A different collection

A new case arrives. Same two grapes, same two flavours, nothing exotic.

But this merchant's wines are priced on a pattern the last chapter's wines did not have.

A cabernet is a heavy, rich wine. Plum suits it. The two together make something worth drinking, and the merchant charges for it. Apricot does not suit it at all: bright fruit on top of all that richness tastes wrong, and the merchant can barely give those bottles away.

A viognier is the opposite. Light and floral, and apricot belongs there. Plum is far too heavy for it and flattens the wine completely.

So the collection looks like the four bottles here. Read across either row and you find one expensive wine and one cheap one. Read down either column and the same thing happens. Only the diagonals agree with themselves.

Look at that shape once more, because it is the whole chapter.

Plum is not good or bad. It is good in a cabernet and bad in a viognier. Apricot is not good or bad either. It is good in a viognier and bad in a cabernet.

Nothing here is strange. Any cook knows this shape: chilli is wonderful in one dish and ruins another, and you cannot say what chilli is worth without asking what it is in.

The prices are simple. The expensive wines are 40 dollars. The cheap ones are 10.

One more simplification, and it is deliberate. In the last chapter a bottle could be half plummy, at 0.5, or carry the faintest touch of apricot, at 0.2. Here every bottle is one grape and one fruit, both at full strength. Nothing is at half, and nothing is faint.

We are doing this so that when the machine fails, there is nothing else to blame it on. Not faint signals, not awkward numbers, not bad luck. Every bottle differs from every other in exactly one way, which grape met which fruit, so that is the only thing its failure can be about. Varied strengths would fail here too, and they would just make the failure harder to watch.

Four kinds of bottle, two prices, and one rule behind them: the matched pairs are expensive, the mismatched ones are cheap. Plum belongs with cabernet, apricot belongs with viognier, and a bottle that gets it wrong is cheap.

Now hand it to the machine.