Stale wine: the trouble with closeouts and lesser wines

Saturday, May 16, 2009

So, I went to the wine store the other day just for a quick fill up before the holiday weekend. On the shelf to my right I was a Shiraz for the low, low price of two dollars. Yes, that’s right, just two dollars. As it turns out, this wine was on closeout, and without looking at the year on the bottle, I said what the hell.

Well, it was one of the worst decisions of my life. The wine is a 2001 Kelly’s Promise Shiraz from South Eastern Australia and the only thing that I could think of when I tried it was burnt roadkill. This was the most awful thing that I have ever tasted; it ranked up there with the flavor of bile.

Truthfully, a quality red wine should be able to easily keep for years, but some of these newer productions might only be good for four to five years. White wines, on the flipside, are usually consumed in two years of release, but there are some exceptions to the rule. And again, this wine should have been given to our enemies years ago as biological warfare.

Sometimes the reality is that there is nothing such as a bargain, and in this case, or in the case of this wine, this was definitely getting screwed for trying to get the best bargain. This, in turn has soured me on closeout wines, which is sad, because there might be some good bargains out there, but I think that in reality, there are more flops than winners.