Are Expensive Wines Better?

Better wine is more expensive. Sometimes, expensive wines are terrible (and our goal is to make sure you avoid those), and sometimes less expensive wines are excellent (we try to lead you toward picking one of those). However, the fundamental truth is that good wines cost more money to make, and are produced in smaller quantities, and probably have more demand, so they’re more expensive.

Wines that are more expensive rank higher in our proprietary rankings.

There’s always a study that shows how consumers like cheaper wines. One of my favourite lines about wine is from 1843: Unfortunately, designing an experiment that gives tasters a chance to succeed requires the scientist to understand wine. When a consumer wants to buy a more expensive wine, they often pick wines from better regions, instead of picking an expensive wine from the same region. More expensive wines from the same region almost always tastes better; a more expensive wine from a more expensive region is less certain.

Somm.ai understands that more expensive wines are better. That’s why we are obsessed with how much cheaper a wine is than the average that wine sells for (at other restaurants, and at retail). We’re also obsessed with trying to find producers that are under-rated, because those wines are generally underpriced.

The same wine can sell for radically different prices.

Here’s a graph of one of our favourite wines — the Raveneau Montee de Tonnerre. The same wine is priced as low as $200, and as much as $1600. The best way for us to make sure you drink great wine is to find great wines that are priced reasonably, and this is how Somm does it. When you search our systems, you will see a 💰 icon beside any wine we think is particularly well priced vs retail and other restaurants.