there’s one French company who are making “the real deal” these days, but who knows if it’s really authentic to what was available 100 years ago.
As a Freelance Wine Professional / Sommelier myself who works in the world of wine, thank you on behalf of my industry for taking the time to create this long-form content about the subject matter of wine! We train for many years to achieve status and indeed costly wine qualifications that give us the credibility we need to continue our work! :) I can make many comments about the content in this video, however I will say this: as wine experts, we are not infallible and will often make mistakes which is completely fine! Correctly identifying the grape varietal and country during a blind tasting does not make us experts. It's the reasoning and analysis behind our answers that makes us the experts! If our guesses are wrong, so be it! :)
My SIL is a Certified Sommelier (this is level 3 so the middle of the pack) and she can pick out the varietals, some terriors, etc. She is not a wine snob and will recommend a $10 bottle just as fast as she will recommend a $50 bottle. There is a difference between a sommelier and a connoisseur. A sommelier is trained and has proven the ability to pick out certain aspects of wine. A connoisseur is much more likely to be filled with BS.
I am a Certified Wine Specialist, having gone through the Society of Wine Educators, and know two or three master somms. Anyone worth their salt will be more than eager to recommend a real good wine that is $10 versus a crap wine that is $80. If someone does that, they are a salesman. Not a wine expert.
@@mariaghiglieri78 The wine store where my SIL works is mostly wine experts which I really like. They will happily sell you a $100 bottle, but just as happily sell you a fantastic pinot noir from Northern Macedonia that costs $6.99.
Can they differentiate antifreeze fluid from wine? Or having heavy presence of glycol and about 15 other chemicals present in a bottle of wine? And I am not talking about traces, I am talking about amounts enough to kill a grown man if he drinks 3-4 litres of wine and anything above a litre will give you kidney damage?
Certified is level 2. Advanced is level 3 and master is level 4. I passed level 2 and recommended picking up wine if your interested in geography, history, and biology.
I have personally witnessed a Wine professional. During a blind tasting. I was participating in. He correctly identified the Wine… The Varietal and the origin within one square mile
I passed the level 2 somm test in 2017, did it as a hobby. The job of a Somm isnt to guess the wine but help the customer explore wines they like. Just because a wine is expensive doesnt mean a customer will love it. Its more about exploring and the experience. Typically, the higher the price, the more specific the wine will be.
The netflix doc on the guy that mixed cheap wines to recreate super rare vintages proves absolutely that they are no better than the nose and palate of the average person
I have seen this done to professionals twice, and one of the guys it was done to admitted * that a part of wine tasting is knowing some information about the kind of wine, so he can form a comparison in anticipation. * As if he needed to admit to it.
I live in Japan, and some decades ago, was taken on a tour of a Kirin beer brewery in Tochigi prefecture. At the end of a work day, production workers are treated with a tiny sip of the day's work, and even among themselves, only 1% can tell the difference between bottled and draft.
I like wine. When I talk to friends who say "I don't drink wine because I don't know anything about it," I always tell them that they are the very best people to drink because they can (and should) just get the cheapest bottles they find and as soon as they find a mass produced bottle they like, just stick with it.
I remember Keith Floyd pointing to the alcohol content on a wine label saying “This is the ONLY thing that matters. How pissed you can get. There’s an awful lot of crap talked about wine”
My best friend sister is a professional drunk is what we call it ..I’ve known her for 30 Years. She done very well for her self . She’s been a master for 20 years
The idea isn't to be able to tell the difference between cheap and expensive wines. That's very easy, you just look at the godddamned price tag. The idea is to be able to judge the quality of the wine, and the character of the wine, so as to make intelligent buying decisions either for your employer, or for a retail customer in a restaurant. Wines are expensive for various reasons, but interestingly, none of those reasons is the quality of what is in the specific vintage you are sampling. Wine is priced on HISTORICAL quality, on the overall positive or negative rating of the grape crop of that year, on marketing hype, on the popularity of that style of wine, and many other factors. But the price of the bottle on the shelf is a function of all those combined, even if whats in the bottle THIDS time is cats piss. Every year there are cheap wines that turn out to be stellar. Not many, but every year it happens, some grower has a brilliant year, some unknown winemaker turns out to be either lucky, or an up and coming viticulture genius. And every year some of the worlds greatest winemakers fuck up and produce the afore mentioned cats piss. Yes, most of the time if you buy a wine from a respected label and a well regarded vintage year, you will get a good wine, BUT NOT ALWAYS. The greatest skill of a good sommelier is simple: They find the wines that are better than their price tag, and then from those, they pick one with the character and flavour which will work best for their customer or employer. To do that, you need to be able to decide what tastes good, describe it in easily understandable phrases, and compare it to other wines like it to make a quality judgement. It is difficult, it is filled with pitfalls, but it is absolutely a skill and a skill that can be taught, learned, and honed with experience. Note that all of these so called 'debunkings' are simply efforts to use well known psychological or physiological quirks to trick people. Rather than presenting a liquid neutrally and asking for a judgement is VERY different from setting traps for people that the trapper already knows will target vulnerabilities in the tasting process. In the end, the common thread of those triumphantly crowing that the snobby experts are all a bunch of frauds tis that they themselves don't like wine, and want to prove that their own lack of interest in wine is not a lack of culture, but some sort of admirable self-honesty and refusal to be impressed by bnullshit. There is plenty of bullshit in the wine world. but that is why sommelier are so useful. They cut through the bullshit (or at least the honest ones do) and help you find a good bottle for Sunday dinner.
I haul bulk food products for a living. I once hauled several thousand gallons of wine from one winery to another who then shipped it to a third winery, without it being unloaded from my trailer, as their (2nd winerys) wine. The third winery recieved it after their quality control, which included a test by a sommelier, verified that it was produced by the second winery. The third winery unloaded it into a tank to be bottled the next day as their own wine. The third winery was an award winning winery on the west coast of the US. I am pretty sure that sommeliers can't tell the difference between wines.
Not just wines, they cant tell a difference from wine with wine mixed with antifreeze fluid. You can stuff any chemical in it, enough to kill a grown man, and as long as they money is payed they will sip it, praise it and spit it out. Happened in Europe, for about 15 years... Pure evidence of this fraudulent industry.
Port is an interesting example. A very cheap port is indeed terrible, and a hugely expensive port is delicious... but anywhere between very cheap and hugely expensive is unknown until you taste it. Price for port is more an indication on how long it has been sitting around, and how much they spent on packaging... whether it tastes good has little relation to taste except at the two extremes.
Stomping, grapes and pressing grapes is two different things you would stomp the grapes right after harvest to release some of the juice and then ferment with the skins and all the juice and then you would use a wine press afterwards to extract the juice there would be no stomping after you ferment
When you were talking about ABV, when you talked about absinthe you said it was infused with Grand Wood Worm!!! I think you meant Grand Worm Wood.. anyhow, cheers!
I studied cooking and took oenology classes. the first thing to consider is that not everyone has the organoleptic capacity to differentiate (number of taste or smell receptors), not everyone has the training to be able to differentiate. so if you eat just because you are hungry, you probably have a low amount of receptors that can stimulate a very small area of your brain, your experience will never compare to a person with a large number of receptors.
I am fairly confident that i can tell the difference between $5 bottom shelf and thenother stuff as the very bottom shelf is a special kind of bad,usually. Where is gets hard for me is everywhere else..
Highly sceptical that being drunk and "floppy" can protect you from traumatic injury. Boxers are knocked out by the blow they didn't see coming. If they anticipate the blow and tense up to receive it, they are FAR less likely to suffer a KO. So 150 years of pragmatic experience in the ring suggests rather strongly that being relaxed and unprepared doesn't protect you from trauma.
They might not see it coming, but they are standing up, bouncing about a bit, bracing for their next strike. Not draped against the fencing snoring when they get hit. Not exactly comparable.
The story I heard about the October beer party was a bit different. Since making large batches of beer involved large, open vats, beer making in the summer months was largely avoided, what with all the air-borne yeasts, bacteria, fungi, etc. Small batches were more easily controlled, but a large batch going bad would represent a substantial financial loss. So most of the year's beer production took place in winter when air-borne contamination was not a problem. This applied to ales as well as lagers. So, if you plan ahead correctly, you will have enough beer to get you through the summer until you can start production again in the autumn. Autumn comes, you start brewing again and you have, hopefully, excess stock from the previous winter. So you throw a big party and empty the kegs that are needed for the new production cycle. So it wasn't, according to this explanation, a matter of brewing ales in the summer and lagers in the winter. Rather, all large-scale brewing took place in the winter.
We Canadians call American beer pisswater not because of it's alcohol content, but rather because it tastes "thinner". However, in some Southern states Alabama in my experience, alcohol content, at least in the 1990s, was regulated so that 3.5% was the norm for most brands. Anything higher was called :"malt liquor" and was only available where liquor was sold.
And Labatts and Molson aren’t piss water🤮? Yes we in America have many watery beers, BUT we’ve also got a huge cottage industry of local breweries that make damn good brew. AND I don’t need to pay $25.00 for a 6-pack with $10.00 in extra taxes tagged on.
Oh, that's why our beer - San Miguel Beer is slightly better than American beer. It is 6.5% alcohol. The 3.5% alcohol types of beer are called light beers.
Yes and no. Blind tasting is an advanced parlor trick, but you DO need an excellent memory for tastes and an encyclopedic knowledge of terroir, and having “supertaster” levels of tastebuds help too. So yes, they are full of shit, because they are just using a really big, memorized decision tree to “identify” blind tastes wines, but also no, because to effectively use this system, you do have to have the knowledge, memory, and physiology to find infinitesimally small subtleties in wines. All that said, I have yet to meet an IGS soon who can identify a Primitivo correctly within 3 tries-which is why Primitivo is officially banned from guild Somm blind tasting tests.
You cross into pretentious territory when you act like your knowledge makes you the ultimate judge of what is good. There is no objectively “good” wine. I am really passionate about wine, it’s central to my work, and I have always said that the only thing that matters is that I know enough to help other people find what they like (which, sometimes, is something that I personally do not like). My job isn’t to sell everyone a $1000 1st growth Bordeaux or lecture them on terroir, it’s to make people happy. Lots of “experts” absolutely are snobs, and some are just nerds, like in any other field.
there are supertasters who have more taste buds per square inch than the rest of us. apparently that helps with wine tasting. i'd be curious to see a blind study of tasting with a few of those folks. And how many of the masters are supertasters.
Even the most Expensive bottle of wine, can get Bad so high price isn't a Garantie for quality. And sometimes great wine from unknown region and producer could be quiet inexpensive until they get known. Not to mention the magic stuff that never gets out on the market and you can only try in the small village it's from if you know the family that makes it.
A problem that I've observed twice now is that if they do get known - and if it's good they most likely will - the price goes up and the quality goes down.
I'll just throw this out. I'm not really a big fan of wine, but even I can tell the difference between cheap wine and expensive wine. Where it becomes more difficult is between the medium quality and more expensive wines. My favorite type of wine is Cabernet Sauvignon. And the difference between a $8 bottle and a $30 bottle is pretty obvious to me. Usually the oakiness is completely missing from the cheap stuff.
Sometimes Inexpensive wines can be good and more expensive wines can be marketing, or rarity, or quality, etc.. price doesn’t necessarily dictate taste
Regarding the "Does being drunk help you survive a car crash?" question, here's an anecdote. My friend and I were 21, and we had been out to the bars. I was drinking, and he was driving. He decided to show off in his sporty car, and I was along for the ride, drunk as a skunk. He lost control, and we spun out on the road, and sailed into the trees at approximately 100mph. Needless to say, we wrecked. My friend suffered a broken collar bone, broken ribs, and punctured lung. I experienced a small scratch on the top of my head from impacting the ceiling. My friend was hospitalized, and I didn't even need stitches. From my memory of the crash, I saw it coming, and, in my drunken state, I calmly assumed a crash position. I think the effect of the alcohol was allowing me to produce an unnatural state of calm.
1:13:58 I always forget about clean-faced Fact Boi. I believe it may be Whistle’s ChatGPT bot come to life and is a bastardized representation of TH-cam’s hardest working man. We may never know…
There are quite a few examples where sommeliers are duped and guessed wrong. People are often easily fooled and experts are often over confident of their own abilities.
I can tell the year of different regions of Australia since 2015. I even have preferences. But as I do not drink wine before 2015 (because I was not interested before then) and I live in Australia, my tastes are limited. Hint: it has to do with knowing the weather. the el nino/la nina cycle has a huge impact.
There’s a video on here of a guy who’s a beer expert and he doesn’t get a single thing wrong…I’m sure there are others just as knowledgeable about wine Epicurious is the channel
Cheap from expensive isn't that useful anyway unless you think someone is scamming you. It's far better to know things like acidity, sweetness, body, tannins, barrel treatment and sometimes flavour notes since those are actually tangible aspects that contribute to a wine's flavour
Not sure I would be able to tell apart a $15 bottle of wine from a $500 one, but I can tell the difference between very cheap wine and a reasonably priced but decent one.
I am the House Sommelier here - my home. I like it I drink it. I don't, then I don't. If I buy it more than once, maybe twice, it's considered good, otherwise - occasional. Do I buy it for company - then it's pretentious, bordering on posh. However, I do prefer a dry red. IMO, the California Zinfandel requires at least 20 years or just make a rosé and move on.
*_I Know A Licensed Sommelier._* He assures me that the *_Highest Rollers_* that come to his restaurant don't know the difference between a 1945 Mouton and a 2024 "Barefoot."
There seems to be some misconceptions in the comments about 3.2 and 5 percent beers in the U.S. It boils down the the measurement method use by the individual states. The beers are the same horse er, water, just different printing on the top of the can. Yes, some Pilsners taste like someone applied a fire-hose to the vat before bottling when compared to Lagers or Ales, let alone Stouts or Porters.
That jumpscare really got me. It is almost midnight where I am, and I just smoked a bunch of weed, so beardless simon legitimately terrified me for a second.
Yes, the sentence wines that your man supermarkets have ordered the fifth so strange to me we sleep in Sweden or we can only buy alcohol as such as wine and beer stronger than 3.5% in special government stores call system company and here $10 for a bottle is considered cheap. It would be pretty great to be able to buy wine at two dollars per bottle. if so, inclined
Im so pissed at myself, every year during Oktoberfest the store chain Aldi('s?) doesnt matter the spelling they sell special Oktoberfest flavors of their imported bratwurst and i missed it this year.
Some people can totally help you pair a wine with a meal, but the number of people who can tell the difference between the '67 and '69 (a joke example) are _diminishly_ small and not paid enough to work at the restaurant you're eating at.
I have a seasoned tongue. I’ve been using mine every day for over 50 years. I gave myself this title because I’m the only person that can taste what I taste and isn’t that what’s really important?
0:00 Can Professional Wine Connoisseurs Really Not Tell the Difference Between Expensive and Cheap Wines?
17:26 How Alcohol “Proof” is Determined
21:00 Do Drunk People Really Survive Car Crashes More?
32:10 Why Would You Add Antifreeze to Wine?
46:15 Do Wine Makers Really Walk Over Grapes With Their Feet?
51:10 Does Canadian Beer Really Contain More Alcohol Than Beer Made in the United States?
55:12 How Did Oktoberfest Start?
1:03:55 Why Isn’t Beer Sold in Plastic Bottles?
1:08:30 Who Invented Tequila and What about the Worm?
1:13:30 What is Eggnog Made Of?
I prefer a 4% , homebrewing on the other hand I've had it shoot to 20%, I don't think its classified as beer at that point. Average for me is about 6%
Cans have a plastic coating inside.
Hi.
As You asked concerning 32.10: If I remember right, the antifreeze gives a sour, wine sweetness.
Correct if I am wrong.
from a Finn in Diaspora
@@outsider7658 i doth believe thee to be correct, as it being sweet is why i was constantly told bees and wasps love it.
😅😅😅
To quote a whisky sommelier, “The best whisky is the whisky you like to drink, and the best way to drink it is the way you like to drink it.“
I have been trying to refine my sense of taste over the years and can say with confidence that blindfolded I can now distinguish between a rich, full bodied Barolo from the Piedmont region of Italy and a crisp, fresh Budweiser from the St. Louis region of Missouri , especially if the wine is served at 17 C in a glass and the beer is served at 50 C in a can. My palate is more like a pallet - flat and woody.
Got a literal lol from me.
I was so annoyed until the "Budweiser". Then I busted out laughing and continued laughing the rest of the read. Thank you, dork 😂😂
Way to flex on us uncouth unwashed masses. Maybe if I win the lottery I’ll be able to tell the difference between Dom Perignon and Mad Dog 20/20 banana, but I doubt it.
@@chitlitlah The secret is to cleanse the palate between tastings. I suggest a double bacon chilly cheese dog smothered in aged Sriracha sauce followed by a slightly grey pickled egg and a small to medium sized bowl of heavily salted peanuts you have pocketed from your local pub two weeks, three days ,four hours and seven minutes (here seconds are not so important) prior to the sampling. Bonne appetit et bonne chance.
PS If you want to take this to another level, crawl upstairs at least two flights and end the tasting with 6 shots of Don Julio Blanco tequila straight from the bottle quickly chased with a generous sampling of chilled Almdudler lemon drink and an unfinished all-day sucker you rescued from the cup holder of your best friends car. Cheers.
Nailed it! 🤣
Although it did trigger a thought; I wonder if I could tell the difference between Bud and Bud Light? They're both godawful abominations and remind me of one of my favorite sight gags from the Simpsons. Homer goes to the Duff brewery and at one point we see them bottling Duff, Duff Light, and Duff Dry - all three are coming from the same singular pipe which splits into three just before being bottled.
I worked with a Sommelier at an upscale restaurant for a number of years. He was really cool and had an amazing sense of smell and taste. He could break down a blend almost by percentage and was able to nail geographical sources and vintage with mind boggling accuracy. Being a Sommelier was just a secondary interest for him. Chemical engineering was his thing. But he was absolutely brilliant in a wide range of fields and subjects. He would hold study classes for all the college students who were employed there. After the restaurant closed on an early evening, he would get in the middle of the bar and all the employees would bring their text books all around the bar that was almost a full surround. It didn’t matter what subject. The students would ask questions on subjects they were struggling with. He would bounce a few qualifying questions back at them then completely break it down and explain it in a way they could understand. It was a trip watching him going around the bar helping everyone. Dude was just brilliant. And he was only in his late 20’s at the time. And he wasn’t a square. He partied like a rockstar. No crap drugs like blow or ketamine or other crap that was going around. More of a mushroom, ecstasy , lsd and any kind of mind expanding hallucinogenics. He was funny AF too. Good times.
Yeah, that seems about right for the 0.01% of people who can actually differentiate between box wine and "good" wine. He was probably some sort of neurologic deviant, and a great trip buddy.
I didn't now Elon was a somm....
Sounds like my kind of guy
The better outcome evaluation than saying he only took “nice drugs” is knowing how he ended up.
In a gutter somewhere or succeeding at an executive desk?
@@cjb8010everyone has a different measure of success. Yours is apparently sitting behind a “corporate desk”. Last I communicated with him he was traveling extensively with his son. And he’s happy. The last time I worked with him was over 15 years ago. All I know is he is a cool dude that likes to help people and enjoy life. I don’t think he measures his success by whether or not he sits behind a desk.
The comment at the end of the sommelier section, "The only thing that matters with regard to a wine is whether or not you like it", reminds me of the motto of a whiskey channel I watch: "The best whiskey is the whiskey you like to drink, the way you like to drink it."
There is a reason why Ferraro Roche are wrapped in gold. Psychology is big.
only objectively correct comment. well done sir.
Heh they are just cornflakes in chocolate aren't they? The ultimate gilding the turd.
With this comment, you are really spoiling us 😂
Yeah I can't stand that chocolate and my stuffy father in law swears they are "the best".
@@loopbackish It's made by the same company that produces Nutella, so there definitely some of that in there as well.
I mean, who doesn't love Nutella wrapped in gold paper, sign me up for some of that!
I think “master of wine” is a an incredibly qualification to achieve.
Only 300 people have achieved this certification.
Going by stats, that's probably because they passed by accident.
it's a great memory exercise... Understanding wine is a different thing.
Real wine professionals can absolutely tell the difference between most cheap and expensive wine, assuming the cost came from winemaking and not marketing. There are plenty of cheap wines that over-perform their cost, and there are a ton of not great expensive wines.
Yeah that is a good point, and there is no way around it.
Price is arbitrary. Some cheaper wines are actually made with quality as well.
Business Insider black bald guy does a decent job of comparing two wines to say what one is cheaper.
I like the phrase "over-perform their cost". Thank you and I will definitely use it going forward. My current favorite Pinot Noir is a $6.99 bottle from North Macedonia that out performs a lot of the $25+ wines from the Willamette Valley.
The problem is wine pricing is based on a ton of factors (land/labor cost, marketing, supply/demand, etc.) and not just tied to quality.
A better way to phrase the question is "Can wine professionals tell the difference between low-quality wine and high-quality wine?"
We know the answer is yes.
@@hectorsmommy1717 In whisky we have a nice layman's term for it: Bang or your Buck. Some cheap whiskies are very decent (for their price) and some very expensive ones are very much worth it. But there's always a law of diminishing returns at work and quite often the $30-50 range isn't half bad and a lot more accessible than the 100+ stuff. Most people are ignoring the 1000+ stuff completely, and rightly so.
As with many things in this world, it varies.
Some people can smell a flower and tell which one it is, while others are only somewhat sure it’s a flower.
Absinth makes the heart grow fonder!
But an abscess makes the fart go: honda
I doubt that there’s very many people on the entire planet who have had real absinthe, considering that it was banned for decades. I think there’s one French company who are making “the real deal” these days, but who knows if it’s really authentic to what was available 100 years ago.
And the head go wander.
Too much absinth makes the pp go wander
Mum always enjoyed a good Cardbordeaux...
Turning the volume all the way up to hear young Simon only to have current Simon blow my eardrums out
As a Freelance Wine Professional / Sommelier myself who works in the world of wine, thank you on behalf of my industry for taking the time to create this long-form content about the subject matter of wine! We train for many years to achieve status and indeed costly wine qualifications that give us the credibility we need to continue our work! :) I can make many comments about the content in this video, however I will say this: as wine experts, we are not infallible and will often make mistakes which is completely fine! Correctly identifying the grape varietal and country during a blind tasting does not make us experts. It's the reasoning and analysis behind our answers that makes us the experts! If our guesses are wrong, so be it! :)
But what’s the point of being about to guess where a wine is from?
My SIL is a Certified Sommelier (this is level 3 so the middle of the pack) and she can pick out the varietals, some terriors, etc. She is not a wine snob and will recommend a $10 bottle just as fast as she will recommend a $50 bottle. There is a difference between a sommelier and a connoisseur. A sommelier is trained and has proven the ability to pick out certain aspects of wine. A connoisseur is much more likely to be filled with BS.
I am a Certified Wine Specialist, having gone through the Society of Wine Educators, and know two or three master somms. Anyone worth their salt will be more than eager to recommend a real good wine that is $10 versus a crap wine that is $80. If someone does that, they are a salesman. Not a wine expert.
@@mariaghiglieri78 The wine store where my SIL works is mostly wine experts which I really like. They will happily sell you a $100 bottle, but just as happily sell you a fantastic pinot noir from Northern Macedonia that costs $6.99.
Can they differentiate antifreeze fluid from wine?
Or having heavy presence of glycol and about 15 other chemicals present in a bottle of wine?
And I am not talking about traces, I am talking about amounts enough to kill a grown man if he drinks 3-4 litres of wine and anything above a litre will give you kidney damage?
Certified is level 2. Advanced is level 3 and master is level 4. I passed level 2 and recommended picking up wine if your interested in geography, history, and biology.
I have personally witnessed a Wine professional. During a blind tasting. I was participating in. He correctly identified the Wine… The Varietal and the origin within one square mile
Most likely a setup.
Now you need to witness how to use a period.
This is probably the earliest ive got to one of simons vids
Ooh Mr Whistler😂 2:49 that felt like it came from a real place 😂
I passed the level 2 somm test in 2017, did it as a hobby. The job of a Somm isnt to guess the wine but help the customer explore wines they like. Just because a wine is expensive doesnt mean a customer will love it. Its more about exploring and the experience. Typically, the higher the price, the more specific the wine will be.
The netflix doc on the guy that mixed cheap wines to recreate super rare vintages proves absolutely that they are no better than the nose and palate of the average person
A $10 bottle of wine you’re an alcoholic, a $50 bottle you’re a connoisseur.
Becky: [smells candle] "Hey this smells like Fireball"
Becky's Friend: "Non-alcoholics call that cinnamon"
I have seen this done to professionals twice, and one of the guys it was done to admitted * that a part of wine tasting is knowing some information about the kind of wine, so he can form a comparison in anticipation.
* As if he needed to admit to it.
I like the way Simon says 'somilier'.
My God! The Neon sign is ... LIT! Glory Days™ indeed!
That’s because this was filmed years ago.
I was wondering how long he'd take to repair it...all that Raid: SHADOW Legends $$$, it shoudl have been repaired years ago.
That is a very young Simon at the end of this compilation video.
The last part about eggnog with Simon having no beard seriously freaked me out ^^'
I live in Japan, and some decades ago, was taken on a tour of a Kirin beer brewery in Tochigi prefecture. At the end of a work day, production workers are treated with a tiny sip of the day's work, and even among themselves, only 1% can tell the difference between bottled and draft.
If I get really stoned and drink wine I can taste what sommeliers claim to taste. So that’s pretty cool.
"the snozzberries taste like snozzberries"
I like wine. When I talk to friends who say "I don't drink wine because I don't know anything about it," I always tell them that they are the very best people to drink because they can (and should) just get the cheapest bottles they find and as soon as they find a mass produced bottle they like, just stick with it.
I remember Keith Floyd pointing to the alcohol content on a wine label saying “This is the ONLY thing that matters. How pissed you can get. There’s an awful lot of crap talked about wine”
My best friend sister is a professional drunk is what we call it ..I’ve known her for 30 Years. She done very well for her self . She’s been a master for 20 years
8:47 I may have misheard but it’s menthol not methanol.
Yes, a slip of the tongue or auto-correct mistake I think...methanol is extremely poisonous (used in anti-freeze, pesticides etc.)
I heard the same. Was confused as well lol
nothing wrong with a little box of Card-boardeaux.
Carlo Rossi for the ones with sweet tooth.
Chateaux cardboard.
The idea isn't to be able to tell the difference between cheap and expensive wines. That's very easy, you just look at the godddamned price tag.
The idea is to be able to judge the quality of the wine, and the character of the wine, so as to make intelligent buying decisions either for your employer, or for a retail customer in a restaurant.
Wines are expensive for various reasons, but interestingly, none of those reasons is the quality of what is in the specific vintage you are sampling. Wine is priced on HISTORICAL quality, on the overall positive or negative rating of the grape crop of that year, on marketing hype, on the popularity of that style of wine, and many other factors. But the price of the bottle on the shelf is a function of all those combined, even if whats in the bottle THIDS time is cats piss.
Every year there are cheap wines that turn out to be stellar. Not many, but every year it happens, some grower has a brilliant year, some unknown winemaker turns out to be either lucky, or an up and coming viticulture genius. And every year some of the worlds greatest winemakers fuck up and produce the afore mentioned cats piss. Yes, most of the time if you buy a wine from a respected label and a well regarded vintage year, you will get a good wine, BUT NOT ALWAYS.
The greatest skill of a good sommelier is simple: They find the wines that are better than their price tag, and then from those, they pick one with the character and flavour which will work best for their customer or employer. To do that, you need to be able to decide what tastes good, describe it in easily understandable phrases, and compare it to other wines like it to make a quality judgement. It is difficult, it is filled with pitfalls, but it is absolutely a skill and a skill that can be taught, learned, and honed with experience.
Note that all of these so called 'debunkings' are simply efforts to use well known psychological or physiological quirks to trick people. Rather than presenting a liquid neutrally and asking for a judgement is VERY different from setting traps for people that the trapper already knows will target vulnerabilities in the tasting process.
In the end, the common thread of those triumphantly crowing that the snobby experts are all a bunch of frauds tis that they themselves don't like wine, and want to prove that their own lack of interest in wine is not a lack of culture, but some sort of admirable self-honesty and refusal to be impressed by bnullshit.
There is plenty of bullshit in the wine world. but that is why sommelier are so useful. They cut through the bullshit (or at least the honest ones do) and help you find a good bottle for Sunday dinner.
Epicures had a wine tester on their blind cheep vrs expensive series, they managed to get it all right. Cool person.
I haul bulk food products for a living. I once hauled several thousand gallons of wine from one winery to another who then shipped it to a third winery, without it being unloaded from my trailer, as their (2nd winerys) wine. The third winery recieved it after their quality control, which included a test by a sommelier, verified that it was produced by the second winery. The third winery unloaded it into a tank to be bottled the next day as their own wine. The third winery was an award winning winery on the west coast of the US. I am pretty sure that sommeliers can't tell the difference between wines.
Not just wines, they cant tell a difference from wine with wine mixed with antifreeze fluid.
You can stuff any chemical in it, enough to kill a grown man, and as long as they money is payed they will sip it, praise it and spit it out.
Happened in Europe, for about 15 years... Pure evidence of this fraudulent industry.
Sweet Jesus , #25! I feel like such a fan!
At first I thought the thumbnail said "Are some liars full of crap". hah.
me and my family's favourite wine is the German white wine ' blue nun', which is a traditionally drank wine in our family.
That was the winner that first got me drinking wine. Too sweet for me now, but I still appreciate the world it opened for me!
funny. cuz same here. IF we have to drink a white...that's the preferred white. We mostly drink reds though.
I can atleast tell a grape juice from wine
Yeah, grape juice tastes nice.
I smashed grapes with my feet as a child for home made wine my dad made. It was fun :D
Port is an interesting example. A very cheap port is indeed terrible, and a hugely expensive port is delicious... but anywhere between very cheap and hugely expensive is unknown until you taste it.
Price for port is more an indication on how long it has been sitting around, and how much they spent on packaging... whether it tastes good has little relation to taste except at the two extremes.
Omg naked simon .. was not expecting that 😂
Doc: Nurse, push 30 ml of ethanol stat and hang a bag of Macallan!
(Doctor checks patients insurance)
Doc: Make that Lord Calvert instead.
Stomping, grapes and pressing grapes is two different things you would stomp the grapes right after harvest to release some of the juice and then ferment with the skins and all the juice and then you would use a wine press afterwards to extract the juice there would be no stomping after you ferment
When you were talking about ABV, when you talked about absinthe you said it was infused with Grand Wood Worm!!! I think you meant Grand Worm Wood.. anyhow, cheers!
I studied cooking and took oenology classes.
the first thing to consider is that not everyone has the organoleptic capacity to differentiate (number of taste or smell receptors), not everyone has the training to be able to differentiate.
so if you eat just because you are hungry, you probably have a low amount of receptors that can stimulate a very small area of your brain, your experience will never compare to a person with a large number of receptors.
I am fairly confident that i can tell the difference between $5 bottom shelf and thenother stuff as the very bottom shelf is a special kind of bad,usually.
Where is gets hard for me is everywhere else..
Highly sceptical that being drunk and "floppy" can protect you from traumatic injury. Boxers are knocked out by the blow they didn't see coming. If they anticipate the blow and tense up to receive it, they are FAR less likely to suffer a KO. So 150 years of pragmatic experience in the ring suggests rather strongly that being relaxed and unprepared doesn't protect you from trauma.
They might not see it coming, but they are standing up, bouncing about a bit, bracing for their next strike. Not draped against the fencing snoring when they get hit. Not exactly comparable.
What I love is box red wine and orange flavor seltzer water. its like a cheap sangria
I have tread grapes. It was fun! 🦶 🍇 That said, I never found out what happened to the wine.
The story I heard about the October beer party was a bit different. Since making large batches of beer involved large, open vats, beer making in the summer months was largely avoided, what with all the air-borne yeasts, bacteria, fungi, etc. Small batches were more easily controlled, but a large batch going bad would represent a substantial financial loss. So most of the year's beer production took place in winter when air-borne contamination was not a problem. This applied to ales as well as lagers. So, if you plan ahead correctly, you will have enough beer to get you through the summer until you can start production again in the autumn. Autumn comes, you start brewing again and you have, hopefully, excess stock from the previous winter. So you throw a big party and empty the kegs that are needed for the new production cycle. So it wasn't, according to this explanation, a matter of brewing ales in the summer and lagers in the winter. Rather, all large-scale brewing took place in the winter.
Love the thumbnail
We Canadians call American beer pisswater not because of it's alcohol content, but rather because it tastes "thinner". However, in some Southern states Alabama in my experience, alcohol content, at least in the 1990s, was regulated so that 3.5% was the norm for most brands. Anything higher was called :"malt liquor" and was only available where liquor was sold.
3.5%? Nobody would drink that here.🍻🇩🇪
And Labatts and Molson aren’t piss water🤮? Yes we in America have many watery beers, BUT we’ve also got a huge cottage industry of local breweries that make damn good brew. AND I don’t need to pay $25.00 for a 6-pack with $10.00 in extra taxes tagged on.
Oh, that's why our beer - San Miguel Beer is slightly better than American beer. It is 6.5% alcohol. The 3.5% alcohol types of beer are called light beers.
It has been said that drinking American beer is like making love in a canoe.....f'n near water. Cheers 🍺
The big national brands are usually around 3.5 percent because of the different rules in different states
Newcastle Brown Ale, you can taste when it's from a can instead of a bottle.
You got your sign fixed. Cool. I offered but yeah, I'm sure my comments never get read 😂
"Are sommeliers full of crap?" No, but if you know a lot about wine, you can't help but sound pretentious.
Nah, they're full of shit
@@Rick-k7m Connoisseurs are. Sommeliers are much less likely to be (but I have met some who are)
I think I getting notes of full bodied daftness and barefooted bumpkin.😁
Yes and no. Blind tasting is an advanced parlor trick, but you DO need an excellent memory for tastes and an encyclopedic knowledge of terroir, and having “supertaster” levels of tastebuds help too.
So yes, they are full of shit, because they are just using a really big, memorized decision tree to “identify” blind tastes wines, but also no, because to effectively use this system, you do have to have the knowledge, memory, and physiology to find infinitesimally small subtleties in wines.
All that said, I have yet to meet an IGS soon who can identify a Primitivo correctly within 3 tries-which is why Primitivo is officially banned from guild Somm blind tasting tests.
You cross into pretentious territory when you act like your knowledge makes you the ultimate judge of what is good. There is no objectively “good” wine. I am really passionate about wine, it’s central to my work, and I have always said that the only thing that matters is that I know enough to help other people find what they like (which, sometimes, is something that I personally do not like). My job isn’t to sell everyone a $1000 1st growth Bordeaux or lecture them on terroir, it’s to make people happy. Lots of “experts” absolutely are snobs, and some are just nerds, like in any other field.
there are supertasters who have more taste buds per square inch than the rest of us. apparently that helps with wine tasting. i'd be curious to see a blind study of tasting with a few of those folks. And how many of the masters are supertasters.
Even the most Expensive bottle of wine, can get Bad so high price isn't a Garantie for quality. And sometimes great wine from unknown region and producer could be quiet inexpensive until they get known. Not to mention the magic stuff that never gets out on the market and you can only try in the small village it's from if you know the family that makes it.
A problem that I've observed twice now is that if they do get known - and if it's good they most likely will - the price goes up and the quality goes down.
Time warp! Stewart little is back!
If the bottle looks fancy then it tastes better. Thems the rules
I'll just throw this out. I'm not really a big fan of wine, but even I can tell the difference between cheap wine and expensive wine. Where it becomes more difficult is between the medium quality and more expensive wines.
My favorite type of wine is Cabernet Sauvignon. And the difference between a $8 bottle and a $30 bottle is pretty obvious to me. Usually the oakiness is completely missing from the cheap stuff.
For me I still find it funny that you can show a character is high class by making them get drunk.
Sometimes Inexpensive wines can be good and more expensive wines can be marketing, or rarity, or quality, etc.. price doesn’t necessarily dictate taste
Regarding the "Does being drunk help you survive a car crash?" question, here's an anecdote.
My friend and I were 21, and we had been out to the bars. I was drinking, and he was driving. He decided to show off in his sporty car, and I was along for the ride, drunk as a skunk. He lost control, and we spun out on the road, and sailed into the trees at approximately 100mph. Needless to say, we wrecked.
My friend suffered a broken collar bone, broken ribs, and punctured lung. I experienced a small scratch on the top of my head from impacting the ceiling. My friend was hospitalized, and I didn't even need stitches.
From my memory of the crash, I saw it coming, and, in my drunken state, I calmly assumed a crash position. I think the effect of the alcohol was allowing me to produce an unnatural state of calm.
Hum, wine stomping is a real thing and it's done in many private vineyards in current days
When I turned 30 booze started giving me bad migraines half way through my first drink. I miss a good stout and porter. Even a black and tan
1:13:58 I always forget about clean-faced Fact Boi. I believe it may be Whistle’s ChatGPT bot come to life and is a bastardized representation of TH-cam’s hardest working man.
We may never know…
There are quite a few examples where sommeliers are duped and guessed wrong. People are often easily fooled and experts are often over confident of their own abilities.
YES
I can tell the year of different regions of Australia since 2015. I even have preferences. But as I do not drink wine before 2015 (because I was not interested before then) and I live in Australia, my tastes are limited.
Hint: it has to do with knowing the weather. the el nino/la nina cycle has a huge impact.
are you a bot?
@@arthurpendragon8192 i am programmed to say "no".
This is very similar to audio 'experts' who claim to identify and categorise 'tone woods' in electric guitars.
There is a very good film about this.
I would love to see a similar video for bourbon.
Horace Rumploe's Chateau Thames Embankment!🤪🍷
There must be enough people who are interested in wine to be interested.
I don't drink any hard juices so I'll have to catch you on the next upload 😊
Rather fond of a nice château Aldi breakfast claret myself.
There’s a video on here of a guy who’s a beer expert and he doesn’t get a single thing wrong…I’m sure there are others just as knowledgeable about wine
Epicurious is the channel
It's an edited video on social media, posted by a well known professional content creator. I think it might be a wee bit staged.
That cousin Gill has a tendency to wildly overfill his wine glasses.
Cheap from expensive isn't that useful anyway unless you think someone is scamming you.
It's far better to know things like acidity, sweetness, body, tannins, barrel treatment and sometimes flavour notes since those are actually tangible aspects that contribute to a wine's flavour
Not sure I would be able to tell apart a $15 bottle of wine from a $500 one, but I can tell the difference between very cheap wine and a reasonably priced but decent one.
I am the House Sommelier here - my home. I like it I drink it. I don't, then I don't. If I buy it more than once, maybe twice, it's considered good, otherwise - occasional. Do I buy it for company - then it's pretentious, bordering on posh. However, I do prefer a dry red. IMO, the California Zinfandel requires at least 20 years or just make a rosé and move on.
16:06
ahh yes, mass produced round tablea are often quite good.
Yes, there you go........
Im something of a wine expert myself. You pour me a glass and i can tell you with a single sip if its wine or not.
There are also Masters of wine and the whole WSET education programme besides the sommeliers.
super young Simon at the end, what year was that from?
*_I Know A Licensed Sommelier._*
He assures me that the *_Highest Rollers_* that come to his restaurant don't know the difference between a 1945 Mouton and a 2024 "Barefoot."
There seems to be some misconceptions in the comments about 3.2 and 5 percent beers in the U.S. It boils down the the measurement method use by the individual states. The beers are the same horse er, water, just different printing on the top of the can. Yes, some Pilsners taste like someone applied a fire-hose to the vat before bottling when compared to Lagers or Ales, let alone Stouts or Porters.
The first time I took the level 1 somm test there was a question that gave 4 wine regions in Argentina and asked you to name them from east to west…
Lol glad that wasn't in mine 😂
1:13:40 my god Simon always keep the beard lol
That jumpscare really got me. It is almost midnight where I am, and I just smoked a bunch of weed, so beardless simon legitimately terrified me for a second.
Yes, the sentence wines that your man supermarkets have ordered the fifth so strange to me we sleep in Sweden or we can only buy alcohol as such as wine and beer stronger than 3.5% in special government stores call system company and here $10 for a bottle is considered cheap. It would be pretty great to be able to buy wine at two dollars per bottle. if so, inclined
All I know is that I cannot tolerate Sauv Blanc. Sick for several days after drinking a little sip.
Penn and Teller had an awesome bulls*** episode about this
Careful what you say about Taylor. Some of her fans are crazy. ;)
Get 😊
😊
Im so pissed at myself, every year during Oktoberfest the store chain Aldi('s?) doesnt matter the spelling they sell special Oktoberfest flavors of their imported bratwurst and i missed it this year.
Wine snob tip; always keep the label up when pouring red wine.
Some people can totally help you pair a wine with a meal, but the number of people who can tell the difference between the '67 and '69 (a joke example) are _diminishly_ small and not paid enough to work at the restaurant you're eating at.
The question is not if they can tell the difference, but if people that buy wine can. These guys don't buy wine but get it donated to them.
I have a seasoned tongue. I’ve been using mine every day for over 50 years. I gave myself this title because I’m the only person that can taste what I taste and isn’t that what’s really important?
I don't know anything about wine, but i can tell the difference between mad dog 20/20 and yellow tail