People have sometimes (often, maybe) misinterpreted The Wine Trials (and The Wine Trials 2010) as making the claim that no expensive wines are worth the money, or that cheap wine is generally “better” than expensive wine. In fact, I make neither one of those claims in the book.

Rather, my basic points are these:

(1) Evidence has shown that most everyday wine drinkers (not wine professionals) don’t prefer more expensive wines to cheaper wines in blind tastings. This is separate from the question of whether the properties of expensive wines are aesthetically superior in the minds of experts.

(2) Many (but certainly not all) expensive wines, such as the luxury brands from LVMH—which are advertised much like the group’s TAG Heuer watches, De Beers diamonds, Guerlain perfume, or Louis Vuitton handbags—are overpriced because such a large portion of their cost base is spent on marketing. This doesn’t just go for superpremium wines like LVMH’s Château d’Yquem, Krug, and Dom Pérignon; it also goes for brands like Cloudy Bay, a straightforward New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc whose price—without any apparent change in the production method—rose from about $15 per bottle to about $30 per bottle after LVMH acquired the brand in 2003 and began marketing Cloudy Bay as a luxury product.  To me, when the consumer dollar is going more toward advertising than toward materials or production, it’s a paradigm case of overpricing. It bothers me that the mainstream wine media doesn’t take brands to task for this.

(3) There are also wines that are overpriced for reasons other than marketing—reasons like an irrational premium Bordeaux bubble that’s being inflated by indiscriminate demand from rich, unsophisticated consumers in emerging markets like China and Russia. Even if Pétrus spends no money on marketing, $5,000 is an irrational price for a bottle, and this is a demand-side phenomenon.

(4) Then there are the producers who model themselves after Pétrus in an effort to capitalize on that same demand-side phenomenon. These producers make “high-end” wine (with the characteristics typically associated with the 95-and-higher-point wines in wine magazines, e.g. aging in new French oak, high alcohol, extreme concentration) and price it as such. Here, there aren’t necessarily the extreme marketing expenditures of LVMH; rather, there’s simply a price-signalling play: the hope that positioning the product at the top end of the market will speak for itself, and that consumers in search of a luxury good will buy into that notion. In this case, the consumer dollar isn’t paying for lots of advertising and marketing—it’s just sustaining unconscionably high profit margins for the producer.

What situations (2), (3), and (4) have in common is that the cost of production of each of these premium wines is virtually unrelated to the street price.

One might divide wine pricing theory into two rough schools of thought. There is the camp that believes wine should be priced from a supply-side/cost-plus perspective–you take the cost of production of the wine, you add reasonable costs and a modest profit for the producer, you factor in markups for distribution and retail, and you arrive at more or less what the wine should cost. The other camp believes that wine should be priced from a demand-side perspective–that a wine is worth whatever the market is willing to pay for it.

The reason I’m in the first camp, and not the second, is that I don’t subscribe to the neoclassical model of consumer rationality upon which the demand-side pricing theory is built, a counterfactual universe of stingily hypersensitive, quality-sniffing consumers. My sense is that, especially when it comes to hazy markets like wine, real human beings—within certain constraints—generally anchor themselves to market prices that are imposed upon them, and generally pay for things what they’re told those things are worth.

One attempt to justify superpremium wines with modest costs of production is an opportunity-cost-of-land argument—that wine in the Champagne appellation is so expensive that the opportunity cost of that land can justify higher prices. I’m unsympathetic to that argument, because real estate prices track market wine prices, so the price of land is not an independent factor.

So when are premium prices justified in my camp?

When the cost of production is high. The fact that Matthews and Briand mention 1er Cru Burgundy and German whites as examples of expensive wines worth the money suggests that they might be in my camp too, because these are particular examples of wine regions in which grapes are often harvested from small plots with very low yields. In the case of German TBA, for instance, the harvesting is often done on steeply terraced slopes that are extremely difficult to work. Ice wines and botrytized wines—the priciest of German whites—are indisputably more difficult and expensive to produce than almost any other type of wine.

In short, while spending $50 or $75 or even $100 on a good Sauternes, TBA, or top red Burgundy might not always make economic sense for the buyer—particularly if it’s a buyer without much experience in wine—it’s at least justifiable from a supply-side pricing perspective. The $150 you’ll pay for a bottle of Opus One or Krug, meanwhile—never mind the $5,000 you’ll pay for a bottle of 2005 Pétrus—has little to do with the cost of production.

The Italian Ministry of Agriculture has a recent history of operating at the curious intersection of neofascism and culinary purism. Zaia’s “zero-tolerance policy” on food fraud became famous with his 2008 bust-up of cheating Brunello di Monalcino producers, which was hailed as a victory for consumers. But in a less-reported crackdown the following year, Zaia, a member of the extreme-right-wing Lega Nord—the political party that has advocated the seccession of Northern Italy—also instituted, with Berlusconi’s backing, a policy banning new “ethnic” restaurants from opening in certain northern Italian cities, including Lucca and Milan. It was a move that the left-wing newspaper La Stampa called “culinary ethnic cleansing.” Reporting on the policy, the Times of London quoted Lucca city spokesman Massimo Di Grazia as saying that “French restaurants would be allowed”; he was “unsure, though, about Sicilian cuisine. It is influenced by Arab cooking.” Continued the Times: “Asked if he had ever eaten a kebab, Mr Zaia said: ‘No—and I defy anyone to prove the contrary. I prefer the dishes of my native Veneto. I even refuse to eat pineapple.’” This, from the country’s Minister of Agriculture.

Sometime in 2001 or 2002, I recall meeting, and discussing pure-ingredient fervence with, Giorgio Alemanno, who was Italy’s Minister of Agriculture at the time (this was two Ministers ago). The man talked about wine with great passion. And like Zaia, he was also an absolute right-wing zealot. As mayor of Rome, Alemanno was famous for praising Mussolini, expelling immigrants, and mowing down gypsy camps. “Upon his election,” reported the Telegraph at the time, Alemanno “was greeted by crowds of supporters, among them skinheads, who chanted ‘Duce! Duce!’ and raised their arms in a fascist salute.” It’s interesting to see Zaia, with Berlusconi’s backing, continuing in this tradition.

Certainly, when we buy mozzarella di bufala—or Brunello di Montalcino—we want to get the real thing. But if we’re enjoying what’s sold as Brunello or bufala, and feel like we’re getting our money’s worth, is the cow/Cab crime really so great?

I’ve previously discussed the thorny issue of the overzealous advocacy of a traditional recipe to the exclusion of all others. In response to Florence Fabricant’s claim, for instance, that “for any pasta all’amatriciana to be authentic, it must be made with guanciale (pork jowl),” not bacon or pancetta, I responded that “too many food writers construct a counterfactual Italy of culinary dogmatism, a population of finger-wagging guanciale zealots, a nation…harrumphing around about how the world is going to shit now that people are making amatriciana with pancetta…People and recipes aren’t anthropological tokens. They’re living things, the products of neural assemblies and proteins and chemicals bouncing across the ages. Narrow your gaze and squint your eyes too tightly in the search for authenticity, and you might miss that whole, beautiful landscape.”

Perhaps I should revise this statement: clearly, there are some finger-wagging guanciale zealots in Italy. They tend to gravitate, it seems, toward the Ministry of Agriculture. The question of whether “zero tolerance,” when it comes to food, is fascist, patronizing, noble—or all three—is certainly one for further contemplation.

And in the index, there are two successive entries for the winery: “Casa Lapostolle (Argentina), 14; Casa Lapostolle (Chile), 84.”

I figured this was just an editing/database mistake. It happens.

But things got stranger when I actually compared the reviews of the exact same wines in the two chapters. Aside from the words “black currant” and “black fruits,” their descriptions turned out to be totally different from each other. Here they are:

(From Argentina chapter) “Casa Lapostolle Merlot Cuvée Alexandre Apalta Vineyard. This Merlot has an attractive nose of black currant, blueberry, vanilla, and clove. The wine has good weight on the palate with layers of black fruits and a firm structure. Drink it during its first 6 years of life.”

(From Chile chapter) “Casa Lapostolle Merlot Apalta Vineyard Cuvée Alexandre. The Merlot Apalta Vineyard Cuvée Alexandra [sic] has aromas of cedar, spice box, black cherry, and black currant followed by a smooth-textured, ripe Merlot with ample savory black fruits, good depth, and a moderately long finish.”

Blueberry, vanilla, and clove have been replaced by cedar, spice box, and black cherry. Is there a wine-adjective dartboard in the house?

Moving on to the second double…

(From Argentina chapter) “Casa Lapostolle Cabernet Sauvignon Cuvée Alexandre Apalta Vineyard. Similarly styled but with the focus on black currants. It has enough structure to evolve for 2–3 years in the bottle and will drink well during its first 8 years of life.”

(From Chile chapter) “Casa Lapostolle Cabernet Sauvignon Apalta Vineyard Cuvée Alexandre. The Cabernet Sauvignon Apalta Vineyard Cuvée Alexandre has an expressive bouquet of smoke, pencil lead, spice box, black cherry, and black currant. The wine’s black fruit flavors linger into a medium-long finish.”

At least the black currants travel well.

Mistakes like this do happen. They don’t discredit the critics behind them; we all have slightly different experiences when we taste the same wine twice. And in this case, although the tasting notes are totally different, they’re not quite mutually exclusive, nor do they render dramatically divergent judgments/opinions about the wine (Parker ratings are not included in the under-$25 book). But I see it as yet another reminder of the arbitrariness of these fruit/spice adjectives, even in the hands of the world’s highest-end wine critics—which is particularly troubling when these opinions turn out to be so powerful in the marketplace.

This from the abstract:

“In markets for experience goods, publications exist to help consumers decide which products to purchase. However, in most cases these publications accept advertising from the very firms whose products they review, raising the possibility that they bias product reviews to favor advertisers…Although the average Wine Spectator ratings earned by advertisers and non-advertisers are similar, I find that advertisers earn just less than one point higher Wine Spectator ratings than non-advertisers when I use Wine Advocate ratings to adjust for differences in quality.”

These are wine ratings, not the restaurant Awards of Excellence, which I’ve written about in the past; the applicants for those awards are advertisers by definition (having submitted a $250 fee to be considered).

Karl Storchmann has also posted an interesting blog entry about Reuter’s paper on the AAWE website.

Reuter later retreats to a statement that he “finds little consistent evidence of bias…at worst, the tests for biased ratings suggest that Wine Spectator rates wines from advertisers almost one point higher than wines from non-advertisers. However, selective retastings can explain at most half of this bias and then only within the set of U.S. wines rated by both Wine Spectator and Wine Advocate. Given Wine Spectator’s claim that it rates wines blind, the remaining difference in ratings may simply reflect consistent differences in how the two publications rate quality, which leads to predictable differences in advertising. This interpretation is consistent with the fact that tests for biased awards provide no additional evidence of bias. Therefore, despite the fact that Wine Spectator is dependent on advertising revenue, the long-run value of producing credible reviews appears to minimize bias.”

I think this conclusion is softer than it need be. Even if selective retastings explain only half of the one-point bias, that’s still pretty damning; it means that if you advertise in Wine Spectator, you might well get the benefit of a selective retasting that gets you, on average, an additional half-point. Translation: advertising influences ratings.

With respect to the other half-point, if there are indeed “consistent differences in how the two publications rate quality, which leads to predictable differences in advertising,” then you should try leafing through a copy of Wine Spectator and seeing if you’d trust critics who favor the types of wines that tend to advertise in the magazine. I think the roster of advertisers speaks for itself.

The more important issue, perhaps—especially if you’re a small wine producer—is how difficult it is to get magazines like Wine Spectator to even review your wines at all. And this is where, anecdotally, bias might play an even larger role. “Unsolicited samples,” states the Wine Spectator website, “may not be tasted.” Advertise in the magazine, and that problem seems to go away.

And then there’s the matter of the selection of a wine (Columbia Crest Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve) from a Wine Spectator advertiser (Chateau Ste. Michelle) as this year’s Wine Spectator wine of the year.

Although proving bias in every such case is a complicated, difficult point, the obvious conclusion of all such research is the simplest:

We should be skeptical of criticism whose publication is financially supported by the producers of the products being criticized.

Wine critics should not accept advertisements from wineries.

Period.

Check out my posts there:

Monday, November 30: “Have you heard of the two best Chinese restaurants in Portland?”

Tuesday, December 1: “These, in my opinion, are the five best comfort-food dishes in Portland. Let the flame-wars begin.”

(Tuesday, December 1, 7:30pm: Fearless Critic Portland Restaurant Guide release event/Q&A/discussion/debate, Powell’s on Burnside. Thanks to all those who came and made the event a success.)

Wednesday, December 2: “Which trendy restaurants and bars are guilty of conduct unbecoming Portland, and which ones live up to the hype”

Thursday, December 3: “From soondae to seolleongtang, the hidden wonders of Beaverton”

Friday, December 4: Coming soon…

As she should.

But with “brine turkey” at #12 on Google Trends today, it’s clear that the turkey-brining craze has hit new levels this year. Is the Food Network driving this bus? Alton Brown (who comes up in the first page of hits) preaches it. Sara Moulton swears by it. Just like roasting your turkey with a wine-soaked piece of cheesecloth was last year, or basting your turkey with orange juice was a few years earlier, it seems as if every Thanksgiving seems to come out with a new line of tools, gadgets, and fool-proof plans for housewives all across America to jump all over like the fall fashion line so they don’t serve the notorious dry piece of poultry to their in-laws. This year, there was an entire section of my local grocery store dedicated to brining needles, brining bags, and other brining accessories.

Don’t get me wrong: brining works. (On why it works, I’m sure the Food Network is running Good Eats Turkey episodes left and right, but Serious Eats really nails it here.) But brining can’t save an overcooked bird. It also takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of space, and there are more important things to be worrying about before Thanksgiving Day (like making sure your fantasy football team is set for the shortened week).

In my case, brining the 28¼-pound turkey that I acquired from Andrea would have required, at the least: (1) a bathtub; (2) a time machine, to go back another day; and (3) cruelty to animals (it’s considered really bad form to brine a turkey while it’s still alive).

If you haven’t brined, don’t worry about it. Forget brining. Get rid of your brining guilt. Just don’t overcook the thing. The trends come and go, but in reality, your turkey is dry because it’s very lean meat, and more often than not, you, your mom, and your great aunt cook it too long, perhaps because you follow some misguided FDA directive, a recipe from cookbook from too long ago, or (wince) the directions on the turkey wrapper or supermarket pamphlet about minutes per pound.

So instead of buying another gadget that will inevitably sit in your kitchen drawer for the rest of eternity, I suggest buying a temperature-alarm thermometer that will let you know to pull the turkey at around 160 degrees Fahrenheit. Unlike whatever trend may hit next year, this kitchen tool will be your friend year after year. Or you could go the old-school route and separate the legs from the rest of the body and roast them separately, as the breast cooks a bit faster. Either way, you don’t need to be scouring the web for the next big answer when the answer is pretty simple—plus it makes gravy all the more viable.

Let’s just hope, for humor’s sake, that home sous-vide-ing is next year’s trend.

Housewives with immersion circulators fretting over sealing numbers?

Oh hell yes.

[Guest post by chef Justin Yu]

Among the binge drinkers who might have participated in the study would be anyone who routinely orders the tasting menus with wine pairings at Le Bernardin, Jean-Georges, Daniel, or Per Se, four of New York’s top restaurants. Each of these restaurants pairs its tasting menu with seven wines, according to John Brecher and Dorothy Gaiter’s excellent article last year on wine pairings.

If the federal government wanted to seek real ways of reducing traffic accidents, instead of vilifying people who enjoy multiple glasses of wine with dinner, it would take more of an urban-planning approach and subsidize programs like Denver’s Night Riders, which seems to have gone out of business. You would call the service like a taxi, and somebody would pick you up at a bar or restaurant, fold up his or her scooter, put it in your trunk, and drive you home in your own car.

It was the only overtly political phrase of an otherwise carefully apolitical speech—the only Obama talking point, perhaps. The thing is, politics as “joy and nobility” (carefully chosen words, really) isn’t just about bridging partisanship. That’s what Obama turned it into, because that’s Obama’s shtick. He wanted to say—and it’s a debatable point, really, if you consider McCarthy—that there was a time when reasonable policy proposals wouldn’t lead to comparisons with Hitler, a time when politicians were understood to be philosopher-kings, and above such garbage.

But politics as “joy and nobility”—the joy and nobility (amidst tragedy and suffering) that the Kennedys embodied—isn’t really about that at all. It’s more about being born into an aristocracy, and about the notion that when you’re not just elected but actually one of the Elect, it’s understood that you have sex and drink and party and get STDs from Mexican prostitutes—that you do all of the other things that common people do, only more so.

It’s understood that you’re conducting yourself in the way that a real human being might conduct him- or herself if he or she were born into your position: spending your free time sailing and boozing and getting laid. That’s both natural and aristocratic. Going on a stilted date to Blue Hill, a meal enjoyed in the intimate company of hundreds of photographers and washed down with only one alcoholic beverage? Not natural and not aristocratic.

That’s not a problem for Obama, because he’s perfect and mannerist and comes off like the kind of guy who doesn’t mind having just one drink. Even his imperfections, his cocaine use or whatever, are perfect because they taught him a lesson. That’s why it’s so strange that he’s been dubbed an elitist. He is the furthest thing from a nobleman. The nobility have sex and do drugs and crash cars and sail and have secret parties in their free time. Obama has scarcely spent a minute of his free time in the past decade not behaving in a certain way to please somebody else, not flawlessly emulating the personality traits of the upper-middle-class family-movie protagonist.

Ted Kennedy was a nobleman, and it was his nobility that set him free. If he was above the law for that reason, he was also above pandering for that reason, and it freed him to do real work in the Senate.

I watched Ted Kennedy’s funeral today with my parents in Massachusetts. “He might have been a murderer,” said my father, “and I voted for him in the 1980 presidential primary anyway.” So divine was his status in the Massachusetts of my childhood that there was nothing, not even manslaughter, that would prevent his reelection to the senate. We cried not for the loss of a friend—we had each met him only a few times, and briefly—but for the loss of someone whose face, whose mannerisms, whose handshake, whose accent, had made two totally different generations totally proud of our state in totally different ways.

The fact of not worrying about being reelected set Ted Kennedy free, and decades of civil rights legislation resulted from that carefree status, that noblesse-oblige freedom, the fact of a political future being indicative and not subjunctive. Ted Kennedy reminded us that if the perfect form of government wasn’t Camelot—as England knows, the divine right of kings can yield idiot child rulers, too—maybe it wasn’t modern capitalist democracy, either.

“We can still hear his voice bellowing through the Senate chamber,” said Obama, “face reddened, fist pounding the podium, a veritable force of nature.” He was of nature; he was natural; he did things that politicians can’t do anymore, except maybe Barney Frank, another member of Kennedy’s Massachusetts Congressional delegation, whose recent outburst at a town-hall meeting (“on what planet do you spend most of your time?”)—using language that was in everybody’s mind but is considered untoward for politicians these days—was a very un-modern moment, a moment that was about red-faced, fist-pounding Ted Kennedy, too.

Frank is another politician whose displays of raw humanity—like Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick—probably prevented him from rising further in the political world, yet whose colleagues probably respect him for it, in a way, respect him more than a lot of his more perfect colleagues.

It’s not that a politician today couldn’t transcend partisan divisions the way Ted Kennedy did. In that, Obama might be his equal. It’s that a politician today would no longer be able to survive Chappaquiddick. Politicians are no longer larger than life in that particular way. The forces of modern democracy, as perfected by the media, don’t allow it.

Ted Kennedy was a Democrat, but his rule was not democratic. It was aristocratic. And when we look at what’s gone wrong in American politics, the unfashionable truth might be that as the imperfect aristocrats have been replaced by the perfect politicians, the sorts of policies both unpopular and correct that might arise from a life’s work are being replaced by the sorts of policies both popular and incorrect that might arise from a term’s work.

I wonder if one of the reasons that America waxes so nostalgically about the Kennedys is that it occurs to us, on some level, that there are some benefits to the rule of a hereditary aristocracy; that elections, even conducted fairly and openly, create incentives we’re not quite comfortable with; that what we want, really, is something somewhere between this and Camelot; that maybe we’re a little bit less sold on democracy than we were in elementary school.

Many have written to corroborate my claim that used bikes are unusually expensive in Portland, while many others have disputed it, citing evidence of cheap bike-swap shops and some inexpensive bikes on Craigslist. On that point, it is important to note that I was measuring median prices, from a sample of 50 data points in each city, in order to offer a rudimentary hypothesis about trends in the market as a whole. To cite as a counter-example the mere fact that there are some cheap bikes for sale is to miss my more general observation of the relative medians and of the car-bike relationship in various cities.

This relationship, as supported by my extremely preliminary evidence, seems to suggest that in bike-friendly cities like Portland—cities in which a higher proportion of bikes are being used for commuting and transportation, and not just for leisure—bikes and cars are functioning more like substitute goods than they are in other cities; there may be, in such cities, an upward pressure on bike prices and a downward pressure on car prices. This is hardly a ground-breaking idea, but it’s a phenomenon that could merit further investigation as we consider ways of reducing emissions and gasoline consumption.

Last time I was in Copenhagen—one of Europe’s most bike-friendly cities—free one-speed public bikes were available to all; you’d insert a coin into the bike when you removed it from a rack, and you’d get your coin back when you redeposited the bike elsewhere in the city. (A while ago, I’d heard that the bikes were being manufactured by inmates in local prisons, although I don’t know if this is still the case.) This system has been employed in other cities, too, with some success. I’m sure that such free public bikes are of the very lowest quality, yet their existence creates a biking opportunity to those that cannot afford more expensive bikes. In that case, bikes are probably functioning less as a substitute for cars and more as a substitute for buses or other public transportation, so the benefit of that trade-off might be questioned. However, it is well established that—as far as health care costs borne by the public are concerned—it is in society’s best interest for its citizenry to get more exercise.

Perhaps the most interesting debate, though, has been over my use of the term “moral/aesthetic” to describe the social norm in Portland that pushes bike prices higher. That statement has been criticized by some commenters as (in Mr. Rose’s words) “skidding away from Economics 101,” a notion that’s fueled, presumably, by the idea that I’ve strayed from the assumption that in equilibrium, goods with higher market prices are understood to be of higher quality—and that it’s because of a better understanding of quality, not a moral choice, that people in Portland are spending more on better bikes.

First, it is important to note that I acknowledged that the Schwinn at Costco was a technically inferior bike—an acknowledgment that Mr. Rose noticed, but some others seemed not to. I wrote: “I don’t doubt that the Schwinn Midtown is a far inferior bike, from the point of view of a bike connoisseur, to whatever’s being sold used in Portland.”

But it’s also true, in another sense, that I have skidded away from Economics 101: it is becoming increasingly clear, from evidence in neuroscience and elsewhere, that more complicated our economy becomes, the less accurately that page of the introductory Economics textbook describes the average consumer’s ability to perceive the quality difference between the Schwinn and the Trek. In an experiment I conducted last year, about two-thirds of 62 consumers preferred an $11 Domaine Ste. Michelle Brut sparkling wine to a $150 bottle of Dom Perignon.

The more we look at the marketing strategies adopted by the modern manufacturers of luxury goods like wine, automobiles, and even five-bladed razors, the more we see the manipulation of social norms substituting for real product development, and the more we see companies’ cost bases shift toward advertising and away from R&D. The more we look at the information intermediaries on which we are supposed to rely for the unbiased expert judgment of those goods, the more we see pay-to-play “ratings” schemes like this and junketeering like this substituting for real judgment, propping up the prices of luxury goods whose counterfeits consumers often can’t distinguish from the originals.

The central element of the debate, then, might be boiled down to the question of how comfortable we are with the notion that market prices are so heavily influenced—not just at the top end, but at the bottom, too—by the minority of connoisseurs that probably can tell the difference between the $500 bike and the $1,000 bike than by the unsophisticated evaluations of everyday consumers that probably can’t. Freakonomics poster Andromeda writes:

[W]e’re not just talking about moral/aesthetic differences here (although some bikes *are* sexy). There are big differences in the feel, comfort, and speed of different bikes, and if you’re biking as much as people in Portland apparently are, it becomes seriously worth it in terms of quality of life to shell out extra money for a lighter frame (the big expense), more ergonomic and/or durable shifters, more energy-efficient pedals, a more comfortable saddle, et cetera. The price range of bikes I’m interested in considering has crept up as I’ve become more serious and knowledgeable about my biking, and yeah, part of that is drooling at the sexy, but most of it is knowing how I use my bike and what will maximize my happiness and efficiency given those uses. (And most of these are things that were *not* apparent to me before I’d put a few thousand miles on my bike.)

Sexy—or sex, at least—is something real. We can all tell the difference between when we’re having sex and when we’re not. It’s easy to detect sex appeal, our at least our individual versions of it. I’m confident that when it comes to brakes and pedals, the bike aficionados who commented on my article can tell the difference between a great used Trek and a crappy new Schwinn. But I’m also confident that there are a lot of people that can’t. That’s not to say that the fragile egos of the unsophisticated consumers don’t also figure into the social norm that we should buy better bikes, as they figure into the social norm that we should buy better wines. People are insecure about their preferences, and for the wine collectors that really can’t tell the difference in blind tastings, buying Château Lafite isn’t a mere act of self-delusion; it’s a social act, a way to fit in with the better bikers, a way to feel a part of it all—and evidence indicates that they get placebo pleasure from the act, too. But placebo pleasure seems to come from the relative price of a good, not its absolute price.

And there are also those that don’t fit that placebo profile. Mr. Rose writes that “[to] buy a shiny new $200 Schwinn over a used ride with solid bones and newer components is like buying a $60 Costco guitar expecting it to stay in tune and sound like a Martin.” But where does he get the idea that they’re expecting it to sound like a Martin? Where does he get the idea that they even know what a Martin is supposed to sound like?

If there is a place for the Costco guitar, isn’t there also a place for the $50 used bike, which seems to have all but vanished from Portland? The bike that you know isn’t in tune, but you don’t mind? The bike that someone who can barely afford a bike is buying not as an alternative to a more serious commuter bike, but as an alternative to nothing at all?

When I arrived in Portland last month, the first thing I wanted to do was buy a bike and get around the way the locals do. Since I wouldn’t be in town for too long, and it wasn’t clear that I’d be able to take the bike with me when I left, I wanted something extremely cheap.

There were bike shops on every other corner in Southeast Portland, the sort of Brooklyn-ish neighborhood where I was staying. I walked into what looked like the grungiest of them—a store that sold mostly used bikes. There was one employee, and he was heavily tattooed and seemed pretty cool. I completely leveled with him: I didn’t know anything about bikes, really; I could barely change a tire; I was only going to be in town for a little while, and I wondered if he had something cheap that I could use for puttering around town.

I know this is sort of quaint, but the last time I bought a bike, I think I spent $35, and it wasn’t hot. It was a road bike; it had 18 speeds, I think; it squeaked; and it served my needs (biking from my house to school every day) perfectly well. (The bike later died a peaceful death at Burning Man, but that was due to maltreatment, not poor quality.) I was looking for something like that.

The guy in the store asked me how much I wanted to spend.

I sort of stuttered my way and ultimately refused to answer the question because I was embarrassed to say something like “less than a hundred dollars,” for fear of coming off like Borat inspecting the Hummer before buying the ice-cream truck.

Yeah, the bike guy answered, he had something super-cheap for me, an old road bike that they’d fixed up. It wasn’t exactly my size, but it would do. It was a 1991 model, a Trek, I think; it was in good working condition, it had some newer components, and it came with a warranty. I could have it, he said, for $475.

So I went to another store. Same deal, more or less. There was one bike for $275, but it was a girl’s Raleigh from the 1960s with a wicker basket.

I started looking around the Web. At the down-to-earth-sounding Recyclery, another Portland used bike shop—and probably a great one—there are currently 59 used bikes on offer. But 34 of them cost more than $1,000, only eight are priced under $500, and there are none under $300. Even to rent a bike for one week from the Recyclery costs $175—more than I paid for my weekly rental car the previous time I was in Portland.

At Portland’s Costco, meanwhile—on the outskirts of the city—you can buy a brand-new Schwinn Midtown city bike with Shimano shifters for two hundred something dollars. But, according to the clerk there, those Schwinns aren’t moving.

I don’t doubt that the Schwinn Midtown is a far inferior bike, from the point of view of a bike connoisseur, to whatever’s being sold used in Portland. But you’ve got to love a city whose citizens put a set of moral/aesthetic principles—whether it’s riding a bike with proper disc brakes or refusing to support the Big Box stores—this far above their own financial well-being. And although every city has its bike aficionados, I think that in Portland, most people just buy rebuilt bikes locally because it feels right to do so, not because all these everyday bike riders can really tell the difference between Shimano TX-30 derailleurs and M-970 XTRs.

Still, what’s up with this bike micro-inflation? Why does there seem to be no market in Portland for used bikes that are actually cheap? Portland is otherwise a pretty cheap city. Beer is cheap. Used clothing is cheap. By major urban standards, housing is cheap, too, unless you compare it to the strip-mall-type cities. And certainly there are plenty of people in town who can’t afford to spend $475—never mind $1,000—on a bike.

I asked a few people in town about this, and got some general sense of agreement and common frustration: cheap bikes were impossible to find around here. The word on the street was that so many people were selling their cars (or taking their cars off the road) and using bikes to commute to work that there just weren’t enough bikes to go around. I also heard about a guy who was actually in the business of bicycle arbitrage—he would immediately snap up the few cheap bikes that would come up on Craigslist, fix them up a bit, put them back up on Craigslist, and make a good profit.

So I started looking at Craigslist—not just in Portland, but in other cities too, and not just at bike prices, but also at car and truck prices. I looked at a wide range of midsized-to-large cities that I thought represented a diversity of urban layouts, bike prevalence, wealth, and so on: Austin, Miami, New York City, Phoenix, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle.

From each of these cities I collected an extremely basic data set: the asking prices for the 50 most recent cars/trucks and bikes advertised. I excluded children’s bikes, frame-only bikes, and non-working bikes; I excluded non-working cars and cars that were being sold for parts. I also excluded obvious dealer spam from each. Then, I looked at the medians. Here’s what happened:

Median price, first 50 items for sale on Craigslist, 8pm PDT, 8/13/09

I didn’t run any serious statistical tests on the data set. This is because there are a few fundamental problems—the largest being that we’re not comparing apples to apples in terms of what’s being sold. That is, we don’t know if the same types of bikes are being sold for more in Seattle than in Phoenix, or if there are different types of bikes being sold in the two markets. The ads also change so frequently that replicating these results might be difficult; and 50 data points might be too small a sample.

Still, whether it’s over/underpricing or just selective selling, what struck me about this informal little analysis was that not one city fell out of line in the inverse order. Where cars were selling for the most, bikes were selling for the least; where cars were selling for the least, bikes were selling for the most; and so on, inversely, in between.

So, it looks like even though there are tons of bikes and bike shops in Portland, there still aren’t enough sellers in town to satisfy the strong demand in this biker’s paradise. Perhaps, in the long run, when enough arbitrageurs start shuffling bikes around the country (and enough arbitrageurs start underpricing each other to drive down their margins), more cheap used bikes will become available in the bike-friendly cities.

In the meantime, if you’re a Portland or Seattle resident thinking of selling your car and going green, maybe you should drive down to Phoenix and ride a bike back. You’d leverage both sides of the inverse relationship—plus there’d be some beautiful scenery along the way.