1076: Wine Fraud | Skeptical Sunday

1076: Wine Fraud | Skeptical Sunday

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[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I am here with Skeptical Sunday co-host journalist Peter Copart on the Jordan Harbinger Show. We decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.

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What makes a good bottle of wine so dang expensive? Can a thousand dollars bottle of wine really be a hundred times better than that $10 bottle of Josh in the back of your fridge? Would most people even be able to tell the difference? Joining me to explore these questions is our resident wine expert, at least as of last week.

Peter Copart. Peter, welcome to the show, man.

[00:01:33] Pieter Colpaert: Thanks for having me, Jordan. But um, don't call me a wine expert. I think I'm just a regular guy who loves a good glass of wine now and then, and who started wondering why a lot of the good stuff is so damn expensive.

[00:01:44] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's the big question, right? I've never really understood it myself and it just seems like there's a such a wide range, right?

It's not like a camera lens where one is decently priced and the other one's a hundred dollars more, or some are ridiculous 'cause they're cinematic. This is like even more wild in the pricing than seemingly luxury goods, which is really confusing for a guy like me. So what got you interested in all this in the first place?

[00:02:09] Pieter Colpaert: Well, I think my origin story is I, I was drinking this beautiful Sicilian red wine from a, a natural wine maker in Sicily, who's actually a Belgian guy just like myself. His name is Frank Cornelison, and he produces some really incredible wines on the slopes of Mount Aetna in Sicily. I. And so I was trying his suzuka, which is a favorite of rapper action Bronson.

The epitome of taste. Yeah, exactly. He compared the joy he felt drinking that wine to when his mom bought him the NBA Jam Tournament edition for PlayStation when he was a little kid.

[00:02:42] Jordan Harbinger: That is quite the endorsement. And I know I'm joking about him being the epitome of taste, but he apparently, he's like a major, major foodie and I did not, he doesn't look like the type for some reason, maybe I'm judging a book by the cover anyway, not the first wine expert.

I was expecting you to name drop here and I actually, I remember drinking with him at a club in Hollywood a really long time ago, and let's just say he was more of a quantity over quality guy back then, and I think I probably was too. So what was it about the Suzuka that captured your attention here?

[00:03:10] Pieter Colpaert: Well, first of all, the wine itself, I mean, it's just, it's amazing. Like it's somewhere, I'd say between like a light red wine and a rose. It has a beautiful ruby collar, like a nose full of red fruits and herbs. It's not too jammy, just like a very unique, vibrant wine. The kind of wine that I want to be drinking all summer.

Um, and also it's, it's a natural wine.

[00:03:30] Jordan Harbinger: And what does that mean there? There's un, there's

[00:03:32] Pieter Colpaert: unnatural wines, apparently. Well, I mean, natural, it's kind of a catchall term in this case. It means the winemaker tries to intervene in the fermentation process as little as possible. So they're only using indigenous yeasts.

You know, they're not adding any chemical or commercial yeasts. They're not adding additives or sulfites to the wines. Um, as more traditional winemakers would typically do.

[00:03:54] Jordan Harbinger: You know, it feels like natural wines. I've heard of these. They, they're having a moment for the last 10 years probably to the point where you'll find a natural wine bar in every decent sized American city.

It's like a whole thing. It's like, it's like craft beer, but for wine. And the guy who just loves natural wine will never shut up about its delicious barnyard smell or whatever. It's just like become a cliche around here, especially.

[00:04:16] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah. I mean, I, I hope, I'm not that cliche guy, but a lot of natural wine is a little too funky or like weird for my taste because I don't want my wine to smell like a horse table, or I don't want my wine to taste like a kombucha.

[00:04:28] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I suppose I'm with you that then again, I don't drink much wine and I love a good Boch, so what do I know?

[00:04:33] Pieter Colpaert: Well, this, this wine that I was talking about, it had none of that kombucha flavor, this wine maker, his goal was to let the grapes and the character of the Aetna volcanic territory shine through in his wines.

And you know, the best part of it is it sells for maybe like $30 a bottle in the us, which, you know, it's quite expensive. It's no like barefoot or two buck chuck, but for a wine of that quality, I think it's a steal because also, you know, there are risks to the natural wine making process. I.

[00:05:00] Jordan Harbinger: How can making wine be risky?

And by the way, I know it sounds like we're sponsored by whatever wine this is and it's an infomercial, but I promise we're getting to the point. There's people hovering over the button right now. Like, do I wanna, do I care about this? Tell me how making wine can be risky before I start pressing you on this stuff.

[00:05:15] Pieter Colpaert: So, you know, winemakers typically will be using commercial yeast and additives to prevent spoilage and to have a more stable and consistent product. So, you know, not a commercial, but this guy Cornelison, he has to be super diligent in his wine making process in the grapes he selects, he. How he stores the wines, et cetera.

So there's, there's some irony there. You know, it's not, intervening in your wine is more expensive and more difficult sometimes than tinkering with it.

[00:05:40] Jordan Harbinger: I see. So this is, it sounds like preservatives in food, if you don't have the meat that's loaded with preservatives, you need to take more time and resources and actually preserving it, like keeping it cold and keeping it out of the, I don't know, whatever.

So it's more expensive and, and if you just load up that bologna with nitrates, you could probably put it in your shoes on Wednesday and it would still be good. Well, it would still be bologna anyway by Monday. And reminds me also how Starbucks they burn their coffee beans. On purpose kind of, because otherwise, if you take beans of varying quality and varying origin and yada yada, and you roast them kind of properly, they all taste different.

But if you over roast them, they all taste kind of the same, which is a little bit burned, and people just get used to it. And the last thing you want is like the Starbucks three blocks away has different coffee than the Starbucks near your house. And then you don't know which one to go to and you don't know what you're getting.

So they deliberately do that. It sounds like the same thing, but with wine.

[00:06:38] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah, I mean those are great comparisons. It's exactly the same where, you know, like with these commercial wines, you're adding a bunch of stuff so you have a more consistent product. So it all kind of tastes the same, but that is because you're adding all these flavors to it by adding commercial yeasts.

And also, you know, it's the same with like, it's the reason why organic food is more expensive than non-organic food.

[00:06:57] Jordan Harbinger: Alright, so 30 bucks, I guess that sounds pretty reasonable then. I feel like this is now finally getting us into the question of what goes into pricing wine. Which always, to me, it seemed a little bit like a marketing scam, or maybe not quite a scam, but it just seemed like marketing to me, like, this wine's more expensive because we've all agreed for whatever reason that it is.

[00:07:17] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah, I mean, there's some truth to that because to kind of continue my, my love story with the suzuka with this wine, after I drank it, I, I started talking about it with my local wine guy. Of course, you've got a wine guy in every area code. I mean, you don't, they're they're really useful. I mean, so anyway, we, we were chatting about Frank Cornelius's wines and this wine guy mentioned to me that Frank produces what some people consider the holy Grail of natural Italian wines.

It's called the magma. You know, the grapes are being grown on the side of a volcano. Clever. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's made from a single vineyard of 100-year-old Nlo Musculi vines. So there's only a couple hundred bottles produced each year, and the most recent vintage retails for I think around $350 a bottle in the us.

[00:08:03] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. Okay. So that's more than 10 times the price of your previous Fancy pants Su. So let me get this straight. Those two are produced by the same wine maker using similar methods on vineyards that are probably like a stone's throw from each other on the slopes of Mount Aetna Volcano. So what justifies the huge price difference?

[00:08:23] Pieter Colpaert: I. You know, it's the same as any luxury product really. There's the rarity factor, because with such limited production, the magnet is just simply much harder to come by. And then there's also the age of the vines because the magma comes from a single vineyard of prefix vines, pre-fill. What is pre-fill?

Pre-fix. Sorry, sorry. So this is, this is pretty technical time for some wine history. All right. The lacera was an insect pest in the late 19th century, and it caused this huge epidemic, which destroyed most of the vineyards for wine grapes in Europe, especially in France and Italy. So winemakers started ripping out most of the infected vines, and then one of their main solutions was to plant imported bug resistant root stocks and graft new vines onto them.

But so around the slopes of Mount Aetna, the little bug, the ox didn't make it past a certain altitude. There, they still have a, a fair amount of ungrafted vines from the original rootstock that are more than a hundred years old. So those are vines that are super rare and distinct. And then also, you know, these old vines, they produce grapes with more concentrated flavors, more complexity.

[00:09:32] Jordan Harbinger: So I can see how that would make a difference in the final wine you're paying for that complexity. But it also sounds like a lot of the price comes from the ability for, frankly, for someone well like you to wax on about it at a dinner party. Kind of like you're doing right now. I mean, actually it is interesting, so I get it.

There's value in being like, this wine that I brought is so amazing and better than everyone else's, and here's why. There's, there is value there. Unfortunately.

[00:09:58] Pieter Colpaert: Listen, I, I, I will gladly admit to waxing poetically about this wine. So let me wax on for just a little bit longer. Another important factor is the aging process.

Because the Suzu Karu is a wine that you're supposed to enjoy when it's young, and then the magma is aged for one and a half years in special epoxy tanks, and then another one and a half years in the bottle. So that allows it to develop even more depth and nuance. So that also means more flexing to whatever company you happen to be in at that particular moment in time.

[00:10:29] Jordan Harbinger: Okay, so you're, you're making me thirsty. For whatever the opposite of pretentious bullshit is, but I'm, I'm not, I'm still not convinced that it can be 10 times better than that susu that you love so much. I mean, 10 times. Is it, is it, think about if someone makes 10 times more money than you, they're loaded.

Right? So like 10 times better. 10 times the price.

[00:10:49] Pieter Colpaert: Listen, that's, that's what I tell myself, but I think that's a way to cope with the fact that I cannot afford a bottle of magma.

[00:10:55] Jordan Harbinger: I see. I see. So some of it has to be hyped though, right? Because it just, it sounds that way, right? It sounds like you could maybe do something 99% of the way there for one third of the price.

[00:11:08] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah, I mean, you're right there because, you know, this is a dynamic, again, you see it with all kinds of luxury products. Magma has this like near legendary status in the wine world. It's got glowing reviews, high ratings from collectors, and all those things contribute to price. There's also one wild card, which is the winemaker.

He says he uses this social pricing structure, so he actually makes the magma more expensive to subsidize his other wines like the Susu Karu, so he can sell those at a more democratic price point. And so more people are able to try his wines.

[00:11:38] Jordan Harbinger: So that

[00:11:39] Pieter Colpaert: actually, that's

[00:11:40] Jordan Harbinger: smart. That makes a lot of sense. And it's a great idea in terms of growing his market share and exposing people to his product.

Okay. I feel like I'm starting to get a sense of what goes into pricing, a bottle of wine. So scarcity is one. Wines that are produced in limited quantities, command higher prices. Surprise, surprise, supply and demand. But the story behind it also seems to go a very long way too. I, I read something earlier this week or last week.

Where it was like breaking news. Dolce and Gaana only spend $67 making one of their, I don't know, $4,000 handbags, and everybody's like, of course you really, this is not a $3,500 to produce piece of fabric and metal. No, it's all marketing. There's a photo shoot with Gwyneth Paltrow holding one like that part costs a million dollars.

The rest of it is. People making a purse next to another person who's making a purse for not dolce and Gabbana, right. With the same crap. Maybe fake gold instead of real gold. So it's, yeah, luxury goods are just a fascinating market.

[00:12:35] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah. And you know, as, as you say, it's about the scarcity. So the harder it is to find a wine, the more expensive it's going to be.

And it's probably the same with a hand back. You know, if it's harder to find a handbag, it'll be more expensive. Whether that's a single vineyard wine, or it's from like a specific rare vintage, or just like really prestigious vineyards. Those are all factors. And then reputation is another big one as well, because you know you have wines from very famous wine regions like Burgundy or Napa Valley.

Those will fetch higher prices just based on the wine region they're from.

[00:13:05] Jordan Harbinger: I see. So if you're a bargain hunter, look for the lesser known wine regions maybe. And then age is another one. Right. And aged wine obviously is gonna have developed a more unique, complex flavor profile, whatever that means.

[00:13:17] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah, and then selling a bottle right away that is cheaper for the producer than having to age and store it.

So again, like with anything, production costs are a big factor. Cost of land, labor, storage, uh, materials and so on. And you know, like most of the wines we drink will be machine harvested, but then the premium wines for those most wine makers will still be handpicking their grapes.

[00:13:40] Jordan Harbinger: Oh my god, my back hurts.

Just thinking about that. Aren't those machines now though, better than grape pickers? Anyway, I feel like I saw this for strawberries on discovery channel.

[00:13:49] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah, I think they're faster, but handpicking is still easier on the grapes and vines because, you know, when you're a human, you tend to be a little bit more judicious and careful about how you pick the grapes, what grapes you pick.

So I think right now there's not really a substitute for the trained human eye. I. Although, I mean, listen, I'm sure in a couple years we'll have these like AI powered grape picking machines.

[00:14:10] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. But then having humans do the backbreaking labor of picking it will be part of the story. Like this is the only non machine picked grape wine that is made in this part of the world.

And it's like, oh, it's better because somebody sweated their. Rof going to get like, yeah, someone suffer, someone put their life in danger, climbing up a volcano to get these grapes for you. Alright, so there are some legitimate reasons behind the higher priced wines, but do these expensive wines actually taste better?

I feel like I've seen so many, and maybe they're anecdotal nonsense, but studies where, so-called experts, they get blindfolded and then they can't tell the difference between some crap from like Trader Joe's and something fancy pants from a restaurant.

[00:14:53] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah. I mean, do expensive wines tastes better?

That's, that's the million dollar question that we're trying to answer here. And I'm sorry to say, I don't have a straightforward answer for you because taste is super subjective and then a wine that I'm raving about might leave you totally unimpressed. But there are actual studies about this. So the Journal of Wine Economics did a study, they analyzed more than 4,000 wines that had been entered into 13 different competitions across the United States.

And the researcher, he found that the probability of a wine, winning a gold medal in one competition was completely statistically independent of whether it won a gold medal in any other competition, there's no correlation.

[00:15:33] Jordan Harbinger: So, so it sounds like even experts can't agree on which wines taste the best, which I suppose makes sense.

[00:15:38] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah. I mean, but then these experts sometimes don't even agree with themselves. Because there's another study I like to cite, which is the same researcher. He found that only 10% of judges at the California State Fair Wine competition, only 10% of judges were able to replicate their scores within the same metal group when they were tasting the same wine several times.

So, you know, there's all kinds of things that influencer bias, their judgment, like the order in which they tasted, the wines, the scores they gave to previous wines, even the reputation of the producer or the region. So, you know, one moment they'll give it a gold medal. The next they'll give it a silver medal.

And this is the same taster.

[00:16:16] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, experts. Yep. They're human. After all. I look, taste is subjective. I understand that, but I would love to think that I can just judge a wine purely on how it tastes and how much I like it, but I have a feeling that you're gonna burst that bubble as well.

[00:16:30] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah. Sorry. I think I have to burst that bubble because I mean.

Humans are highly suggestible. You know, our expectations do influence how we experience things. And then wine is no exception because a group of German researchers, they found that people's brain activity while they were drinking wine was influenced by the price they were told. That wine costs, even when that information was completely fake.

[00:16:52] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. I would've loved to have been a part of that study, but maybe for beer. Okay, so wait, they were in an MRI scanner, so were they drinking wine while laying down in an MRI scanner? Because that. Sounds really difficult actually.

[00:17:06] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah. I mean, it wasn't, it wasn't a classic wine tasting. These subjects, let's call them, they were laying down in the scanner, the MRI scanner, and they had test tubes, feeding them a milliliter of wine every time.

[00:17:17] Jordan Harbinger: So that sounds fun, but also messy. I feel like there's no way you're coming out of that unstained.

[00:17:23] Pieter Colpaert: No, there there's not. But, um, you know, they, they gave all these participants the same wines to drink and then told them different prices. And when? When people believed that they were drinking a more expensive wine, you saw the areas of their brain associated with reward and pleasure become more active.

And now for something that starts

[00:17:40] Jordan Harbinger: out energetic and bright, and finishes with just a hint of capitalism, we'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Better Help. Have you taken a moment recently to thank the people in your life who keep you going? Those folks who make your day a little brighter, make your life a little bit easier.

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Free for y'all over at Jordan harbinger.com/news. A lot of great feedback from all of you so far on that. A lot of fun for us to create as well. Jordan harbinger.com/news. Now back to skeptical Sunday. So our brains are basically tricking us into enjoying expensive wines. More so people are pretending they're enjoying the expensive wines more.

Our brains are telling us to enjoy it more. So it's almost like part of the, it's just part of the deal.

[00:20:43] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah. I, I don't know if they're pretending. I think it's a thing your brain does, you know? And, and it's a known dynamic 'cause it's not limited to wine. You know, there's a name for this phenomenon.

Psychologists have called it the price quality heuristic, which means that we kind of subconsciously associate higher prices with higher quality. So that will then kind of affect your actual perception of the product.

[00:21:02] Jordan Harbinger: This kind of reminds me, this is probably adjacent to that, but do you remember the first time you saw an iPod?

[00:21:08] Pieter Colpaert: Mm,

[00:21:08] Jordan Harbinger: I was pretty young, but making me feel, but yeah, I was blown away. I was probably graduating from college, but anyway, I remember my friend bought one. Opened it and the packaging was just like nothing I had ever seen was packaged this way. Yeah. And when he opened it, it was like, press me or whatever, and it all the buttons lit up red and it just looked like it was dropped by a UFO on earth.

And it was, I was just, I could, I could not wait to go and get one. I think I went like the next day and bought one even though I couldn't afford it. There's something there, when something is packaged right and priced higher, you're just like, oh, it's the best thing, even if you don't even know how it works.

So I suppose the lesson here is don't underestimate the power of expectation. I think this just confirms something we all know deep down, but hate to acknowledge, which is that we are very susceptible. To marketing. It's no coincidence advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry. And here I am giving away this podcast for free, maybe, although maybe there's a reason for that.

[00:22:05] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah. Or maybe you should just start charging, see what happens. Yeah. There we go. There we go. But you know, I also wanna note that the people in this very experiment, they were just kind of like regular, occasional wine drinkers like you and I. They weren't sommeliers or wine experts. So actually one of the things these researchers didn't test but were interested in is whether you can train your taste buds to reduce those placebo marketing effects.

Because if you're a master sommelier, you've undergone super rigorous training and that is supposed to help you identify all these different kind of technical elements in a wine so you can assess its quality.

[00:22:38] Jordan Harbinger: Right? Isn't that why they have blind tastings to take out factors like price and reputation?

So you just focus on the actual wine itself and all you see is the wine in a glass or whatever.

[00:22:49] Pieter Colpaert: Yep. But I mean, I dunno if it'll surprise you. But in these blind tastings, you know, experts, they're often able to pick out grapes and vintages and regions, but generally they're not gonna be able to tell you if they're drinking an expensive wine or not.

[00:23:03] Jordan Harbinger: I think it's incredible, actually. That's still impressive, man, that they can tell by subtle taste differences where the grapes grew, that made the wine that they're drinking. I mean, that's still like. Kind of a superpower. I also think it's interesting that they can tell characteristics that are distinctive, but they can't necessarily tell or determine the quality of those characteristics.

Like they can tell like, oh, there's notes of this and that, and the other thing. But they can't say like, and this is a good thing, they can just tell that it's in there.

[00:23:29] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah, I mean they tested that as well because there's this famous study known as the Wine Spectator Award-winning wine tasting. And they had researchers had 54 wine experts taste the selection of wines.

These ranged from like a dollar 65 to $150 a bottle, but they didn't tell them anything about the identity of the wine. Uh, so it was a blind tasting and the experts were unable to consistently identify and. Which wines were expensive, or even like rates, the expensive wines as tasting better than the cheap wines.

[00:23:59] Jordan Harbinger: That's pretty eye-opening, man. Even the best experts struggle to tell the difference without a price or a reputation to go on. So that data that we're getting from our brain that says this is a good wine, it's basically a necessary part of the equation. Alright, so in terms of the marketing and the reputation and all that, so let's say I'm going to a really nice restaurant.

And they tell me they're gonna send over the sommelier to discuss the wine. Should I just be like, Hey, don't bother. It's all a bunch of hocus pocus. Gimme the cheapest crap on the menu. But tell me it's good. I.

[00:24:27] Pieter Colpaert: No, no. I mean, I don't wanna put Somalias outta work here. I think they, you know, wine experts, somalias, they have real important expertise.

They will have a wide knowledge of wine regions, of grape varieties of wine making techniques. You know, they'll be like super knowledgeable about how you serve store decanted wine. I. They'll tell you all about how you compare it with food. You know, a lot of these people trained for this for years and especially there's this thing called the Masters of Wine.

[00:24:51] Jordan Harbinger: Masters of Wine sounds like something from the French Edition of Game of Thrones. I know what this is though. This is like a certification, right? I did a tasting with one of these guys in Napa a long time ago for a, a company that was sponsoring the show and he was really impressive. I actually kind of felt bad wasting his time given my absolutely barbarian level palette for things like wine.

[00:25:12] Pieter Colpaert: Oh yeah. I mean, those guys, they're, they're part of a very super elite club. You know, as of last year, there are only 416 masters of wine in the entire world, um, from 31 different countries. So these guys, they have to, guys and girls, sorry, they have to pass a very rigorous exam and it can take years before you pass the exam.

They usually pass less than 10% of people who even participate. That's an exam that'll test their knowledge of, you know, everything from like grape, growing wine making to the business and marketing of wine. And, um, the exam also includes a blind tasting of 36 wines over three days,

[00:25:47] Jordan Harbinger: 36 wines. And you gotta probably nail all of those.

And they still can't tell me if I'm drinking an expensive wine or not. What the heck?

[00:25:54] Pieter Colpaert: I mean, to be fair, again, they'll, they'll be able to tell you all kinds of things about this wine. They'll be able to make a really good assessment of the quality of the wine. You know, like the balance, the complexity, the potential for aging.

So in theory, you know, these masters of wine, they'll be able to say like, Jordan, this is a, well-made high quality wine. That just doesn't necessarily mean that it's an expensive wine. And I think this goes to show there's no like straightforward connection between perceived quality and price. And listen, I think that's good news for people like me who love wine,

[00:26:26] Jordan Harbinger: right?

Because, okay, so good wine doesn't have to be expensive. That's kind of interesting. I probably should have thought of that earlier. So what I'm getting from this is. There's a lot of reasons why one bottle of wine might be more expensive than the other, but the vast, vast majority of people won't really be able to tell.

That actually leaves an enormous amount of space for the role of marketing and storytelling, but it also means that if you kind of don't necessarily need all of that all of the time, you can afford a really good bottle of wine and it doesn't have to have $300 of story attached to it.

[00:26:57] Pieter Colpaert: Right. But that's also why it's worth it for, you know, these wineries to invest in creating this image, this like aura of luxury and exclusivity around their wines because that's what's going to make people think that their wines are worth spending money on.

[00:27:10] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's just good business.

[00:27:12] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah. And then, you know, to your point there, there, there are lots of small and subtle ways that they can achieve that because ages ago I was just getting into wine and I had a friend who pretended to be a real wine expert and he told me. That if the bottom of a wine bottle had what they call a punt, which is, you know, where, where the bottom is not entirely flat, but slightly indented and you can kind of like put your thumb in there, that meant it was a great quality wine.

I.

[00:27:36] Jordan Harbinger: Really aren't almost all wine bottles that way. Don't they all have that thing in the bottom that you can put your thumb in? I feel like every bottle has that.

[00:27:43] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah. Well most bottles, most bottles are not entirely flat and they'll have like an indentation. But I think basically what my buddy was saying is that the deeper the punt, the more expensive the wine should be.

And you know, I heard that from several people, but then. Later on, I found out that's really just an urban legend.

[00:28:00] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Oh, good old urban legend. Like when I was a kid, I thought there were alligators in the sewer system. Although if you live in Miami, there's probably some truth to that. I.

[00:28:09] Pieter Colpaert: Fair enough. And I mean, there's some historical truth to why Glassblowers used to make bottles that way.

Ah, okay. It, you know, it made it easier for the bottles to stand up on the shelf. It helped collect the sediment as the wine ages. And so it is true that it's like slightly more expensive to make bottles with a punt, but still there's no correlation with the quality of wine inside the bottle.

[00:28:30] Jordan Harbinger: I mean, it might actually be easier to make an expensive bottle than an expensive wine.

So if your wine is kind of crappy or mid. You just, you're like, how do we improve this? Make the bottle look fancier. All right, fine. So you can't judge a wine by its bottle, I guess.

[00:28:43] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah. I mean, and, and you know, I'm, I'm bringing this up because it, I think it shows how there's all kinds of external factors that influence how we gauge the quality of a bottle of wine.

And that's something the wine industry obviously knows and plays into with them, like pretty creative marketing strategies, like how they designed the wine label. The shape of the bottle and even the weight of the bottle. Those have all been proven to influence people's perception of a wine's quality and their willingness to pay a higher price for it.

[00:29:09] Jordan Harbinger: So you're telling me that I might be more likely to buy a wine just because it has a fancy label or a heavier bottle?

[00:29:16] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah. I mean, another study, because they do a lot of studies on this kind of thing, found that people associate heavier, thicker glass bottles with higher quality wines. So in this study they present the exact same wine, same label bottles of different weights, and they found consumers are willing to pay more for the wine in the heavier bottle.

So, I mean, go to any winery and like look at their more premium wines. Usually they'll use kind of like heavier, more substantial bottles for them.

[00:29:42] Jordan Harbinger: Maybe they should put some lead in there that'll really boost sales. Follow me for more food marketing tips.

[00:29:48] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah. Brilliant, brilliant. Id Jordan. I think, uh, health authorities might have a slightly different opinion on that one.

So the shape of the bottle, that's another signifier. Like think of a classic burgundy bottle, has those nice sloping shoulders, or a Riesling bottle is tall and slender. Those designs kind of give him this air of tradition and of quality, and it'll also help you notice 'em quicker when you go to the wine shop.

[00:30:10] Jordan Harbinger: Ah, that's clever. Yeah. 'cause otherwise all the bottles look the same. I, I, I think I've noticed that a little bit here and there. The labels. Are important too, right? Because that's kind of the first thing I notice, especially if the bottles look similar. The most expensive wines, it's like a lawyer's business card, right?

It's simple, it's elegant. There's just like a couple of bits of data on there. The name of the winery, the vintage in simple gold, silver lettering, whatever. There's not like a. A rainbow in a kangaroo on the front or something?

[00:30:36] Pieter Colpaert: No, I mean, Jordan, are you gonna believe me if I tell you there's a study for this?

[00:30:40] Jordan Harbinger: I would indeed believe that there's a study for that. Wow. There's a lot of, there's a lot of funding going into studying wine, obviously.

[00:30:46] Pieter Colpaert: I know there's, there's a lot of money in wine, so, yeah. Um, I mean, so in this study, they found simple black and gold labels. People perceive 'em as more luxurious and then if it has like a bright collar, quirky label, but like kangaroos and rainbows you were talking about, those are perceived as casual and affordable.

[00:31:02] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it's funny 'cause this study could probably have been done by just asking a few people what they thought of each label. 'cause it's so obvious this is not deep science. So to some degree you can make people believe a wine is expensive purely by its design and it's. Really hard to tell just by tasting whether a wine is expensive or not.

So it feels like it has to be very easy to fool people. I. And I, I'm wondering if that's why I keep hearing about all these quite spectacular cases of wine fraud. Have you heard about this at all?

[00:31:33] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in the world of fine and rare wines, wine fraud is much more common than people realize. I think I.

I read somewhere that experts estimate that as much as 20% of the fine wine market could be counterfeit. Wow. Especially when it comes to like the rare, expensive bottles.

[00:31:49] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. One fifth of wine being fake is a massive share of the market. I'm trying to think of anything else where 20% of it is fake.

That's ridiculous.

[00:31:58] Pieter Colpaert: Right. And not in like the regular wine market, but in the rare wine markets that's, that's what they think. Like one in five and Right. Not, not at, not at BevMo. Like you

[00:32:05] Jordan Harbinger: don't have counter Yeah,

[00:32:07] Pieter Colpaert: no. There's, you know, your, your $10 bottle of wine, they probably won't bother faking.

[00:32:11] Jordan Harbinger: No, that would be a waste of time for sure.

It's like counterfeiting a $5 bill. Yeah.

[00:32:15] Pieter Colpaert: And in this case, you know, there's this documentary that you might have heard of called Sour Grapes. Yes. It's about one of the most notorious cases of wine. It involves Rudy Kwan. He is this Indonesian wine collector who was convicted of selling millions and millions of dollars worth of counterfeit wines.

So this guy for years, he would mix cheaper wines together and then just pass 'em off as rare, expensive vintages. And in doing so, he was able to fool like super experienced collectors, like billionaires like William Koch. So they found that this guy sold as much as $550 million worth of fake wine.

That's by far the largest wine fraud case in history.

[00:32:53] Jordan Harbinger: That is so much more massive than I thought. $550 million. If you'd said 50 million, I would've been impressed. I. So, but half a billion dollars worth of fake wine. How did he get away with it for so long?

[00:33:05] Pieter Colpaert: You know, I think he was a master at exploiting the trust and lack of transparency in, in the high-end wine market.

This is someone who had an encyclopedic knowledge of rare wines, so he was able to create elaborate fakes, you know, very convincing, fabricated labels and bottles.

[00:33:20] Jordan Harbinger: It sounds like he put a lot of real legwork into it then, if he was not only, he's not only faking the wines, right? He's faking the bottles, he's faking the labels, and there's probably some sort of provenance certificates, right?

Like, where did you buy this? Where did it come from? So how did he get caught?

[00:33:33] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah, I mean it's, it's a real thriller, this story. There's all these experts in the wine world that started to become a little suspicious of him, including this woman, Maureen Downey. She's an like an Eagle Eye wine expert, and she started to notice minor inconsistencies in the bottle that he was selling.

But still, it was hard to find like actual evidence of fraud. But then he got a little sloppy, he sold several bottles of a rare burgundy. This is a 1945 domain at an auction in New York.

[00:34:01] Jordan Harbinger: Ooh, that sounds very fancy. And, and I mean very, very, it was fancy. Very, yeah. Wow. That's when you bust out the French.

Yeah. And it's 80 years old. Holy smokes.

[00:34:13] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah, I mean just after World War II and, and can you believe his luck? This auction was attended by Loren Poso. This is the head of that winery and this winery, it had been in his family for generations. So he knew all about those wines and he knew that his family had not produced wine from that particular vineyard until 1982.

So this guy was trying to, you know, pass off a bottle from 1945. So that raised some like obvious concerns. And then the FBI starts investigating. Long story short, Rudy Corn was sentenced to 10 years in prison and ordered to pay $28.4 million in restitution to his victims.

[00:34:49] Jordan Harbinger: The 10 years in prison sucks, but 28.4 million in restitution is peanuts compared to what this guy made off that fraud.

I. And that's wild, man. What a detail to get tripped up on. That's like when they caught the son of Sam's serial killer because something to do with a parking ticket, it's like, otherwise that guy would've just gotten away with it. What an amazing grift that was with that kind of money swirling around.

There must be a whole cottage industry now around authenticating wine, preventing wine fraud, certifying cases of wine. I don't know.

[00:35:17] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah, I mean in, in this case, this famous Kwan case also increased demand for wine authentication services. So Maureen Downey, who I mentioned earlier, she was one of the first to raise suspicions of Kwan.

She helped out the FBI, she testified against him, and now she's become this kind of like Colombo or Sherlock Holmes of the wine world. So she's made it her mission to uncover wine fraud and help collectors spotting fake bottles.

[00:35:40] Jordan Harbinger: That is such a great niche, man. Nancy Drew in the case of, uh, well, the case of wine.

Yeah.

[00:35:47] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah. I mean the wine focused Nancy Drew, she, she has her own consulting company and several others likers exist now too. They all kind of use a combination of scientific analysis and their expert knowledge to look at the authenticity of a bottle. So they go and like analyze the chemical composition of a wine.

They research, its provenance, they examine the bottle and label for inconsistencies. They go and do some like archival research, like all these things to spot the fake bottles of wine.

[00:36:13] Jordan Harbinger: This is like CSI in Napa Valley. So let's talk a little bit more about this world of rare wine collectors. I'm quite intrigued by this.

So we've talked a lot about what goes into wine prices for the average Joe like, like us, meaning bottles. You or I could pick up at BevMo or whatever, but I assume that this aforementioned rare wine market just operates on a totally different level.

[00:36:34] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah, I mean it's, it's in the name, right? It's the rare wine market.

So that's the determining factor. It's all about scarcity. It's all about provenance. It's, you know, it's also about historical significance. Those things can really like drive prices to astronomical heights where a single bottle can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

[00:36:51] Jordan Harbinger: I feel like we hear more and more about these high profile auctions.

So has the rare wine market, is that growing in recent years? It sounds antiquated to me, but it sounds like something I just don't know anything about. So for all I know it's tripled overnight.

[00:37:03] Pieter Colpaert: No, no, it's been growing like, especially since the pandemic, 'cause that was a boom time for all kinds of collectibles.

I see. You know, expensive watches, luxury handbags, and, and Pokemon cards. Like all those just boomed in price. So in 2021, uh, global Wine Auction Sales, um, hit their record high. $520 million worth of rare wines were sold that year. Wow. You know, there's also been a correction in the wine markets. The, the LX Fine Wine 1000 Index, they track thousand leading wines.

It fell 14% in 2023, and then you have the champagne 50 index, this double during the pandemic between like 2020 and the end of 2022. But then last year, you know, another correction, it fell by 18%.

[00:37:44] Jordan Harbinger: Speaking of fancy pans, marketing, how about a word from our sponsors? We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Progressive.

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Jordan harbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Now for the rest of skeptical Sunday, I still, I'm impressed they have indexes tracking these things. So this really is like any other major commodity market then. So give me some examples. What are some of the most expensive bottles ever sold at auction?

[00:39:56] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah, I think the, the main example or the most famous one is a bottle of 1945 Roman de Conti. Which, uh, sold for $558,000 at a Sotheby's auction. Oh my gosh. In 2018. Wow. So six years ago, you know, it still has the record for most expensive regular 750 milliliter bottle of wine ever sold. Wow. And you know, that particular wine, that particular vintage, is considered one of the greatest burgundies ever made, and there's only a couple bottles left.

[00:40:23] Jordan Harbinger: I wonder what that amounts to on a per

[00:40:26] Pieter Colpaert: sip basis. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm pretty bad at math, but I think it's like a small SUV with each gulp Oh my gosh. I mean, there's, it's funny, mean, there's, there's some, there, there's some other, you know, ridiculous examples. Like there's a champagne bottle that they sold as an NFT in collaboration with Bored ape.

[00:40:43] Jordan Harbinger: Okay. So, so for those who don't know, NFTs are in short. A sort of cryptocurrency adjacent digital art. And yes, there's more to it and no, we're not gonna explain it, but it's all you need to know is it's blockchain related and you can't hold it in your hand.

[00:40:58] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah. And, and Bordea is, you know, their cartoon monkeys basically.

So this was, this was a Cartoon Monkey champagne bottle, um, which sold for $2.5 million in 2022. It

[00:41:08] Jordan Harbinger: was essentially a picture of that. Yeah. Tied to the blockchain. You can't even put it on a shelf because Right. It doesn't exist.

[00:41:15] Pieter Colpaert: The bottle was. The bottle was real. Oh, the bottle was real. The bottle was real.

I see. But the Cartoon monkey is fake. Okay. Even still probably not worth 2.5 million. Nope. I don't think any bottle of wine is worth 2.5 million. And there's another one called The Taste of Diamonds Champagne. That's a bottle they engraved with gold and then they built an 18 carat diamond into the label.

Oh my God. That one a little over 10 years ago, they sold for $1.9 million. Wow. That's dumb. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they're, I think they're all kind of dumb, ridiculous examples. Although my favorite of these crazy, expensive wines, I think is the wine that went to space.

[00:41:51] Jordan Harbinger: Ooh. Space Wine. Is that like something Neil Armstrong's smuggled aboard Apollo 11 or what?

What's going on here?

[00:41:57] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah, it's something like that. I mean, they, they basically sent 12 bottles of Petrus 2000, that's considered one of the best wines in the world. They sent them to the International Space Station where, where they orbited for more than 14 months, just, you know, going around the earth.

[00:42:12] Jordan Harbinger: So that, that's, I mean, look, it's incredible, I guess. But what is the point of sending wine into space? Why,

[00:42:18] Pieter Colpaert: uh, great question. I mean, it was. Part of a privately funded research study on food and agriculture and space. Um, so they were trying to examine the effect of zero gravity and space conditions on the aging process of wine.

Okay. Whatever. So when, yeah. I mean, when, when the bottles returned to earth in January of 2021, I. They had some scientists analyze them and then they also had like a group of super lucky wine tasters. They got to compare the space aged wine with the earth aged bottles.

[00:42:45] Jordan Harbinger: What did it taste like? Burning tax dollars?

[00:42:48] Pieter Colpaert: No, I mean it did taste more smoky. I bet it did. And more floral. And that's according to journalists than wine writer Jane Anson. She was one of the tasters. She said, you know, it's noticeably different. But she also said, those are the aromatics, you know, the smoky floral ones. That would develop when you age petris anyway.

You know, whether you age it in space or you know, in your cellar. Right? In your cellar, your basement. Yeah. Yeah. She couldn't even say if it was better or worse.

[00:43:14] Jordan Harbinger: I guess in that case it probably makes more sense to age that bottle in your basement in Michigan than on the International Space Station. But what is a bottle of space aged Petrus 2000.

What does that run me?

[00:43:28] Pieter Colpaert: In May of 2021, uh, Christie's, they sold a bottle of the space wine, along with like a regular bottle of the pets so that the buyer could compare the two. This was a private sale, so they didn't disclose the final price, but they set the estimated price at $1 million. I. Okay, so

[00:43:45] Jordan Harbinger: what is a regular

[00:43:45] Pieter Colpaert: bottle

[00:43:46] Jordan Harbinger: of Petrus then?

[00:43:47] Pieter Colpaert: According to wine searcher.com, the average price of a 2000 petrus will be like around $7,000. Oh wow. For one bottle. So 7,000 versus you know, 1 million.

[00:43:57] Jordan Harbinger: So you're paying 990 plus thousand dollars for the bottle of space to Asia?

[00:44:01] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah, $993,000 of space wine and like $7,000 of regular Patriots.

[00:44:06] Jordan Harbinger: Wow, okay.

You know, I'm wondering if you just spent a million dollars on two bottles of wine. Are you even gonna drink it or is it, is it just a collectible at that point? Is it the Pokemon card? That was it? Logan Paul wears around his neck, you know, like, you're not gonna use that stuff, right? You're not gonna play it.

[00:44:24] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah, I mean, I think you gotta ask these collectors, because I think there's a few of them who, they'll probably enjoy the flex, you know, opening up this super rare bottle of wine for like a, a special occasion. Maybe they want to impress a date, but you know, I think mostly it's probably more an investment or like a status symbol.

Because generally, you know the value of those wines, it's way more tied to the rarity and the history of them than their actual taste. That makes sense.

[00:44:48] Jordan Harbinger: You're gonna open that when you can finally get an audience with the Prince of Saudi Arabia or something like that. So what makes a wine a sought after collectible, beyond age, reputation, or, you know, sending it to space or engraving it with diamonds?

Is there, is there something else that makes it collectible? Does it go with other things that you have?

[00:45:06] Pieter Colpaert: Well, yeah, I think everybody loves a good story. They love a celebrity connection, right? So the historical significance of a particular bottle plays a big role. Um, several of the most expensive wines that have ever been sold have a connection to Thomas Jefferson, you know, the founding fodder.

I. He was one of history's most famous wine collectors. This guy, you know, he was ambassador to France and he spent a lot of his time visiting the vineyards of Bordeaux, of Burgundy, buying up wine for his collection. So Hard

[00:45:34] Jordan Harbinger: at work is the ambassador to France. Yeah. Going to different wineries and buying wine.

Oh my God. I think

[00:45:38] Pieter Colpaert: he kind of, you know, finagled a dream job for himself. But then in 1985, supposedly someone discovers this like bricked up cellar wall in Paris and they find a wine cellar that's more than 150 years old. Several bottles in there have Thomas Jefferson's initials, T, H, and J. So those bottles, they end up in the hands of this famous German guy.

Wine collector. Music producer, Hardy Rodent stock. He works together with Christie's, the auction house. They authenticate the bottles, the auction of several of them. And then in 1989, a bottle of 1869 Chatto Laz, supposedly owned by Thomas Jefferson, sold for more than $150,000. So this is, you know, 35 years ago, at the time, the most expensive wine ever sold.

Now guess what?

[00:46:25] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I was gonna say color me skeptical. I'm guessing this is all fake. Yep.

[00:46:28] Pieter Colpaert: I mean, listen, there, there had always been suspicions around the authenticity of these wines. So in 2005, uh, billionaire wine collector Bill Coke, he had some of his so-called Jefferson bottles tested by a team of experts.

And these experts, they found that the bottles contained wine from the 1960s, not from the 18th century. So Jefferson, he kept really good records of his wine purchases, but very few of his bottles are still around and even fewer can be proven to have belonged to him. Though one of those fake bottles actually ended up being one of the most expensive bottles never sold.

What do you mean never sold? Okay. This, this is another one of my favorite stories, William Soko, and he's this famous New York wine merchant. He had a bottle of Au Margo from 1787. It had Jefferson's initials slash 1965, but okay. Yep. And he, um, you know, he had this bottle on consignment from its English owner, so he was going around New York trying to sell it for half a million dollars.

People were kinda laughing at him. You know, no one thought that he would actually be able to sell a bottle of wine for half a million dollars, but, you know, as part of his whole like PR blitz, he, he went to this very fancy Chateau Margot dinner at this very fancy four Seasons restaurant in New York. And then at the end of that night, I don't know how many glasses of wine deep, right?

He walks into a metal tray table carrying that wine and he breaks the bottle.

[00:47:50] Jordan Harbinger: Oh my God. What? Alu. I sure hope that was insured. He's never gonna live that

[00:47:56] Pieter Colpaert: one down. Well, I mean, he actually didn't because it was literally in his obituary that was published in the New York Times.

[00:48:02] Jordan Harbinger: That story. Sorry about that.

Sorry, folks. Import taste. Uh, yeah. Wow. Okay. Funny

[00:48:08] Pieter Colpaert: thing about that story. Some of the attendees, they immediately started dipping their fingers into whatever drops that they could salvage. So that they could at least get a taste of this wine. The wine had chemically deteriorated and the restaurant manager said it was completely undrinkable.

[00:48:22] Jordan Harbinger: Well, yeah, it's undrinkable. It's on the floor of a hotel, so ugh. Hotel floor wine. Imagine that hangover. Alright, so how did this bottle, A very likely counterfeit and totally undrinkable vinegar wine or whatever it ends up doing in the bottle. I. How did that become the most expensive bottle Never sold.

Just because the asking price or what?

[00:48:42] Pieter Colpaert: Well, so Colin, he did have the foresight to insure the wine. So he received a $225,000 insurance payout. Um, which, you know, he says he shared with the owner. And to this day, I think is still, it holds the record for the world's most expensive broken bottle of wine.

[00:48:58] Jordan Harbinger: Again, though, color me s skeptic. How convenient. So I wonder, is this bottle fake? They figured, oh, there's no way to sell it without actually committing a crime, or we're just never gonna get a good asking price for this. So then he accidentally breaks it for the insurance payout. And I'm, I'm starting to wonder, do you have any examples of expensive historical wines that are not actually fake?

[00:49:19] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah, I, I mean, in fact, I do. 'cause I think, you know, we've been talking about wine age in space. What about wine aged on the bottom of the ocean? There's a, an interesting little subset in the world of fine wines that they call shipwreck wines.

[00:49:32] Jordan Harbinger: Ooh, love a good shipwreck.

[00:49:33] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah. In, in 2010, for example, uh, 47 bottles of lyco champagne were recovered from a 19th century shipwreck.

In the Baltic Sea and you know, wildly enough, these were still drinkable. They'd spent 170 years underwater. Wow. Yeah, they, so some people got to taste them and they said they were sweets, but balanced by a dry acidity.

[00:49:55] Jordan Harbinger: That is absolutely incredible. I thought you were gonna say, this ship sank in the nineties or something and there was champagne at the bottom.

170 years. That's mind blowing, man. That's really impressive.

[00:50:07] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah, I mean, I, I think a lot of people agreed because those bottles, um, sold for, you know, around like $43,000 a bottle at auction. Wow. And, um, and at this gave Vili Co the Champagne House, they, they gave it an idea, I. Oh no.

[00:50:20] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, Dave, we're gonna torpedo this boat so everybody get off.

Send it to the bottom of the ocean.

[00:50:24] Pieter Colpaert: A little, a little less drastic, but they just started experimenting with storing bottles deep in the ocean. So they've submerged 350 bottles of their champagne in that same area of the Baltic Sea where the shipwreck had been found. So they say this is, you know, some kind of experiment.

They want to better understand the behavior of wine under extreme aging conditions, and that's an experiment they're gonna be running for about 40 years. Every couple of years they go, they surface a few of those bottles and then they taste and they compare them with bottles that have just been aged in like a regular cellar.

[00:50:54] Jordan Harbinger: Wow, okay. They should have put more down there. 'cause what if it's amazing Now you gotta wait like 30 more years to get it to age. I bet you they put like 35,000 bottles and they told everyone it's 350. Alright, so we've had. Fancy single plot, volcanic wines, space wines, ocean wines, fake wines made in some dude's like bathtub or whatever.

But with everything you've told me, is it ever actually worth it to splurge on a really expensive bottle of wine? I mean,

[00:51:21] Pieter Colpaert: listen up to you Joe Bastianich. That's, you know, maybe you know him. He's, he's, he was on MasterChef. He's like a famous restaurant owner. He's a winemaker. He wrote this memoir called Restaurant Man in 2012, and there he writes, no wine should cost more than a hundred bucks.

And you know, I think it's a little ironic because you know, he has this restaurant, I live here in New York, he has a restaurant called Babo, very fancy Michelin star Italian restaurant. A lot of bottles on his list are selling for more than a thousand dollars. So, you know, this is the guy telling you no wine should cost more than a hundred bucks.

But I think, you know, he makes a good point in the book because in the end. We're talking about fermented grape juice. Take into account the farming and the labor and the storage, what have you. There's a real limit to what it costs to actually produce 750 milliliters of fermented grape juice. So that's exactly where capitalism market forces and then especially marketing come into play.

[00:52:16] Jordan Harbinger: I love that he is like, no wine should cost more than a hundred bucks unless it's me getting the money. Then in that case, I am all for jacking the price up 10 x at my restaurant. Alright, that's, well look. Hashtag capitalism. So how much. I know I, I feel like I keep harping on this and bugging you, but how much should I pay for a decent bottle of wine?

Is there a range or anything like that? Like what are we talking about?

[00:52:37] Pieter Colpaert: There's obviously you'll find some like exceptional, expensive wines, but I just don't think that a higher price guarantees you a better taste or a better experience. I mean, listen, any wine expert is gonna tell you there's lots of high quality wines that are available at affordable price points.

I'd say maybe 20 to $30 a bottle is like the sweet spot, but then best a certain price point, whether that's $50, a hundred dollars, you're really no longer paying for quality. You're paying for name, for reputation, for scarcity.

[00:53:06] Jordan Harbinger: Hey, I guess that's good news for those of us who don't have thousands of dollars to drop on a single bottle of deep seas shipwreck slash space wine.

[00:53:15] Pieter Colpaert: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I guess at the end of the day, wine is there to be enjoyed regardless of a price tag. So. My amateur opinion, amateur advice is go and experiment with some different regions, grape varieties, different styles, and then discover what you like and just don't get too fixated on the price.

Just trust yourself, trust your taste buds.

[00:53:36] Jordan Harbinger: Well, you certainly peaked my interest on this though. I would still, I would love to try that bottle of magma that you were talking about earlier in the episode. The, the story does get you, man, it is, it, it makes it special,

[00:53:47] Pieter Colpaert: right? I mean, listen, start saving up and then invite me over for dinner when you track one down.

You got it, man. Cheers. It's totally my pleasure. Jordan. Ante.

[00:53:57] Jordan Harbinger: You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger Show with Bo Lotto.

[00:54:00] Clip: There is a world out there, but we don't see it as it is. So this isn't philosophy. This is just laws of physics. So if a tree falls in the wind, no's there to hear. It doesn't make a sound.

No, it creates energy, but the sound is a construct of your brain. So the tree exists, the energy exists, but your brain then turns that into something useful, which is sound. Light, all the light that's coming around us, right? It's bouncing off objects, and then it's changing when it hits an object, and then it comes to our eyes, right?

But our retina has no access to the light directly nor to the surfaces. All it literally has access to is energy, and that's where your brain is actually constructing a meaning. And it's that meaning that you're seeing, you're not seeing the energy, you're detecting the energy, but you're not seeing it.

Language is not a construct of the world. Think about perceptions of pain. Is pain an illusion? Of course, it's not an illusion. It's a meaningful perception, but it's not something that exists in the world. There aren't painful things in the world.

[00:54:59] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:54:59] Clip: If we weren't here, pain would not exist. We can't hear the five sounds of a that people in Scandinavia use, for instance.

Right, right. We can't see certain shades of red that Russians can see. Really? Yeah. And it's only when you have awareness of why you're doing what you're doing, that creates the possibility of doing it differently. Now, of course, if you don't have eyes, you can't choose to see, you still have to function in a world that has gravity, right?

That has light. But we have more freedom than we think we do. We have more agency than we think we do. So the world is always changing and complexifying, and we need to complexify with it, and we never could if we always just see it as it really is.

[00:55:43] Jordan Harbinger: For more about how our brains produce vision and the constructs our brain makes to build our world.

Check out episode 1 77 with Bo Lotto here on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Thank y'all so much for listening. Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to me, jordan@jordanharbinger.com. Show notes on the website as well. Advertisers deals, discounts, and ways to support this show all at Jordan harbinger.com/deals.

I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with Podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird and Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and opinions are our own, and I am a lawyer, but I am not your lawyer.

So do your own research before implementing anything you hear on this show. Also, we may get a few things wrong here and there. We always do, especially on Skeptical Sunday. If you think we really dropped the ball on something, do let us know. We're usually really receptive to that, and that makes the show better.

Y'all know how to reach me, jordan@jordanharbinger.com. Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love. If you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism and knowledge that we doled out today. Maybe you know, a wine lover who would find this all interesting.

I found this fascinating. I'm not even into wine, so I think somebody who likes wine. Would actually really like this episode. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.