Can you actually taste the difference between a £7 and a £57 bottle of wine?

[Eeepsh]

White wine I mean - I don't drink red but apparently it's more obvious.

I ask as we did a blind taste test last night, 5 bottles of different supermarket Pinot Grigios and a £50 bottle (from someone whose boyfriend works at a proper wine shop).

Although none of us are experts (not through lack of practising!), we all had different favourites and only 1 correctly identified the expensive bottle.

Got us thinking - is it all a bit of a con or are we just complete uncouth philistines?

Depends on how often you drink white wine and how familiar you are with different grapes.

Compare a Pouilly Fume with a bottle of CoOp Pinot and you'll get what I mean. (My budget is CoOp btw!)

I think plenty of people can tell!! But what you describe is a pretty well repeated experiment, usually with similar results! I drink what I enjoy and sometimes that creeps north of 25 pounds a bottle but ever so rarely and I certainly wouldnt reap the benefits of spending more I think. A different story when in a restaurant when I usually find spending more pays off but perhaps that is also psychology.

Yes, I’m pretty sure I could taste the difference between a bottle of Casillero del Diablo and a decent Chataeuneuf Du Pape or Barolo.

Whether I decide the difference is worth £50 is a rather different matter…

I don't think I've had any wine costing more than £25 so hard to say! Wine costing around a tenner tastes better than wine costing around a fiver - that's the limit of my experience.😃

Ooh Pouilly Fumé is lush!

Yes I think one can tell, but it is easier if one has an 'educated palate'. Usually only better-off people have the opportunity to develop one of those.

I don’t often get to taste 50 quid bottles, but generally I could tell the difference between 7 quid and 27 quid. I think it’s that if you always drink supermarket plonk then that’s what you’re used to so you probably wouldn’t like some of the flavours you get with more expensive wines. Not that a cheap bottle can’t be v drinkable

I think I can tell the difference between £6 and £20 plus but not much more than that. It's a skill I guess.

er...no. I've been to a few wine tasting things, where we've tried wines from £15 - £100 a bottle. I don't have a sophisticated palate at all, so am quite happy to drink a £5-10 bottle . Some of the more expensive stuff isn't that nice (IMO).

(I did however drink 2 bottles of very lovely wine that my mum bought, which wasn't cheap, and I thoroughly enjoyed them! She wasn't too happy about it though)

I would be able identify the difference between one of the generic blended supermarket whites and a good mid-range AOC and above, yes.

I've drunk loads of white wine in my time but never knowingly a £57 bottle, so can't help you, sorry.

Yes I probably could.

We have done this test with white wine, not quite £50 a bottle but £25 ish v £10 and it was a "more balanced" smoother drink.

Not sure I would be as good at between £25 v £50 but I would be willing to try :-)

Yes, I think I could. We live in France, have a wine cellar which DH stocks up at various salon through the year. I don’t really know my way around it so tend to buy my own if he’s not drinking. I definitely notice the difference btw my supermarket plonk (€10-12 a bottle, which isn’t the cheapest) and his €40/60 a bottle ones.

I can tell sometimes. But there are some really nice cheap white wines out there. And some not so good expensive ones too. So depending on what you get, it can be easy or hard.

Red is easy. White I think if you'd said £12 versus I'd say no but £7 - I think even I could tell.

I think I could but having said that I had a bottle of Chablis over Christmas that was horrible - a sort of chemically harsh tang to it, bleurgh. My budget (well £9-10) bottles were much more pleasant.

I do think more expensive champagne like Pol Roger is much nicer than cheaper alternatives.

With reds more expensive definitely means better.

I couldn't, as long as it makes me dizzy and talk a lot of crap it does me!!.

cheaper wines tend to be less complex and so are nicer for quaffing! but it can depend what you like. just because it costs £50 doesn’t mean you will like it- just means it has been created out of specific grapes in a specific country in a specific way. Just like you might not like some thing designed by Chanel which costs £5000 as opposed to £100 from m and s.

you’ll taste more of a difference at £100+. A £50 wine is likely to have the most profit for the merchant as it’s more than a daily drinker but not expensive. They’ll have a huge profit margin as people will see it as a good price point for spending more so they’ll know they can sell a decent volume of £50 wine.

Pinot Grigio is a fairly low-complexity wine and it would be the one I'd choose if I wanted such an experiment to fail.

You can certainly get some delicious, really stunning wines if you spend more than £30 on a bottle but I wouldn't go for a Pinot Grigio if I was spending that much, it would feel like a waste.

I was always sceptical but a relative who was very into wine died leaving a large collection of wines, many over £100. His immediate family gave a number of us a couple of bottles. You could definitely tell the difference. I don't think I would ever pay that much for a bottle but the difference was apparent.

I also had a menu reading balls up with a friend when we thought £40 for dessert wine was the half bottle price and it was a special birthday so we decided to go for it. Turns out that was the 125ml glass price. Again I wouldn't pay that knowingly but God was it good!

I think you can tell. We've done taste tests at home and I always prefer the more expensive wine and DP likes the cheaper one.

Yes, I could. I have a good palette and really can't stand the after taste from the wines sold at £5 - £10. (I've spent a lot of years in the industry so tasted a lot of wines!)

Whites need to be served at a temperature higher than most domestic fridges, between 8 and 10 degrees (fridges tend to be set at 4 - 6), if they are too cold you deaden the flavour profile so that may also be why you struggled to tell any difference.

I went to an event where wine expert Jancis Robinson said that there’s no difference between a £7 bottle and a £25 bottle…

Was that a few years ago?

2021 I think