Are expensive wines better than cheap wines?

As we get closer to the weekend, I'm finding myself looking forward to drinking some great wine. On Saturday night, I'll be going to a friends house where I'll be drinking a lot of wine from his collection. Now the differences between his collection and mine are quite startling. My collection contains wines that retail for under $10, while his wines are usually sold for around $100. He has outsourced wine storage, while I keep my wine in a box in a closet. Very noticeable differences!

Every time my friend uncorks some expensive wine, I get pretty excited. Since I can never justify spending $100 on a bottle of anything, I appreciate having a friend that doesn't seem to have a problem with it at all. 

Now whenever we've finished a bottle of his wine, I always wonder silently- "was that wine really that much better than my favorite $8 bottle?" I am yet to answer this question with any conviction. I can see where the expensive bottle has its advantages. I acknowledge that an $80 reserve bottle of wine is in most cases better than a cheap bottle of wine. However, I'm not convinced that the advantages outweigh the extraordinary difference in cost.

Another friend of mine reinforced this point recently, when he noted that he attends wine tastings where a cheap bottle of wine is intermingled with 4-5 expensive bottles. When people are asked to rate each bottle, the cheap one always scores higher than some of its expensive counterparts.

So I trudge on..definitely curious about how people justify spending so much on a bottle of wine, and wondering if it just comes down to perception, and not taste.

Your thoughts?

Comments

[Michael]

I find it interesting that the cheap wine usually ranks higher in the contest. Is this because most average wine drinkers are used to 10-15 dollar bottles of wine? So of course they would pick that taste out. Or are these sophisticated wine drinkers taking the test?

[Pascal]

hello there,
you bring up an interesting point for which many wine lovers like you or me who cannot afford expensive wines would like to defend that it's not true. Unfortunately there are the age/vintage factor that you don't take in consideration in your comment. Cheap wines are not designed to be kept when expensive ones usually and unfortunately if you don't have the patience (10 years kind of patience) to wait until the wine gets mature you may not be able to appreciate the difference with a cheap one. It's very rare to find a 10 years old wine in a wine shop and drinking an $80 bottle from 2005 won't be appreciated compared to a $8 one.

[Jeff]

I had a chance to open a bottle of Grahams Vintage Port from 1980.. (a xmas gift from a boss). Amazing...

It was sooooo good, and made cheaper port taste like crap in comparison.

That is my only real experience with a high-quality aged wine.

[TJ]

It depends on your personal taste, which obviously differs from mine. Due mainly to cost my wife and I who have been dating about 6 years now. We've gone up and back down the price scale. I half grew up in Napa, and we routinely go back for wine tastings. We've both noticed that unfortunatly many napa valley wines are going up the price scale while quality is flat or declining. We are more in the "budget" range for wines and are finding quite a few wonderful wines. Some of which we want to attempt to age ourselves and see.

Dorian mentioned Coppola, we used to belong to their wine club. They have many great wines throughout the entire spectrum (Our personal favorite is the Sophia rose I believe you can only get it at the winery?!) From there, it's a taste preference. From Coppola I also prefer the Rosso but one of their more higher end wines I LOVED when we got it in our shipment. Have I repurchased the higher end wine? No, would I? Sure...maybe?!

Thanks to Dorian's heads up, we took advantage of the most recent Bevmo wine sale. While I was shopping the selections my wife ducked away for a moment and popped back with ZD Chardonnay (at the time $24). She looked at me as if I'd argue about not getting it. NO WAY! We both LOVE that Chardonnay and I love that we have it on hand! BUT I could have used the logic of being able to get 3 or 4 other wines that were in the sale vs that 1 bottle. For us, it's worth it to have the ZD on hand.

Being that we do go fairly frequently (At least 3-4 times a year) to Napa I can say that justifying a $100 bottle resides on many factors: Taste being one of them and personally one of the strongest reasons you should buy a wine! You like how it tastes! Experience at a restaurant or winery and overall association/memory impression is probably the 3rd keystone factor.

For example, many people I know really like a winery called Peju and their wines. ABSOLUTLY GORGEOUS grounds but we had a bad experience with a snooty employee and we'll pretty much never go back nor buy their wines. Yet, we had a GREAT time a Heitz (right next to V. Sattui on 29) AND it was a free tasting for flights?! Almost unheard of in Napa!!! I wound up buying a $30 cab, even though I've had better tasting $15 cab's from other places. AND I have ordered Heitz wines over others at resturants. WHY, because of the positive experience/memory I have associated with their wines due to the GREAT experience I had at their winery.

I say taste trumps all, if you like a particular wine-buy more of it! Share it with friends. We have a little "wine group" really it's friends whom we enjoy hanging out with and go wine tasting with. We have a shared and trusted group palette. If one of us brings in a new wine, we know we'll most likely enjoy it because we've shared so much together.