Sorry, oenophiles. Not only is everything you thought you knew about expensive wine total bullhonkey, but you probably also know what koala pee tastes like.
Allow us to explain.
First of all, if you have ever described yourself as being “picky” about the price bracket your wine is in or claiming that a more expensive vintage is superior, then you are also probably a lying liar who lies, even though you might not know it.
The hard truth is that unless you are “highly trained” in the intricacies of wine tasting, you only really like wine because it’s expensive. This video by Vox will help you understand just how thoroughly we’ve all been duped:
Whoa. Turns out, the more expensive a wine is, the more likely it is to taste bad, even though, by some subconscious desire we all have to keep up with the Joneses and appear to have superior taste buds, we will claim it tastes better. Basically we’re all just big posers.
And not only are we big posers, we’re big snobby, pretentious posers. According to Vox, when some researchers dyed a bottle of white wine red, the tasters used all of the descriptors one might use to describe red wine, like “woody,” “spice” and “blackcurrant.” In short, perception trumps reality. Trippy, huh?
If this is all a little much for you, maybe you should pour yourself a glass of wine to soothe your nerves. Go ahead, we’ll wait.
Image: Giphy
Better?
Good, because it’s about to get a whole lot worse. Right on the heels of learning that you only like expensive wines because Big Wine wants to keep you under its thumb, we’re pleased to tell you that the one thing both expensive wines and garbage-y ones have in common is koala pee.
Well, in a manner of speaking. There’s a specific component in some of your favorite wines, especially sweet wines like rieslings, that you can also find if you go to the Australian bush and stand under a eucalyptus tree for a while. That component is wine lactone, and you’ll see it in your favorite sweet wine and in a puddle of koala pee. Of course, it’s not literal pee, just an isomer with the same makeup, but differing structure, of literal pee.
Though, it does make you wonder what’s in those bottles of Yellow Tail, doesn’t it?
Image: Giphy
The takeaway here is to just give up. You don’t know good wine, and if you let yourself get hung up on trying to fake like you do, you’re just going to end up spending $40 on a bottle of something that tastes like koala pee when you could have spent $10 on a bottle of something that tastes like koala pee.
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