What factors do you consider when selecting a wine?!
What factors do you consider when selecting a wine?
Is price important?
Is reputation important?
Is the design on the label important?
Answers:
Many factors involved:
1) Where - where I am having the wine. If I were to drink at home, it really does not matter - just whatever I had left. If I were at a restaurant, I look at the price - and pick out the most cost-reasonable bottle for the occasion. If I were at a wine bar or winery, I pretty much will try anything to discover new and exciting wines.
2) Who - with whom am I drinking. If I were with my drinking friends, then I would be drinking high quality Cab or Merlot. If I were at a party, champagne may be at order. I tend to pick out wines that other people like and I would drink to that.
3) Quality - Life is too short to drink cheap wines. More specifically, cheaply made wines. What we want is good priced wine without sacrificing quality. On special occasions, I would open very nice wines, but on regular occasions, I want good quality wines that would complement the food. There is nothing worse than a nice dinner with bad wines. As for the definition of quality, it is pretty much based on experience and reading.
4) Price - price is important. In general, an expensive wine are wines that are well made - but not necessarily good wine. The pricing of the wine is based on 2 factors - how much the vineyard and the winery put into making the wine, and how they feel the wine is worth. Needless to say, great wine that are highly sought after are expensive. Also, it also depends on where I get the wine. Wines at restaurants are at least 2 times the retail price. Wine at Sam's and Costco's are below retail prices. So, when I am out at a restaurant, I tend not to order the expensive stuff unless someone else is paying.
5) Vintage - what vintage is the wine from. Certain year is better than others. This is especially important when drinking older wines - some wines may be too old and not good for drinking. Also, if you are planning to cellar your wine, you will want to get the better vintages - which means you can cellar the wines longer.
6) Reputation - reputation is important. In general, a good winery will continue to make good wines. There are some vineyard/winery that has horrible rating, yet we keep on supporting them due to prior reputation (best exampmle is Chateau Montelena, which gets horrible rating from Wine Spectator for several years, but we keep on buying and drinking their wines). When a winery keeps on producing bad wines, we avoid them like plague.
7) Recommendation - I buy a lot of wine, and quite a number of them were purchased based on recommendation - from the wine salespeople who knows me and whom I trust, from articles in wine magazines, from word of mouth. The fact is that there are too many wines out there, and no one can possible drink EVERY SINGLE wine there is. So, sometimes you will have to have faith and trust someone's recommendation.
8) Rating - the same goes with rating. You have to take the rating with grain of salt. Rating from Wine Spectator and Wine Advocate and Robert Parker, etc are good guide, but everyone like their wines differently, so what's good for Mr. Bob Parker may not be good for you. In fact, there are some suspicion that the rating at some of the magazines may be influenced by the amount of advertisement placed within the magazine.
9) Unfortunately, design of the bottle and design of the label are not important at all. These are mere gimmicks to attract the less educated wine public to buy their wines. We avoid a lot of the "critter" wines - wine with animals on the label.