THE WORST WINE I EVER TASTED.

 

Wine is a very variable commodity which, while generally still being safe to consume *can vary drastically in flavour profile, taste, quality and drinkability.

* This doesn't mean that all wine is safe however as people have been made ill, blinded and died from wine that has been 'doctored' by greedy manufacturers hoping to increase the value by adding illegal substances. I have written on this before. See: HERE , HERE and HERE .

Sometimes, naive and parsimonious wine drinkers purchase and consume 'cleanskin' wines in the belief that the lack of a label means that they are saving money and that the wine in the bottle is just as good as the stiff that the winemaker actually bothers to put a label on.

These people deserve a dose of diethylene glycol.

I'm not going to talk about the 'doctored' wines in this post, nor will I (shudder) mention the occasional wine that I've been offered by Richard or those that Robert buys from the bargain bin at his local Pak 'n' Save but I will try to remember some of the worst wines that I've had the misfortune to drink.

Early days.

In the early 1970s I started my wine 'career'  .......

...... at Murray Roberts Wines and Spirits as a part-time job while at university. This set me off on a lifetime of working with and appreciating wine. I was able to drink, buy and nick many of the world's finest wines which opened my eyes to the subtleties and intricacies of tastes and to the exciting history behind the labels.

Not all wines from supposedly top wine producing countries were good  though and  a fair bit of study and trial and error was required. Portugal for example is rightly renowned for port but some of the 'table' wine was dire like the disgusting Dao red and white and the unripe Vinho Verde (the name gave it away).

New Zealand wine s in the 1970s were generally a bad lot. They were produced from unsuitable grapes - Baco 1A, Baco 22A, Palomino, Albany Surprise, Chasselas, and other 'industrial' grade rubbish. These were sugared, sulphured and watered to the point of undrinkability which, I guess, did put them on a par with the vile German Liebfraumilch wines and the unpronounceable stuff that came from Hungary. Yugoslavia, Greece and, at the time, Australia. It wasn't until the, now, unfashionable and unfavoured Muller Thurgau came on the scene and later the boring Sauvignon Blanc that New Zealand wines were considered to be drinkable.

Some memorable monstrosities were McWilliams Bakano (although the white Cresta Dore was acceptable),  Corbans Velluto Rosso, McWilliams Marque Vue and anything labelled Chablis, Moselle, 'Riesling', Claret or Burgundy.

1980s and 1990s

I advanced my 'career' from 1980 into retail management, marketing and international sales and was fortunate to not only drink some of the best wines (and beers and spirits) in the world but to visit the wineries (distilleries and breweries) and taste with the owners, winemakers and cellar-masters. The taste of the best of these is still in my memory and provided a benchmark against which to measure other wines that I competitively and professionally tasted, marketed, reported on and made production and importing and purchasing decisions for.

There were some dogs though.

TCA ( 2,4,6-trichloroanisole), is the chemical that taints wine, usually via the cork that has sealed it to cause musty aromas and flavours in wines. The compound forms through the interaction of plant phenols, chlorine and mould. It most frequently occurs in natural corks (TCA can even form on tree bark) and is transferred to the wine in bottle--which is why wines with these off-aromas are often called "corky." But the taint can originate elsewhere in wineries, where damp surfaces and chlorine-based cleaning products are commonplace; barrels, wooden pallets, wood beams and cardboard cases are all sources of phenols. If TCA goes undiscovered, it can spread and eventually taint the wines. I've experienced many 'corked' wines from the most simple and cheapest right through to the most celebrated and expensive. Once tasted a 'corked' wine is memorable. It's not TCA that I want to mention as among the worst wines I've tried though.

Brettanomyces, also known as Brett, is a yeast that imparts plastic or animal aromas, such as sticking plasters, smoke or leather to wine. Brett causes spoilage via the production of volatile phenol compounds. Most people are offended by the unpleasantness of Brett characters  in wine but quite a few nutters (probably Catholics) enjoy them and do not consider low levels of Brett in wine a fault. It was the case (more rare now) that European wineries, especially French, were rather dirty and unsophisticated production facilities. The 'tradition' was more important than modern food manufacturing standards and, as a consequence winery faults (Brett, TCA, Volatile Acidity (VA) and a host of others) were tolerated and actively encouraged as they were seen to be part of the mysterious 'cellar style' and 'terroir' even.

When travelling with a colleague through France (we drove from Rheims in the North down to Bordeaux in the South West) we did lots of side trips to smaller regions and stayed in some quaint and lovely towns and villages. We experienced stunning wines in the Loire region, Burgundy, Rhone and the South West enjoying tasting and talking with the owners. One particular wine and producer near Montpellier was so bad we had to beat a hasty retreat. The beaming proprietor poured us tastes of the most vile poison and then proudly marched us off to view where he'd concocted the rubbish. The wine was redolent of Brett and VA and, if it had come out of a bottle with a cork and not from a barrel would probably have been 'corked' as well. The winery and cellars stank of damp, mould and Brett. It was like walking down a corridor in an old and dirty hospital. We really could sense the mould and brettanomyces yeast spores clinging to our clothing and trying to enter our skin. We mumbled the need to get away to an urgent appointment and took off leaving the now not beaming proprietor in his cave. We didn't buy any wine there.

Later years

I did say that I worked for a long time in the wine industry - more than 40 years in fact so have drunk some awful wines but another memorable one was a very expensive Californian Cabernet Sauvignon which was so high in alcohol it was out of balance. This is what I said about it back in 2008:

Back in the 1990s and the early 2000s American wine producers got all excited when some Californian cabernet sauvignons beat some top French Bordeaux wines in a blind tasting. This sort of meaningless competition happens all the time with New Zealand producers crowing when a New Zealand wine beats a top French one, when German pinot noirs get higher points than a Burgundy or an Australian shiraz score better than top Rhone syrahs. After that the Americans pushed their prices up to ridiculous levels and started overdoing it with inputs - low cropping and concentrated sugars, too much new oak etc - to the point where the wines, particularly the cabernet sauvignons were just too big - like pan galactic gargle blasters. This isn't surprising really as Americans almost always go over the top in things.