Friday, December 07, 2007

Wine Stuff

Getting a bad bottle of wine is not a very common occurrence. Over the past couple decades plus of wine drinking, I have only had to return one bottle of wine in a restaurant, and a couple to package stores. During the summer, I will get a couple of bottles of red wine that have been "touched" by the heat, but they are still drinkable. I generally don't buy any more wine from package stores that have allowed bottles to be damaged by heat, so that is not often a problem.

Tonight's dinner included 2" thick tenderloin medallions wrapped in bacon. I chose a South African wine, Kanonkop Kadette (2004). This is a new wine to me and looked interesting. It is a blend of four grapes; Pinotage, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Cabernet Franc. I was really looking forward to trying this South African blend and figured it would do well with the bacon and beef.

It was not to be. When I removed the foil I found that the cork was protruding from the top of the bottle by about 1/32" or so, not a good sign. Pulled the cork and it did not look like a bad cork, but smelled a bit vinegary. When I poured a glass, I knew for sure, a bad bottle. The wine was cloudy. I should of just left it at that, I knew it was bad, but I had to taste it. Bleech, it was horrible. You want to know what is worse? Being the optimist, I let it breath for a bit and then swirled it around in the glass for a couple of minutes just to make sure it had every opportunity to be drinkable and took another taste. That one almost did me in. V was laughing as I was shuddering and then trying to rinse my mouth out. Water did not work so I had to open one of my everyday go to wines, a wine that could be counted upon to make things right, a 2002 Barossa wine, "The Holy Trinity" (2002). This is a very drinkable wine that can be enjoyed by itself or with a wide variety of dishes. Dinner was saved.

Moral of the story, if you know you should not taste something, don't.

3 comments:

Justin Buist said...

Moral of the story, if you know you should not taste something, don't.

Heh, true.

One of the things I've learned in my years hanging around breweries is that brewers will put anything in their mouths. They're like dogs in that way. Dogs explore the world with their nose, brewers do it with their mouths.

They'll eat raw hops (done that myself) and grain, or drink the wort before it's even started fermenting. They'll suck a sampler out of a vat as it ferments and test it. If something has gone horribly wrong they'll announce to the other beer guys that the batch is bad... and then everybody will taste it trying to figure out what went wrong.

I bet if you found a dead rat in a vat of beer the brewer on staff would still taste the stuff just to see what it did to the flavor.

Anonymous said...

Disappointing, but thanks for the heads-up. I have been having good luck with the Australian reds recently.

Anonymous said...

Just FYI, the Llano Winery in Lubbock has quite a few very good white and red wine choices. Particularly, if you like white, their Johannesburg Reisling is a personal fav.