As a winery owner, I absolutely want you to get in touch with me. The purpose in selling you my wine is so that you can enjoy it! If it is just not your style, or not worth the money to you, that is a different subject. But if it is off: anything from no aroma (flat)to downright corked, I want to know about it and make it right for you!
There was someone on the CT forum who said he didn’t get what all the noise was about with the 2009 Black Cat. Then he gave the 2008 a WOW - 93 points. My guess is he had an unrepresentative bottle of the 2009. Without a real names basis over there, no possible way for me to tell from here who it is.
Actually he said either it’s not his style or it needs a decant. He has '08 & '09. Not sure how big your mailing list is but he’s from Illinois. Don’t recognize the screen name.
Depends on the cost of the wine, and how much I feel invested in the wine maker. While flawed wine is annoying, it doesn’t make economic sense to spend the time trying to seek a replacement unless the price of the bottle is pretty high. If it is a wine you like and follow, however, the cost of the bottle is irrelevant, as what you are doing is help the wine maker. For everything else there is mastercard.
I reported to a string of flaws to a winery a few weeks ago. I’d had three tainted bottles from the same case and noticed recent consistent notes on CT. I was contacted by the winemaker who was very professional and apologetic, offering to replace the bottles or provide a refund.
I used to report and now no longer do so due to a very annoying interaction I had with a winemaker 2 years ago. The failure rate with most CA wineries is only 1-2% anyway so it’s a drop in the bucket compared to other expenses.
Btw I’ve never known a winery to replace bretty bottles and only one winery has replaced a wine with fizz and VA (Linne Calodo way back when and their wines are now better than ever). But wineries generally do replace or refund for corked wines.
In my opinion, a flawed bottle is a datapoint that wineries need to be aware of. They can use it in a variety of ways.
Suppose they moved to a new supplier of corks, and suddenly have a higher rate of corked bottles. This generally isn’t something the winery would bring to the customers attention. By providing feedback, it helps them get their customers the best product they can.
What the winery does with the information is their business.
And BTW, most reasonable wineries want to rid that bad experience and provide a replacement bottle if possible.
I’ve found that most wineries actually want to sample the bottle involved, particularly if it’s not corked. Sometimes this really isn’t feasible, but I would say, if you are going to contact the winery, don’t dump the bottle out. Partially they want to do this to find out if the bottle really is bad (not really for refunding reasons, but for their own purposes), but also obviously for quality control purposes if there is actually a problem.
Is there something they can with the wine after it’s been open for two weeks or longer? (Two weeks being an estimate of the time it takes to contact the winery, have them issue a UPS pickup, have it picked up, 5 days back to the shipper, and another couple days fromshipper to winery.). Not sure I would want to try it then, and wouldn’t most wines be bad by then, especially since it has been opened?
Also, I did have a corked Cali. chardonnay this past December. I contacted the winery and a replacement is coming with my normal list shipment.
they could tell TCA or not, but not much else other than inpecting bottle and cork. Mostly I was thinking regional wineries and folks who might happen to live nearby, or wineries with trusted out of area employees.
Wineries like to see bottles because they are very often tagged with info that allows for traceability. Many wineries, for instance, will mark bottles with the exact time and date of bottling. Since bottling runs of a specific wine can stretch out for several days to a week or more, knowing if claims are spread randomly throughout the run or clustered on a certain day can tell a lot about the nature of the problem.
Too, even tasting wines open for days can often yield clues as to root cause.
Finally, asking for the customer to return the unconsumed wine is a quick and dirty way to find out if the consumer really found the wine objectionable. You’d be surprised how often people respond to a request to return the bottle with a “Oh, but I drank it”.
So, yes, contact the winery if you have a complaint. But do so promptly, and keep the bottle on hand in case they want you to send it back.