I’ve just been writing up my experiences of the Wine Australia trade tasting I attended this morning; there were a few very good wines, lots and lots of boring and pedestrian offerings of general tedium and a notable number of wines so horrifically vile I wanted to cut my tongue off because it had been polluted by these shameful examples of filth.
This got me thinking about supposedly good, or even great, wines that when you finally get to try them you are not only disappointed but actively repelled by their awfulness. So I want to ask the question: What is the most woefully dire supposedly fine wine you have ever tasted?
If I may get the ball rolling. I hate, hate, hate Vega Sicilia Unico. I have some friends with large collections of various flash vintages of Vega and I always get them right when I am given them blind, but by all that is evil I hate the experience of tasting them; they just seem totally horrible to me. The thing I cannot get past with Vega is the staggeringly high volatile acidity levels, to me it just smells like the kind of stuff British people would put on their fish and chips. There were other things about Vega I didn’t like, but the VA problem was just too much: helped me guess them blind but didn’t help me drink any.
1996 La Mouline. Spoof city.
Caymus Conundrum. Deliberately hit all the notes from the white grapes that went into it, couldn’t help being reminded of the quote “a world of made, not of born”.
I can no longer drink 1990 Troplong Mondot. There are some appealing things about the wine, but the combination of richness and VA makes me ill. It might be worth mentioning that I’ve grown much more sensitive/allergic to VA over the last few years, so this might not hold for others.
Mine was something I was TOLD was wine, but was not - does that count?
In China visiting my workshop there, I was asked if I wanted beer. Since I do not like beer, I declined. They then asked if I liked white wine. ‘Sure! I’ll have some white wine!’ They brought out baijiu, which to them is ‘white wine’ - the most foul tasting nastiness in a bottle - ever.
1985 La Turque. In a blind tasting of Cote Rotie, I was sure someone had inserted a Parkerized St. Emillon in the tasting. Quite drinkable (so maybe not quite a match here), but so out of type, so unrecognizable as Cotie Rotie or even Syrah.
I know I’m in the minority here but every vintage of Pegau’s Cuvee de Capo that I’ve tasted has been undrinkable to me.
I haven’t had one in about three years, but unless there has been a tremendous transformation with that additional bottle age I’m sure I would still feel the same way.