This week’s wine news: BuzzFeed does a cheap wine tasting, and cheap wins. Plus, do you need a 1,000-bottle wine cellar? And is fake Yellow Tail flooding Britain?
• Cheap wine! BuzzFeed’s Hannah Dobrogosz blind tasted five cheap wines against five more expensive ones, and the results went the way most of these tastings go. She found that, dollar for dollar, she preferred the less expensive wines. The piece is worth reading for variety of reasons, and not just the results. First, Dobrogozs is not an old white guy, so seeing someone younger go to all this trouble is encouraging. Second, she writes knowledgeably and without the snark most of these stories revolve around. And how can the Wine Curmudgeon argue with a post that ends with: “Don’t let anyone shame you for enjoying a $6 bottle of wine. As this experiment has taught me, price does not mean you will or won’t like something. Find what you like and what works for you, and enjoy it!”
• How big? Fox broadcaster Joe Buck is selling his palatial St. Louis home, and one of the highlights is what the story calls “a wine room that can hold close to 1,000 bottles.” This raises any number of questions for the WC to ponder: First and foremost, how does one drink 1,000 bottles of wine? That’s close to three bottles of wine a day for a year, something not even I am willing to try. Ah, WC, you answer: It’s not about drinking – it’s about storing. So how does one accumulate 1,000 bottles of wine worth storing? And then decide when to drink them – and what to drink them with. Frankly, it’s easier to illegally buy Domaine Tariquet.
• Yellow Tail: I report this story, though I don’t necessarily believe it. The Mirror, one of those British tabloids that is best known for gossip and racy headlines, claims that Chinese gangs are flooding Britain with fake bottle of Yellow Tail, the $6 Aussie brand. Read the story more closely, and it notes that 41 counterfeit bottles were found in a supermarket in a town near Birmingham in central England, and that “other bottles have been found elsewhere in the country.” Which, of course, is hardly flooding. Besides, there’s little incentive to counterfeit cheap wine, since the fake ingredients don’t cost that much less than what’s normally in the bottle. If the wholesale cost of Yellow Tail is a couple of dollars, what’s the point of making counterfeit Yellow Tail that costs $1 to make, as the story says? And hasn’t Yellow Tail suffered enough?