Why Does This Wine Suck?
This particular post was inspired by a question that was posed on Insta. The question was essentially why a Cava that was purchased by a friend at the winery and then gifted to her was flat and tasteless upon opening. (I’ll get to my theory below.) This got me thinking more broadly about the range of bad things that can cause your just-purchased bottle or that one you’ve been holding for a special occasion to disappoint, sometimes profoundly.
And by disappoint—or suck!—I don’t mean that you thought the bottle wasn’t that good or interesting. Let’s face it, there are oceans of properly made but thoroughly uninteresting wine bottled every year. This is because there hasn’t been a legitimate excuse for making flawed wine in decades Even lazy winemakers can manage to avoid hygiene and other technical issues during the winemaking process. It’s just not that difficult to churn out clean wine even at the very low end. And the cheaper the bottle on the shelf, the more likely that it will be uninteresting and somewhat generic. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, because many wine drinkers don’t value what sets apart interesting wine from the mundane. Or at least they’re not willing to pay extra for it. I don’t mean to imply that once you get to a certain price point, whether it’s $15 or $20 or whatever, the bottle will have a personality. I’ve had more than my share of generic-tasting bottles at multiples of any of these numbers.
No, this post concerns those times when there is clearly—or sometimes a little less so—flaws with your bottle, an example of which is the Cava.
While it might not qualify as the most common reason for your bottle sucking, a corked one is certainly the most offensive. Cork taint is caused by the interaction of the chemical compound TCA (no reason to spell it out) with fungi that naturally appear in wood—corks are, after all, from trees—and other compounds that are typically used by wineries during the production and bottling process.
If your bottle is corked (stating the obvious, if your bottle is actually a box or closed with something other than real cork, there is no risk of cork taint occurring, so if you don’t like the wine, you can’t blame it on that), the smell is unmistakeable: musty, damp, often referred to as “sweaty socks” or a locker room after a youth hockey game—this I can attest to out of experience! Sometimes, the initial whiff may not fully reveal the taint. With a little air, it will.
It’s said that roughly 3 percent of bottles are affected by it which means that if you’re a moderate wine drinker, you inevitably should be coming across it at least a handful of times a year. That said, I’m often surprised by how few of the people I have done tastings for say they have in fact experienced it. Which actually leads to the more pernicious and probably much more common occurrence, what the French say about a bottle that is “a little bit off,” meaning that it is corked but only modestly so.
The results of your bottle being just a bit tainted is that just a bit of taint makes the wine not resemble its true self, interesting or otherwise. And unless you’re familiar with the producer’s style or the region it’s from, you may very well not have any idea that you’re drinking an imposter. This matters because what if you decide that you don’t like that slightly off bottle and that in the future you won’t dabble in that region or that producer’s wines. I have heard many consumers say they don’t like Sancerre, for instance, because they tried it once and it did nothing for them. When I hear this, I usually ask what style of white they typically drink. If they say bright, citric, fresh or something along those lines, I’ll then suggest that the bottle they tried and didn’t like may have been off because these are all Sancerre traits. Making my guess even more plausible is when that consumer tells me something like there were no aromatics or the wine was listless. These are both markers of a bottle being a bit tainted but not enough to be obvious.
Another way a bottle can suck is if it gets cooked. Not literally, of course, but exposed to excessive heat because of improper storage. The most obvious sign of this is when there is oozing. If you notice wine making the capsule—that foil-like thing located at the business end of the bottle—moist or the neck sticky, it’s likely that this is what happened. In older bottles, this can also happen if the bottle is left upright for an extended period of time which can lead to the cork drying out and shrinking enough to lose the seal. In that case, and assuming heat wasn’t an issue, the wine might still be fine. Or it might have oxidized leading to premature senility. We may need oxygen to survive but air is the frenemy of wine: a little bit of exposure helps the gentle aging process which is good; too much too fast isn’t. You won’t know until you taste it.
The other primary tell indicating excess heat exposure can be found in a white’s color (not as much for reds). Assuming your white is not more than maybe 10 years old, if it looks darker than you would expect upon pouring it, it was probably exposed to too much heat at some point. However, all darkish whites are not evidence of this. Whites naturally darken with age. Low-end whites—and I don’t mean that dismissively—are not built to last. But many, many other whites are, and not just the usual suspects like White Burgundies, certain California Chards (like the one pictured above), Alsace’s range of offerings, among many others. These wines will develop a tawny hue after maybe 10 or 15 years or more. So, if your 2024 Domaine Whatever comes out looking like tea regardless of price point, take it back if you can. Reds that have been cooked will usually show prune-like aromatics. Cooked wines are fairly easy to identify when you come across them.
The last possible explanation for your wine sucking relates to poor storage as alluded to above, though not in the context of heat exposure. That prize bottle you have been saving for that certain someone shouldn’t be stored in your kitchen cabinet standing up. Honestly, the best storage practice for any wine, regardless of how noble or not in pedigree, should be in a cool, dark place on its side. Cool for obvious reasons. Dark because light and especially sun exposure just aren’t helpful. Horizontal storage lessens the chance that the cork will dry out and reduce oxidation. Wine bottles are not perfect vacuums so anything you do to lessen the occurrence of bad things is a good thing.
As for that sad bottle of Cava, my guess is that it was a bottling line anomaly. Given that the bottle was purchased at the winery’s tasting room, it seems unlikely that it was old enough to have faded as tasting room stock is always turned over quickly. There may have been an issue with how the cork was secured when bottled which may have led to its effervescence escaping prematurely. I can’t say for sure but it seems plausible. Oh, and just because there’s no pop when a sparkler is opened doesn’t automatically mean that the wine will be flat. It is a bit nerve wracking, however! If you get ample bubbles upon pouring it, you’re in the clear.