Authentic Wine

Dan Berger
Mon, 01 Dec 2025 23:00:00 -0800
Lifestyle

If you are a typical once-a-week or -month U.S. wine consumer, the following question may be a little mystical: Do you seek to buy authentic wines? Or to be more precise, do you care if that merlot you recently bought has an aroma and a taste that have nothing to do with merlot?

The question isn't likely to have much meaning for most Americans who drink wine. Even a lot of wine collectors have no answer to this question. The reason is that wine education in this country has been pretty woeful over the decades.

Many people think that the higher the score given to a wine, the better it is. Many people think that the more you pay for a bottle of wine, the better it is. But both assumptions are about their validity, as are movie reviews or music style preferences.
Updated: Tue Dec 02, 2025

If you are a typical once-a-week or -month U.S. wine consumer, the following question may be a little mystical: Do you seek to buy authentic wines? Or to be more precise, do you care if that merlot you recently bought has an aroma and a taste that have nothing to do with merlot?

The question isn't likely to have much meaning for most Americans who drink wine. Even a lot of wine collectors have no answer to this question. The reason is that wine education in this country has been pretty woeful over the decades.

Many people think that the higher the score given to a wine, the better it is. Many people think that the more you pay for a bottle of wine, the better it is. But both assumptions are about their validity, as are movie reviews or music style preferences.

People who love western flicks may not like horror films. People who want feel-good comedies might find most of Shakespeare to be off-putting. Debussy lovers probably dislike rap. It's the same with wine.

I adore dry Rieslings — the drier the better. I know people who detest such wines. All they drink are reds; they consider any white to be a pretender. To them, white wines are not even wine.

My question above about authenticity really has very little meaning to most people since we are all so individual in our tastes. But now and then a bit of light shines through.

A good friend has always been a dedicated consumer of red wines. He visited a Napa Valley winery some time ago and purchased a rather expensive merlot. When he got home, he waited a year before opening it, and within minutes, he called me.

It was terrible, he said. I had warned him that the wine was relatively expensive and had received a lot of high praise from some reviewers, but I told him I didn't like it very much.

"You were right," he said, admitting the wine was not only boring, but too expensive (more than $100). I suggested he try a $25 merlot that I recently wrote about. He called me back a week later.

"Now, THAT's a very nice wine," he said. "Why is it so low in price?"

I said the expensive wine he bought had gotten a high score and was expensive partly because it was made to be "impressive," but did not have any merlot character. The $25 wine is simply authentic, which is a term most people who drink wine never use.

The cheaper merlot had less alcohol than the expensive one and had better structure, so it was designed to go with food.

My friend said that his little educational excursion into expensive wine was a lesson worth paying to experience. "That taught me a lesson," he said. I said, "Sometimes a wine is just priced too high for reasons other than quality."

Wine of the Week: 2021 La Prenda Merlot, Sonoma Mountain ($29) — The bright herb-graced blackberry aroma of this fine wine from Sonoma Valley winemaker Mike Cox is a product of mountain-grown fruit and the aftertaste is rich and oriented toward medium-weight, red meat dishes.