If you are saying you rarely get "drunk" when you drink wine I would say I 100% believe you, that's not what I am talking about when I say people appreciate the alcohol content of wine when they are drinking it. Sure, plenty of people get drunk off wine, but just like you pointed out people get drunk on Bud Light so that's going to be a constant and not the tone of my statement. If however you are trying to say that when you drink wine you feel
nothing I would not quite know what to say to that. I mean, if you drink one glass of wine over two hours okay, but I don't and not too many people I know drink like that, more likely it's two or three glasses with a meal, right? (again, talking the average person consuming wine) So if that's the quanity of wine we are talking about then I would have to say the vast majority of people are going to feel
something off two or three glasses of wine. I'm a bigger dude with plenty of fat on me (especially these days) who has drank plenty of alcohol, from cheap to expensive and from a lot to a little, and by the time I'm about finished up with my second glass I'm feeling real warm. Come on, are we really going to argue that "social lubrication" is or isn't a thing? I've definitely got my favorite Scotch, so I understand what you are saying, but NO ONE learns to drink Scotch, and therefore have an appreciation for it, for hydration or taste reasons alone. If Scotch had no alcohol in it would you drink it? And if you want to try to say you would, would you have learned to drink it in the first place if it had no alcohol?
Sarcasm is sometimes hard to detect on the net and I like to fuck around so sorry if I came across as my sincere thought being "everything considered a wine tastes the same", that's definitely not my intended point. I fully recognize wines can vary, but I also realize taste is incredibly subjective and will vary widely. When I was "into" wine for a bit I sometimes felt stupid because I couldn't taste toooooo much of a difference between some of the nice wines I was getting to drink (I've had some nice stuff many times), I worried about things like "an uneducated palate" and stuff like that and couldn't figure out why everybody else tasted things I didn't, or at the very least tasted at different times with different wines. I did some research and talked to people and figured out a few things; 1. A lot of people are just full of shit in what they are saying, and 2. Because of advances in everything from shared knowledge to equipment to techniques it has made it the reality now for a while that "cheap" wines can very easily be "good" wines. I came away with the understanding that in our modern times the average quality of a $10 bottle of wine is miles and miles ahead of what a comparatively priced bottle would be in times past. And, for a LOT of people, there isn't too much difference to your mouth between a cheap but well done wine and a coveted bottle from a specific vineyard after a specific growing season.
Your buddy that could identify things based on smell alone is impressive, I have no reason to doubt it, but I will still have to point to my own experiences (with a mid-major university level palate back in the day, not expert level
) and
many studies saying otherwise.
I joked about the thread derail but now we've definitely taken this pretty far off track for a welcome thread, told you I was an expert! I would love to continue debating but I think we should do it in another thread? Mo' better still, how about if we are ever at a table together, cards or dinner, we can try our own experiments. First bottle is on me, but that's probably a given since you know I'm going to choose something cheap.
