File this under the sad state of a society only in interested in expensive wine as a status product. This study also answers the question why bad wine that is expensive is more popular than ever. I am always mystified when I taste some glossed-up, hot, out of balance, spoofulated to the max, big shot Napa Cab and I find out is is impossible to get and the waiting list to get on the waiting list is five years. But people have programmed themselves to think that if it costs $150 a bottle it has to be good and if it isn't, I will damn well say it is. There is actually some science behind this, in that marketing directly affects the areas in the brain that that relate to perceptions of pleasure; something called the medial orbitofrontal cortex. The evil part of this article is this line . . ."Marketers are now going to think twice about reducing the price," Shiv said.
Yikes!
Here is also a supplemental article from Bloomberg.com that goes into more detail. What is notable is that when the wine club group was given the same experiment without prices most people liked the $5 wine better.
I use the image of Harlan Estate as it is my personal wine pariah. I have had it many times. Maybe seven vintages. Each one has been undrinkable to my palate. I think everybody who likes Harlan Estate is in on some massive hoax, as the quality is so terrible that it has to be a joke. I call it the Harlan Hoax. But now I think I have to revise that thought process. Harlan's pricing strategy is getting people's medial orbitofrontal cortexes all running and excited and they cannot control themselves when they see a bottle of Harlan Estate. Then they taste the wine and they have images of dollar signs being shot all around their brain at billions of miles per hour and it is registering as 100 pt $900 a bottle goodness. It is unavoidable. Be strong. Nurture can win over Nature in this case. Believe!
Your link is dead, would love to read the article though
ReplyDeleteargggh.....I hate HTML...try now.
ReplyDeleteOh, once you are told the price, there's no resisting the Harlan. We are hardwired to be imbeciles, in spite ofanything that may seem remotely like better judgment. Resistance is futile...:-)
ReplyDeleteM.
Lyle,
ReplyDeleteWhen I worked for a distributor, one of the things I learned from some of the up and coming--now successful--wealthy California wine dippers is that the price was their marketing strategy. The wine was incidental.
Every time we had a tasting of those wines, I got into trouble with my manager for saying things that sales people aren't supposed to say at meetings with the suppliers. Once I asked a supplier, "so how much exactly is all this wood worth?"
Lyle, long time listener, first time caller.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your assessment. Wines like Harlan appeal to many senses, just not true wine lovers senses. (Sensibilities?)
Harlan is a businessman first; that in itself should tell you something. If the price were 'only' $150, the slap wouldn't sting as much. But $450?
Once my Cab goes above $100 (my glass ceiling), there had better be some special stuff going on.
Right now my 'house' wine is a $9 Mendocino Cab. A wine like this ruins it for other wines like Mondavi Napa, Beringer Knights, Hess Estate, amongst others. (the $20-$30 gange). It will be hard for not to compare when my supply runs out. At least until the next 'qpr wonder wine' rolls around...
Good post Lyle. I like your blog.
Mike
So much hating going on here.
ReplyDeleteI'm not a fan of most California cabs either, but it is very clear to me that there are some people who truly enjoy these wines, regardless of price. J. Laube (much like the rest of the Wine Spectator crew) tastes Cal cabs blind and consistently rates high-alcohol, wood-soaked behemoths like Harlan in the mid-90s. Do you think he's peeking at the labels inside those brown bags? Or do you think that he secretly hates wine and wine drinkers, and gives big ratings to wines that he hates to spite the entire industry, proving that the emperor's vines have no fruit, so to speak? (Actually that would be kinda funny.) And he's not alone - not by a long shot.
In my opinion, personal taste is personal taste. Some people love the Harlans of the world - they really do. It suits their palate. So why insult them? Do you think you can shame them into drinking something else? Just let them drink what they want. Or should I come to your house and make fun of your book collection just because I can?
Besides, we should be happy that it's the big oakers like these that get pursued by massively rich wine collectors, and not the honest, natural wines that are so hard to find. Would you rather live in a world where Harlan was $30 a bottle while current vintages of JJ Prum, Clos Rougeard, and Bartolo Mascarello were traded for hundreds (or thousands) of dollars on Wine Commune?
Seb P.
ReplyDeleteMy issue is that Harlan, in my experience is extremely flawed wine. VA, hot, over-extracted. If this was say Dalle Valle or Screagle I would not have a qualm as those wines are not flawed. Harlan is flawed...and that is why I came up with the Harlan hoax.
Reminds me of a particular cult wine that the company I worked for distributed. Every time it came to the sales meeting for us to taste, on first sniff I shouted--"not this one again!"
ReplyDeleteI could never bring myself to even talk about the wine with retailers, let alone sell it to them. The only time I took orders for it was when I was asked by a buyer who had customers for it. One time, the wine popped its cork and started fermenting on the retailer's shelf.
you all need to check out the current laube blog on the WS site concering harlan estate, and a conversation with bill harlan. yikes!
ReplyDeleteRothko,
ReplyDeleteI do not subscribe. What is going on?
Lots of people have more money than sense or taste. That isn't confined to wine. If someone loves big California Cabs when served blind and wants to spend the money on them, I guess I don't take issue with that. It's the person who wouldn't spend $10 for the same bottle if the label had fallen off that gets me.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I love finding $15 wines that blow my mind.
James Laube Unfined
ReplyDeleteHarlan '97 Cabernet Polarizing to Harlan Too
Bill Harlan extended an invitation to meet over lunch after the holidays. "No agenda," he said, "let's just catch up."
Luckily for me I had a topic in mind and Harlan was more than game. Yesterday’s visit at Julia’s Kitchen in Napa provided the perfect opportunity to talk about the 1997 Harlan Estate Napa Valley Cabernet.
For those of you just tuning in, the 1997 was one of my favorite Cabernets upon its release, an unusually plush, opulent, hedonistic bottle of wine. Yet with time its ripeness, and elevated level of volatile acidity, has made it less appealing to me, but it is a wine that some people insist is the perfect 100-point wine (I rated it 97 on release, and 88 the last couple of times) and others insist is seriously flawed. As you can see by my rating, it’s neither to me, yet it is the kind of flashpoint wine that simmers emotions on Internet wine boards.
“To me it’s maybe the most controversial wine we’ve made because it has so much more ripeness than any other wine we’ve made,” Harlan said, adding, “It’s a wine that polarizes people. It’s a wine that I never know how much I like it. Sometimes it’s over the top.”
Harlan said that in his experience of drinking Napa Cabernets, “some time between six and eight years [of age, the Cabernets start to] get pretty disjointed” and then it can take another few years for the wines to settle down.
He allowed that his wines are styled to be showy and complex when young and that he is surprised by the number of people who buy his wine and cellar it, but have never opened a bottle. “I think if they wait they’ve missed something,” he said.
“When I go back and taste the wines it’s not always the ripest that’s the best to my taste,” he said, adding that right now his 1994 is a personal favorite. With a vintage such as 2002, another super-ripe year, the wine offers so much richness and flavor that he wonders if it will ever be any better. That said, he does want to make wines that age well. Trouble is it’s not always easy knowing how to do that, he said, nor is it easy predicting when a wine will peak.
“The ’97 vintage was very unique,” he added. “That wine will, in talking with people [who have experience with wines of similar style], take another 20 to 25 years” to develop. Is it a sort of Napa Cabernet version of the 1947 Cheval-Blanc? Maybe, Harlan said, allowing there are times when he doesn’t especially like the wine due to its extremes. That said, there are wines that are controversial, and that’s part of what make wine such a fascinating beverage and subject. Count on the ’97 Harlan to fuel debate for many more years.
We also had this exchange.
JL: Were there two bottlings of the ’97?
BH: No, just one.
JL: Have you ever used a machine to lower alcohol or VA?
BH: No, (laughing) but we probably should have [with the ’97].
JL: In a year such as 1997, after you pick the grapes and make the wine, do you wish you had picked early, less ripe?
BH: (laughing) It’s too late by then.
On the reverse osmosis process: “It might make some wine that the market likes, but for us, philosophically or culturally, it’s not right, even though it might be for other people.
Carving out a style is challenging and Harlan said that it’s taken his winemaking team 25 years to understand how little they knew early on and how much more is needed to be learned.
“We don’t want to [deliberately] make a wine that the public likes because we know that [taste] can change,” Harlan said. “Some people make wines to please the critics. Some feel they have to sound their own note and we have to hope there are enough people out there who like what we do.”
i think that study itself is deeply flawed, and not just cause of the techniques they used to get the wines to the subjects (tubing, one millimeter at a time, blah blah blah). they ignored the idea that if a consumer spends their own limited resources on wine, they have different expectations than they do if they are GIVEN wine and asked what they like. for example, imagine that you gave 100 people $50 each to buy wine in a study, and offered them "packets" of either one bottle of fine wine, two bottles of medium wine, or four bottles of low priced wine, all of which were exactly the same wine. then ask for their feedback on the wines. that would generate some interesting results. especially if they were allowed to share tastes with neighbors in the room.
ReplyDeleteDoes Bill Harlan mean that after 25 years, the Harlan staff has yet to understand VA and how to handle it? That's amazing.
ReplyDeleteIf he wants to produce wines that will age, I wonder if he has reconsidered the over ripe, high alcohol, high VA style that he admitted doesn't seem to work well.
I find the cavalier attitude in that interview disturbing.
That's some expensive-ass on-the-job training consumers are financing at Harlan...
ReplyDeleteM.
I'm not shocked that people liked the $5 wine best. If they were non wine drinkers, It was probably the most accessible (most fruit, least tannin, etc..). These were Napa Cabs they were tasting.
ReplyDelete