“Wine experts can’t resist making predictions. In 1990, wine lover Richard Nixon prophesied that the Chinese would someday match the French in the quality of their wines; this despite a Chinese carte des vins that featured sweet red wine and a grape called Cow’s Nipple. In the mid-1980s, a well-known New York wine merchant asserted that an $8 Cabernet from Chile was as good as Lafite, and auction prices would eventually reflect this little-known fact. Wine coolers too, as I recall, were expected to expose a vast new market to the pleasures of wine drinking. The coolers bombed, [a nice bottle of Lafite will set you back $250 or more], and Chilean cabernet is still mostly eight bucks.” — Stephen Tanzer, Forbes, May 6, 1996