Bad bottle? Getting to the root of the problem
For all of you who are wondering why a favourite wine doesn’t always deliver
I received an email recently asking how the same wine, from the same vintage, can taste different. “I normally love this wine,” the reader wrote, “but this time I really didn’t like it. And it wasn’t corked because it’s a screw cap.”
Well, that would have been my first question. But after a back and forth with a few emails, we finally might have figured it out. And while I will never be sure, I think the problem was not the wine, but when the reader was drinking. I’ll get to that a bit later on.
This was not the first time that I have encountered this question. So, for all of you who are wondering why a favourite wine doesn’t always deliver, here are a few things to check.
The reader who sent the email did mention that the wine was from the same vintage, but I know many people don’t even check. This is one of the first things I look for when I pick up a bottle of wine. While many “commodity,” or large production, wines are made in a way to try to eliminate as much as possible the differences that a growing season can have on grape quality, there will almost always be slight variations. More artisanal wines are sometimes very different from one year to the next; in fact, that is what keeps me interested in wine.
Aside from the very rare, catastrophic vintage, I love seeing how winemakers interpret the vagaries of each and every growing season. We have a saying in the wine industry that there are no bad vintages, simply bad grape growers and winemakers. In my experience, good winemakers will always make interesting wine.
THE BAD BOTTLE
It happens. Even if your wine is not closed with a cork, there can still be problems with the actual bottling. This is becoming more and more rare. There is cork taint, which means that your wine smells of used athletic socks that have been hanging around a damp basement for a month. But I am finding that cork taint is becoming less and less a problem.
I have had screw cap wines and those with synthetic corks that have been poorly sealed. The resulting problem is usually what we call oxidation, and your wine will either taste slightly nutty, or will feel “flat.” But again, this is a pretty rare occurrence.
TEMPERATURE
I feel a bit like a broken record here, but this is my pet peeve. I’m fanatical about service temperature. For me, a basic of wine service is temperature, temperature, temperature. Just recently I was at a very good restaurant for a tasting and the red wines were served way too warm.
It was too late to dunk the bottles in an ice bucket so I asked the waiter for a bowl of ice cubes. Both the waiter and the person who was giving the tasting looked somewhat shocked as I put a single ice cube in my wine, stirred it for a few seconds, and then removed it. But those few seconds were enough to bring the wine down the 5 or 6 degrees necessary to make it a much better wine. It’s not ideal, but I had no choice.
A few degrees can make all the difference, so if you are disappointed with the wine in the glass, make sure you are serving your reds at a maximum of 18C, or a minimum 8C for whites.
OTHER CONTEXTS THAT CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE
How you drink a wine is in many ways more important than what you drink, and changing the context, like service temperature, can alter your perception of a wine’s quality.
I have served the same wine in two different glasses, one from a bottle opened a day earlier and one uncorked minutes before serving. The results are consistent: change a single parameter and you can change a wine.
Last year, I was at a bistro in Paris that is known for its eclectic wine list. We ordered a bottle of Champagne to start the evening. Much to our surprise, the bubbly was served in a carafe, and we drank from large bowled glasses. There was not a Champagne flute in sight. By decanting the wine and serving it in a larger glass, the Champagne became much more aromatic, though the bubbles dissipated more quickly and were less vibrant.
There are days when it doesn’t matter what bottle I open. I can find a redeeming quality in the most banal and bland wine. Other days when I taste wines, I wish I were a beer critic. I would love to blame it on the wine, but I know that there is more to it than that. After doing this for years now, I know that how I feel personally, or the environment, will affect my appreciation.
Once, within a two-week period, I served the same wine, with the same meal, on two different occasions. The only obvious variable was the company. I remember I was struck by how different the pairings were. The time with my friends, it was remarkable, as if the wine had been made for the dish. In the more business environment of the second meal, the pairing fell flat.
So, back to my email and the dismayed reader. It turns out he is quite an attentive drinker and has become a stickler for such things as serving wines at the right temperature. After going through my huge checklist, I asked him what day and time he drank his wine. It turns out it was a root day!
Winemakers who practise biodynamics, an approach to agriculture that borrows elements from both astrology and homoeopathy, follow a calendar that is based on lunar cycles. Each day, or even parts of a day, are broken down in terms of fruit, leaf, flower or root. They believe that wines will taste best on “fruit” days. Root days are the worst and supposedly have a negative effect on a wine.
I had some fun this summer testing this “root day” problem. OK, for the skeptics out there, this is anecdotal, but I tasted four different bottles of the same wine during these four biodynamic cycles. I tried to keep all other parameters equal — same glass, same service temperature and time of day, etc. And while I didn’t see any noticeable differences between fruit, flower and leaf, the root day wine tasting was the least impressive.
As if wine tasting isn’t tough enough — now you have to pay attention to when you drink it!
After going through my huge checklist, I asked him what day and time he drank he drank his wine. It turns out it was a root day!