Great wine mostly comes from vineyards that have been producing wine since the time of the Romans, with all the institutional knowledge built up and passed down with each for many, many centuries. Their name is synonymous with quality wine because in the era when mass media was passing ideas freely, and the cost of trade fell dramatically their wine knowledge was not moving as quickly and there was a lot of really bad wine (think things like adulterating it with toxic ingredients and contaminating the wine with bacteria bad) made by newer entrants. So their names became brands for the knowledge they won by trial and error over millennia.
Today, modern agronomy and microbiology has dramatically lowered the bar required to make consistently decent or better wine in a vastly wider array of places and by many many more producers. You can still find bad wine out there, but in general bad means not great, not the truly horrid stuff from a century or more ago. Try a wide variety of wines, and don't be afraid to try different wineries in different years, some times a vintage will be your vintage and the next one won't. Drink what you enjoy and in good health.
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Notes -
My $0.02 on this subject.
Great wine mostly comes from vineyards that have been producing wine since the time of the Romans, with all the institutional knowledge built up and passed down with each for many, many centuries. Their name is synonymous with quality wine because in the era when mass media was passing ideas freely, and the cost of trade fell dramatically their wine knowledge was not moving as quickly and there was a lot of really bad wine (think things like adulterating it with toxic ingredients and contaminating the wine with bacteria bad) made by newer entrants. So their names became brands for the knowledge they won by trial and error over millennia.
Today, modern agronomy and microbiology has dramatically lowered the bar required to make consistently decent or better wine in a vastly wider array of places and by many many more producers. You can still find bad wine out there, but in general bad means not great, not the truly horrid stuff from a century or more ago. Try a wide variety of wines, and don't be afraid to try different wineries in different years, some times a vintage will be your vintage and the next one won't. Drink what you enjoy and in good health.
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