Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for August 07, 2020

Guess who’s going to be short on his share of the rent this month?

Rat, how many six packs would a thousand dollars buy?

I am a wine Philistine. Wine to me tastes like sour fruit juice with vinegar. I can’t even stomach champagne unless it’s mixed 50/50 with OJ in a mimosa. To me, Mad Dog 20/20 dated last week and Lafitte Rothschild 1953 are pretty much the same.

Wine is wasted on me. Gimme beer or bourbon.

There was a time, thirty or forty years ago, when the wine market was not subject to bidding wars for prestige bottles. But even then the best Bordeaux was out of reach for most. I saw my last bottle of Lafite many years ago. But the good news is that the volume of not-so-prestigious wines is huge, they are good and affordable.

Adam Ruins Everything did a show on this.

My favorite gourmet meal consists of Salisbury steak on a bun, accompanied by a small portion of French fried potatoes. Fortunately, it’s not hard to find.

to me, wine is just cranberry juice or any other tart fruit juice which isn’t fermented

There’s a thing called the price/value curve. the price is the vertical axis and the value (for wine, that’s approximately “taste”) is the horizontal one. It is always a curve that rises steeper and steeper over on the “expensive” side of things. The trick is to know that you get 90% of the value in the first 50% or so of the price range: Two Dollar Chuck ain’t all that bad, but you can taste the difference between that and a $12 bottle. And I can taste the difference from there to $25/bottle… but only very rarely can I tell which bottle is $25 and which is $50. So I buy wine that costs less than about $30. And even when I can tell that the wine is superb, I just can’t see spending $25 per glass for something that’s so ephemeral.

Once, I was offered a drink of some $1000/bottle Champaign. It was good. Easily as good as the stuff that that costs $12/bottle. I did not mention that, though…

♩i get no kick from champagne, mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all…

but i have been known to tip a glass or several of pinot noir…

Great wine allows you to appreciate life! Fantastic wine takes your breath away and replaces it with flowing sunshine!

A bit better than Eau du Backyard Vine.

For gosh sakes, Pig, get with it before the parade passes you by! Get at least a little joy out of life!

My boy is a sommelier, and he assures me (someone who has enjoyed good wine all his life) that there are many lower-priced wines available that rival the so-called sovereign vintages. The happy part? He’s proved it to me again and again. The key is education. If it matters to you, you’ll find very enjoyable wines that are very affordable. Happily, I can just depend on the son to shine some good wine on me!

There are many small wineries around with a superb product reasonably priced.

You should’ve bought some scotch whisky instead, Rat.

As long as I hide the box, my friends think they are drinking expensive stuff.If they only knew! NIce wine glasses are the key

Thankfully, I don’t drink wine.

Whatever. No use whining now, Rat.

No matter what the cost it all turns to waste product in the end ;-) … Croc Power !

Oh, just stop wining.

I drink brandy, the real stuff, not that fruit flavored junk. Anyway, I can’t stand the good brandy, I like the cheaper stuff, but I can easily tell the difference. As for wine, I like red and dry, 8 bucks a bottle is fine vintage.

I saw a report a few years back where they put cheap wine in a blender and did taste tests with people who know what good wine is. In the blind taste test they choose the cheap wine.

I remember one evening when the only entertainment we had was a couple of bottles of cheap wine.

It was amazing how it went from “this is terrible” to “this is okay” to “we need to get some more of this!” as the bottles emptied.

And ANYONE who goes on about Wine having “A good, strong fruity base, highlighted by hints of clove, which is mellow, but with a good strong finish…” or some such NONSENSE, is FULL OF IT!!! And I’m NOT talking about the wine, either!

When in New Orleans, I had a bottle of aged Champaign, which came to the table in it’s own wooden crate, very impressive…Until I tasted it….I thought I was drinking a cheap bottle of wine…EWW! I couldn’t even finish a glass ……

I’ll take a Tawny Port anyday.

My brother was a producer with a theater. At intermission, the people bought plenty of glasses of wine costing at least $2 a pop — which is about what the theater paid per bottle.

About 40 years ago, I had the opportunity to drink one glass of Chateau Latour, which today is one of those $1,000 a bottle wines. Absolutely spectacular. 40 years later and I still remember how amazing it was. I’m actually considering using my next $1,200 stimulus check to buy a bottle.

I was once on a team of seven people at work where, within a month, every one else on the team transferred to another job and was replaced by someone else. I felt like the only person in the room that didn’t get the joke.

My daughter is a sommelier and would be horrified to know that I feel the same way.

I actually like the taste of some wines. Problem is I cant stand alcohol.

I was at a tasting once and they brought out a 40-yo Cab. While the pouring and after, we were giving a history of each grape (I exaggerate a bit). I had started drinking my glass and was getting death stares, but by the time the guy stopped talking everyone else’s wine had died. I was the only one who actually got a taste of it.

“We will sell no wine before its time”

I love my Arbor Mist, and I also get quite a few nice tasting wines at Aldi, for around $6.

Wine is wine. There have been dozens of experiments (either as practical jokes or scientific curiosity) that have shown even the most elite of wine tasting snobs cannot tell the differences any more than Rat could today.

all wine is a hoax – it’s just alcoholic grape juice

Spoiled grape juice is spoiled grape juice.

When I took a first aid course in high school they used rubbing alcohol to sanitize the Resusci Annes. Truth be told most wines, especially the dry ones, taste like rubbing alcohol to me. Ice wines tend not to be too bad, however.

My neighbors just seem to LOVE “Bay Bridge” wines from the local Kroger… at about $2.99 a bottle…

Champipple

Yes! Actually I do feel like the world is one big hoax!

Another reason I don’t touch the stuff.

Allow me to join you, Rat and Pig (panel 5). Although I can tell a difference between 79-cent cheap pseudo-wine and real wine, the higher up the price scale one goes the less I can tell the difference among otherwise-similar wines. Rat’s is just an extreme example….

I know of someone in the real world who thinks almost everything’s a “hoax”…!

I’m not much of a drinker. A shot of kosher wine in a glass of 7 Up is my idea of a mixed drink. From time to time friends have offered me “the good stuff.” When I taste it and don’t really like it, they say “it’s an acquired taste” and I should learn to like it. Why would I try to “acquire” a taste for something I don’t like, is over-priced, and gives me a hangover?

Stephen King once observed that you could drink your Dom Perignon out of either Waterford Crystal or a Flintstones’ jelly glass – “But,” says Mr. King, “There is a difference.” Presentation, my friends, it’s always the presentation.

As a non-drinking alcoholic, I’ve discovered the refreshing taste of a glass of ice-water with a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar in it. Doesn’t even have to be top-shelf balsamic, house brand will do fine. Pairs well with most foods.

Assuming you like wine to begin with, there will be cheap wines you like and expensive wines you don’t like.

And if you like red wine with your fish or white wine with your steak, that’s what you should drink.

Don’t let anyone try to tell you otherwise.

The Attic Greeks sold wine all over the Mediterranean. They said "Only barbarians would drink unwatered wine. " They knew wine.At least when drinking wine drink at least as much water with it. Your head will thank you in the morning.

One of the sighs in my office as a PHB, “Wining is not allowed.” And another, over that long career, “The beatings will continue till morale improves.”

Only way i’d pay a grand or more for a bottle of wine, is investing in a Petrus Pomerol, then when it’s worth many times what I purchased it for, put it out on the market. Till then, I’ll enjoy my house plonk..https://www.wine-searcher.com/discover?p=0&e=w4

It used to be difficult to predictably create good wine. That’s why the great crus and sommeliers mattered. But over the course of the 20th century, science tackled the problem. Now, small wineries can just buy grapes and make really nice wines year after year. Rating services make it possible to find great wines for very reasonable prices. Once you pay more than $25, you’re buying the label, or supporting a unique business, or paying for the privilege of boasting that you can afford to overpay thousands of dollars for something that might not even taste better. In the end, most luxury goods are ways to strip people who don’t know any better of their excess cash.

Rat drinking wine.

http://blog.lastbottlewines.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/lets-get-this-year-of-the-rat-started.jpg

It’s funny – the principles of diminishing returns exists everywhere, and so the ability to detect differences becomes more and more difficult as you get more and more refined. I’ve actually been invited to a few fancy dinners through work and can maybe taste the difference between a $20 bottle of wine and a $100 bottle of wine – maybe. But I can taste the difference between $5 box wine and that $20 bottle of wine. So, the more I know – the less happy I am with cheap wine. An example where ignorance was happiness and learning was expensive.

As long as it feels good going down & doesn’t hurt coming up, I’m good…

Most people have no objective or experiential basis for judging things like wine. So the $1000 bottle MUST be better than the $100 bottle which MUST be better than the $10 bottle. Take it from someone who was a professional winemaker for 40 years: It ain’t necessarily so.

FUN FACT. Life is a hoax. And you’re not in on it.

me too someone gave me a 100 dollar bottle of wine and it tasted horrible and put me to sleep.

Well, if he were a wine afficinado, after splurging on a $1,000 bottle of wine he’d probably have just put it on a shelf in some closet he’d then call the wine closet, and leave it until it increased in value (he’d probably have to do something about the temp and humidity levels in the closet) and never drink it.

If you’re used to drinking cheap wines and you try a good one, you may not notice a difference. But if you drink good wines for a while and then try a cheap one, you’ll definitely see what the difference is.

Me? I’ll just have a good strong cup o’ Joe. Black! NO sugar.

I have had some pretty expensive wines. A couple of them in the $125 range were actually worth it if luxurient taste is value (BV Georges de la Tour and Beringer Private Reserve, for example). But I went to a wine tasting with an $800 cabernet and I thought, “What’s the big deal?”

John Cleese did a film on wine. Find John Cleese – Wine for the Confused. He sums it up this way (paraphrasing) If you like it, drink it.

Life is like a big ole box of wine. Drink enough of it and you will inevitably get a hangover.

When I feel pretentious, I just change thename to “Oiseau de Tonnerre”. Normally, it’s “Thunderbird”. (Actually, I despise the taste of alcohol..which probably saved my life.)

We were in Jerez, birthplace of Sherry. We were at “Tio Pepe Winery”, the big seller in Spain..a “free” glass includrd in the (not optional) winery tour. Twenty people in the group (of 21) compared it to paint-thinner – or worse. I think my gums receded for a week.

A co-worker once worked as a waiter at Michelin Star Rated Restaurant. Ran out of $150 bottle of wine after selling last one to a patron. When the same guy asked for another bottle, waiter friend took the empty in the back, filled it with $10 house wine, and brought it backed out. Poured the patron a small amount, he did the swirl, sniff and taste and pronounced it “Fine.” True story.

There’s only one Real Thing, and it’s made with two jiggers of hydrogen and one jigger of oxygen. And drink all you can before fracking poisons it!

Grape juice that burns!

Wine buyer tip for the inexperienced. Look for the alcohol content on the wine label, and expect lower alcohol wines to be more drinkable. California passed the 14 percent mark a long time ago as a norm for a lot of reds, especially zinfandel, but there are a few producers who are keeping it real, at 13+ percent as their peak, and their wines go much better with meals. Europe is much smarter about this, and they produce a great deal of red wine with 12-13 percent alcohol that goes great with meals. German Riesling wines drink great, and many of them don’t have as much as 10 percent alcohol.

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