Here is mine:
I think many people who claim they prefer elegance and subtlety in wine aren’t being honest with themselves. Even amoung burgundy drinkers.
Lots of what (many of us think) about wine is just the result of some fad. Example: No Aussie wines are worth drinking (sous-entendu: they are all overly alcoholic fruit bombs)
Good one, Berry. Might even be true of me.
Here’s mine. If more wine was consumed blind, people would learn more and be far less likely to pay >$50 per bottle.
Okay maybe it’s not that controversial, but it makes me think twice before buying PC or GC burg. (which I then do anyway)
I believe that no wine should be sold before its time.
The higher the alcohol content, the more headache producing substances are created.
TTT
Wine enthusiasts are way too concerned about the precise conditions of their storage. I’d love to see a blind tasting at age 12 between Bordeaux or Burgundy bottles stored at optimal temperature and humidity in some $10,000 wine cabinet versus the same bottlings stored in cardboard boxes in someone’s downstairs hallway closet.
As with many others above, that belief hasn’t stopped me from spending a small fortune on wine storage units for my house. Part of it is just that I don’t have nearly enough hallway closets to store all my wine anyways.
That the “best” vintages are often the most obviously “best” vintages.
I also agree that storage conditions are way way overrated/overly worried over, as long as they aren’t “bad”.
Travel shock is a myth.
Too many people confuse quality with their personal preferences and try to impose sinister motives to those whose personal preferences are different.
He said “controversial,” Howard.
I share this belief also. Wine is not a hothouse flower.
Just because you agree with me doesn’t mean it can’t be controversial does it? If I linked some posts where people are doing this (like this one 2008v 2009 burgs - WINE TALK - WineBerserkers posts 16 and 36, for example), do you think I could make this more controversial.
I don’t think that most table wines which taste sweet, whether the ones that score highly with critics or industrial-grade supermarket wine that your neighbors buy, have residual sugar in them. I think they just taste sweet because of the ripeness of the grapes that were used to make them, plus maybe the oak.
[This would be very easy to test, for anyone with basic winemaking instrumentation (which I do not have). One of the reasons I believe as I do is that, if it really were the case that many winemakers were making critic- and crowd- pleasing wines by leaving residual sugar, someone would have long ago tested it and demonstrated it to be so, but I’ve never seen anything to that effect.]
Wine is a form of art. Everyone’s interpretation/perspective is different . . . therefore, no one (including winemakers and critics) are ever “right” or “wrong” about a particular wine.
I believe that Donnhoff wines age gracefully and with great reward.
No wine needs to be over 14.5% alc.
I second “travel shock is a myth”
and say:
Napa Cab at 15 is more pleasurable than Bordeaux at 30
and
Scores are an exceptionally helpful medium, in conjuction with notes, for identifying an individual’s perception of quality in a wine.
It’s interesting to me that Berry asked for controversial beliefs about wine and then he and several of you proceeded to post beliefs about other people’s beliefs about wine.
Here’s a tip - none of us know what other people think or believe. Instead of ascribing to them something they’re not saying, how about posting on the topic?
Mine? I’m with Seiber above… I don’t think wine is as fragile as most believe and would be fine floating from the low 50s to the mid 60s over a year. In fact, I think that keeping some wine at 55 or less is one reason we’re seeing so many people try wines that are 15 and seeing them barely budging - this leads to the “These wines really need 25 or 30 years” phenomenon. In a recent dinner, we had 82, 86 and 90 LLC and all tasted young with little secondary evolution. For wines that range from 20 to 30??
Wine tastes better when it comes in a bottle that’s clearly had some thought put into it. I’m definitely guilty of this, but at the same time, I don’t care. If I was making wine and I knew I had a good product, you bet your sweet ass I’m going to make sure that the package does the juice some justice. If the label looks like it was printed off of my computer and slapped on the bottle, I’m a little leary of it.
I’ve done this test a couple of times…sent samples of wines (a zin and a pinot) that appeared to have some sweetness to them to a lab (Vinquiry). In both cases, the results came back with no detectable RS (glucose+fructose). In both cases, the sweet effect (quite pronounced at bottle opening) was gone the second day. Of course, there are red wines out there with some RS to them…but tasting sweet doesn’t mean RS.