Cruel Wine Reviews

I was at a blind wine dinner several years ago with a producer (who must go unnamed) who joined the usual monthly group of oenophiles, bringing one of his wines as part of a syrah-themed evening.

Please note that in the wine world, a brown paper bag nurtures zero brand fealty. If you bring something you’ve crafted and it maintains anonymity in the protective harbor of a beige cocoon, and ends up being outclassed or flawed, the condemnation level and vitriol tend to get ratcheted up by the dining participants, all of whom have contributed to the evening’s selections and hope their offerings are voted #1.

Sometimes even the person who produced it gets in on the critical assault and battery, unaware that they’re vociferously denouncing their own efforts with outrageous, blunt savagery. This wine in particular, while receiving no top score, certainly resembled #2, not in any numerical ranking, but instead condensing the aromatic olfactory panorama encountered as one drives on US Interstate 40 through Amarillo, past the stables, stockyards, and abattoirs marking that bovine-centric burg.

Coco Chanel, if she’d been at this dinner, would have chimed in with her own denunciation of such a malodorous red, and might’ve spritzed a little #5 around the table to minimize the zoologically oriented stench of this unseemly and clearly flawed syrah.

All of us actually inhabiting the table that night at a fine local café eventually faced the moment when the wine was unbagged and unmasked, and silence reigned as the offending winemaker backpedaled on the reason for the inglorious showing of his blatantly repulsive bottle.

As the dinner reached its end, we paid our check, gathered our jackets, our wine totes, and remaining senses of smell, and the group drifted off into the evening, hoping for a Santa Barbara breeze with a sweet floral accent to recalibrate our poor embattled shnozzes.

Any ensuing invitations to this particular winemaker were appropriately lost in the email ether throughout perpetuity, and in subsequent years, while encountering many a festering vinous atrocity nonetheless, whether brown-bagged or not, the memory of that night has hung with us, like the inimitable bouquet of a wildlife park’s menagerie.

Bob Wesley is the manager and wine buyer at Savoy Wines. www. savoywines.com

By Bob Wesley