Are "Off Wine Days" a Real Thing? If so, why?

Yesterday we had our annual New Year’s Day treat of bagels, smoked salmon and champagne. We were joined by dear friends, who generously contributed the excellent Scottish salmon and also brought a surprise caviar tasting! The food was all excellent, and we pulled a number of great champagnes to ring in the new year and give us a send off into Dry January. Only problem was that nothing, not ONE bottle, showed as we’d hoped.

Francis Boulard Les Murgiers - 2007 base, some of these have been a little tired lately, but this one was flat and uninteresting after the first few sips. Poured out.

2000 Diebolt-Vallois Fleur de Passion - I was sure it was corked, others disagreed, no one thought it was great. Did not finish.

2002 Diebolt Fleur de Passion - better, but I still wondered about cork and nothing about it was what it has been in the past. Barely finished later in the day.

1996 Deutz Cuvee William Deutz rose - the best bottle of the day and really good with the salmon, but somehow still lacking.

Having been disappointed now several times we pulled tried and trues to continue:

Egly-Ouriet rose - always good, but lacking depth on this day.

Egly-Ouriest VP - I’m used to this being a stunning bottle, broad and elegant at the same time. This was good, but nothing like what I’m used to.

So what was going on? And before someone asks - no, we don’t have COVID. And it wasn’t a pairing problem, since most of the bottles were tasted before or apart from the food. Four seasoned champagne lovers and we were all in agreement that nothing was really “on.” Oh wait - actually, the bottle of Domaine De Boingneres eau de vie de Folle Blanches we paired with the caviar was rock star.

Could it have been barometric pressure? The pressure was pretty average yesterday (I checked), but it was unseasonably warm, as it is today, predicted to drop a lot tomorrow. I’ve heard pressure can affect wine - how? High, low, changes?

Could it have been a root day, or whatever the biodynamic folks consider unpropitious for wine?

Something else?

Even more so, did anyone else have a bad wine day yesterday in particular?

I know that, over the years, I’ve had other days like this, when nothing seems to be working. Sometimes I can say it’s probably just my palate that day. Yesterday, though, we were all experiencing the same disappointments. None of us had been up late the night before, none of us were hungover or sick. If it wasn’t just me, I wonder what it was…

Good questions.

Where I am, up the Hudson Valley, we’ve had a string of gloomy, foggy, drizzly days. That and the prospect of another stretch of isolation certainly makes it harder to enjoy things in general. Perhaps that was a factor.

Maybe, but everything the day before - also gloomy and rainy - was great. And the food tasted terrific, the eau de vie and the whisky later on were great, and we were all having a rocking good time. So hard to say it was because all four of us felt depressed.

Could very well be simple back luck and coincidence. But when it’s that many bottles, one begins to wonder if something else might be on.

Just a thought.

And counter-evident to my postulation: I had dinner with friends last night and the food was tasty and the everyday wines – a Cremant de Bourgogne, a Felsina Chianti and a dry sylvaner-riesling – were all pleasurable for what they were.

Just logically: I think we have all experienced bottle variation. It just seems like you had that negatively 5-times at once. Just like rolling dice. It’s unlikely to come up snake up five times in a row, but it will eventually happen. Of course, that is particularly disappointing when it happens on a special day. I would attribute this to a string of bad bottle variation rather than weather, but maybe others have more experience.

Ah who knows. I tend to not care for aged Champagne, so they would feel ‘tired’ to me too. But, could be the Northeastern winter, the two years of pandemic living, the turning of the clock a notch closer to midnight…who really knows?

Not midnight (I was in bed by 9 on NYE) - this was New Year’s Day brunch, and I love aged champagne (the oldest bottle showed the best of the day!) But anyway…

No one “knows,” and of course it could be entirely coincidence. But I was kinda hoping people might have some thoughts beyond “bummer.”

I have a friend who goes by flower days, though I think that’s nonsense. To me, my mood does affect my enjoyment of the wines. I recall being at a dinner this year with some objectively excellent wines that I didn’t enjoy nearly as much as I should have because a few people (one of whom I’ve intentionally not seen since) made it a somewhat unpleasant evening.

Wine can be like that. While I don’t go through the vast quantities that you and your husband do, there are spells when nearly everything I open feels somehow ‘off’, nothing wrong with the wine, but just not what it should be. Of course, since they come from the cellar and tend to be aged, there could be a whole host of reasons why the bottles are not up to snuff, and perhaps they were caught at a bad moment, but I really don’t know.

No real explanation, but I can say that if I have a bottle that is disappointing/not what it should be, then subsequent wines the same day will often get a carry-over effect. It takes something either completely different, or something totally off the charts great to break the palate malaise.

That’s just me. I have had it happen at home with stuff pulled from the cellar as well as at blind tastings, where a poor first wine threw my palate for a loop the rest of the evening.

Those who follow the biodynamic calendar are convinced of this; everyone else - meh.

As others have said, barometric pressure levels, bottle variation, our mood, the setting, the weather, the food - all come into play.

All I know is that it’s not enjoyable when it happens.

Cheers.

This is exactly my thought. It’s going to happen once in a while.

I’ve long been suspicious about barometric pressure being involved. Not the actual pressure, but changes, rates of change, and directions of change. Much in the same way as one, as one gets older (ahem), can predict that a weather change is coming without even looking at the weather report. Of course, when I look at the barometer, and follow it, I can’t really discern anything in an observational way. And so far, I’ve been too lazy to try to track anything in this regard more systematically, either in terms of how wines show, or in terms of how my joints feel…

I used to work in a restaurant and there were definitely days when nothing I tasted tasted good, lots of meh.

Don’t know what it was.

Had a similar experience just the other day, when a couple of out of town wino friends stopped by for lunch. I opened a flight of three Oregon chardonnays, I had opened two of the bottlings within the month and they had showed well. None of them showed well until the next day, they just seemed very muted. The wines were the 2017 Twill Willamette Valley, 2018 Martin Woods Willamette Valley, 2019 Championship Bottle Gravity’s Pull. The remains of all 3 bottles showed well the next day.

Then I opened the 2019 Goodfellow Whistling Ridge pinot, and it, too, was quite muted in comparison to how it had shown at the winery 5-6 weeks before. But I don’t know how long that bottle may have been opened before tasting, and the wine did open more as time went on.

The final bottle was Kelley Fox’s NV Vermouth, and that was stunning from the first pour; both friends have since purchased some.

31st & 1st were fruit days, moving into root around 6pm on the 1st, so for those that do believe in how wines react with the biodynamic calendar - it ain’t that, unless the bagels were for dinner.
Have certainly had bad tastings where wines did not show well overall on root or leaf days.

We largely live in an enviable paradise. Even then, some things are not perfect. Fine, by me.

Yesterday wasn’t a root day or any kind of day, but considered not good for wine. Having said that, if you had to wait for a fruit day or flower day for wine to taste good there wouldn’t be many good bottles.
I think we all have off days and also taste wine so often that you’re bound to have bad luck eventually where no wine satisfies. Seems like off bottles given one was good.

And we know that wine and food can taste bad in planes, where the air pressure is quite low. And this dreary weather has brought fairly low pressures. Here are Philly’s for the last few days:
https://w1.weather.gov/data/obhistory/KPHL.html

I use an app on 1/1 it showed a fruit day from midnight to 6AM EST. is your source the book?