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?

No

it all depends on what you like and anyone saying they can tell the difference, I'd take it with a pinch of salt.

Its peronal taste and I recall having a few sips for a bottle that was allegeldy close to 200 pounds, tasted awful - as i said its personal tast and this applies to all drinks and foods are a reasonal priced item vs 3/5 times the price

I’ve drunk expensive wine and can’t tell the difference.
DH and MIL are under the illusion they can, but having decanted a supermarket wine into the expensive bottle, I know otherwise.
It was a red though.

I occasionally have a £70 "wine flight" as part of a tasting menu experience. I remember once checking the per-bottle price for something we had been given a tiny <50ml serving of and it was in the region of £150 but the taste was totally amazing, and if I had £150 available to spend on wine I would consider it worth it.

I can tell apart a good wine from a crap one.
The problem here is that the more expensive ones aren’t always the best ones. The way the wine transit to the U.K., is stored etc… has a huge impact.

@SleepingisanArt i agrée with you there.
Ive never spent a lot of time tasting wines but having lived in france, I’m used to a different quality. The wine in supermarkets here is crap quality vs what it’s supposed to be (aka before it leaves tte vineyard)

Our Majestic has a lot of wine tastings-really fun and DH and I really enjoy.

DS was home from Uni and went to a rose one with us-he told us we ruined him forever as he used to just go buy the cheapest one in the off licence!!
You can tell. His tasting notes were hilarious...

Yes, I can tell the difference. Were you comparing similar wines?

Am half way through a bottle of Chardonnay costing about £20 can honestly say there is no difference than a bottle for £7 from Sainsburys!

Yes.

I'm not sure that I could tell the difference between a £25 bottle and a £57 bottle, but there may be no real difference or the £25 one might be better.

Under £10 wine is usually rough.

Very many years ago I went to a wine tasting near Colmar, in Alsace.
I was interested in dry Gewuerztraminer and tasted my way through the entire offering. The ones I liked best were the cheapest and the most expensive. On talking to the vintner, it turned out that they sold the cheapest to Sainsburys, which I confirmed at Christmas when at my parents' in the UK.
You could definitely taste the difference.

Isn’t there a weird tax thing that means that there isn’t necessarily much difference until in price until you reach a certain point? I can’t explain it well/remember exactly what it is.

I know that I don’t like New Zealand wines regardless of the price, it just always has a weird taste and gives me horrendously bad hangovers.

If you'll send me the wine I can let you know...

I think most over the counter wine in the UK is dreadful.
That's the stuff within my price range, of course, which is up to £20.-

People pay good money to go on a course to learn how they should describe the taste of wines in flowery terms.
If you need teaching then you probably don't have the tastesbuds to make the difference

I love a nice pinot and usually drink Aldis.

then i also like Mud House sauvignon. Once At a wedding the wine was £30 a bottle but isnt tasted no better than my usual.

Yes I can. But I used to live in France and have done a lot of wine tasting over the years.

I can taste the difference but it doesn't necessarily mean I prefer the more expensive wine. I tasted some £1k/bottle wine last year and it didn't really do it for me.

I'm not a fan of Pinot Grigio at the best of times though so that would be a tasting I'd avoid anyway. Although I do quite like Pinot Gris (and yes I know they're the same grape but cultivated slightly differently - doesn't make sense to me either!)

That's a good idea. We could set up a Mumsnet wine tasting service.

Hell, yeah, I could probably tell the difference. The cheaper wine will be mostly overheads and tax. The real question is whether you are able to tell the difference between £20 - £50 and £200 wine, and I almost certainly couldn't. I'd like to think I could tell the difference between the £20 & £50 stuff and my standard £10-reduced to £8.50 bottle of nz sauvignon blanc.
Also remember that if in a restaurant or bar, wine is usually subject to around a 300% mark up, so a £50 bottle is like a £15 retail bottle (not a criticism, they have overheads to cover and most of their profit is made on drink sales).

A good friend of mine’s family produces wine - not a small batch thing either, it’s a pretty serious operation and they get outstanding scores. This is in continental Europe .

We used to live together as students, and she always picked out amazing wines in the 5 euro region from the supermarket. But she knew exactly what she was doing, and there was an huge variety of producers available at that price point. So I learned a lot from her.

I obviously still don’t know as much as she does, but I do find it harder to get a good table wine here in the UK. They do exist but there’s less variety in the lower price brackets, it seems to be dominated by the mass produced ones that are frankly terrible! This is completely understandable though as the UK doesn’t really have much domestic wine production (apart from the sparkling wines which I think are fabulous).

So to answer your question, I think if you’re in a wine producing country it’s not so much about price and more about knowing what you’re looking for and who the good producers are. But if you’re in a country that imports most of its wine and where there is less choice at the bottom end of the market, there might be more of a correlation.

I was told the real difference is not the taste but how long you can keep the wine in your cellar and it becoming better and aging well. Cheap wine you cannot keep, it's not an investment. I would not personally drink anything above £30 for taste purposes.

I was told by someone who knows a bit (buys from wine auctions etc) that there’s a big jump in quality between a £5-7 bottle and a £15-20 one (supermarket prices, not restaurants obvs), but once you get beyond that it’s purely down to personal taste and preference - it’s not likely the average person will tell the difference between a twenty quid bottle and a seventy quid one.

And I think the pleasure of drinking certain wines often comes from the whole experience - where you are, what you’re eating, how happy you are - which can completely change your perception of the flavour and therefore cost/value.

I did learn a fair bit about it a few years back, and in a blind tasting would have been able to tell not only which one, but also identify several with reasonable accuracy.

Not these days though. I'm out of practice, rarely drink now, and due to a medical issue I have lost most of my sense of smell (which also affects taste), so my party trick is no more.😂

We did a blind tasting at work - one senior manager was very convinced of their palate - what a leveller 😂

I've played that game. My conclusion is that yes, I can tell and appreciate the differences between a £10 bottle and a £50 bottle of the same grape or type of red wine, but I'd rather have a £10 bottle of a kind like than a £50 bottle of something I like less.

We played this game with Shiraz once. Turns out I particularly like Shiraz that comes from the McLaren Vale in Australia. My first choice was the expensive bottle but the second choice was the supermarket brand from there (Harveys's? I forget now).

Not heard the story about a consumer friendly media organisation managed to get a cheap €2.50 wine to win a l prestigious wine competition using clever marketing and representatives who could talk the talk? Shows it's not about taste and wine knowledge.

www.vinetur.com/en/2023061573855/tv-show-exposes-international-wine-competition-s-cheap-wine-scandal.html