I said enough about Showbizguru in my previous post. No need to go on about that gem any further than that. I just wanted to add things below as I went through the thread to, hopefully, clarify the loads of mis-information out there.

Wine is a living thing so the purpose of having you taste the wine when its presented to you is to check for flaws, not to see if you like the wine. Good wine service is there to guide you into making a good choice, but if the wine is not to your liking, they don’t necessarily have to take it back. Some places will, however. If the wine is good, meaning not tainted, they can sell it off by the glass.

So, to answer the op’s questions, if the wine is flawed, then yes, a restaurant or retailer should take it back. They can get refunded by the vendor who sold it to them. If you simply do not like the wine, then no, it is not acceptable to send it back. Another question the op asked later was about pouring a small taste vs. filling the glass. A small taste allows you to swirl the wine around a bit to get some oxygen into it to make a good assessment of the condition of the wine. A larger pour would make it difficult for one to swirl without getting wine everywhere.

There is no such thing as “modern cork being plastic”. There are corks, compressed cork enclosures, synthetic or plastic enclosures and screw caps. Corked wine refers to a wine that has been contaminated with TCA via the enclosure or through contamination of another container where it was stored at the winery prior to bottling. It’s a bacteria that gets into the cork but there can be a number of different sources. I have recently had carrots and apples that have been “corked”.

http://www.cellarnotes.net/corked_wine.htm

Other sources of flawed wines can be things like oxidation and heat damage. Synthetic corks can taint wine by imparting it with chemical flavors. Volatile acidity can make a wine smell like acetone. A secondary fermentation can occur and that becomes obvious once the wine is poured and it has bubbles, with the exception of sparkling wines, where you want bubbles.

People have varying degrees of sensitivity to cork taint and a corked wine may have barely perceptible degrees of TCA when first opened will develop into a full blown, stinky wine with exposure to oxygen.

Both expensive and inexpensive wines can be corked, and even the best cellar practices cannot prevent TCA from contaminating the environment. It happens. The argument for Stelvin enclosures, or screwcaps, grows stronger and stronger but screwcap wines can also be tainted, hence the reason they continue to pour a taste when the wine is presented.

The “taste” of wine is purely subjective and everyone has a different palate. As a wine professional, I never want to lead a consumer by giving them my opinions on what I am tasting, I want them to decide for themselves whether or not they like it. Its OK to not like a particular wine. When selling wine to the trade, its more important to me to present a wine that has a particular place in their program. Do they have enough wines representative of Oregon, for example? Do they have any dry Rieslings on their wine list? Do they have room for a wine that will sell for $60 on their wine list, or better yet, do they have demand for a $60 bottle of wine? I sell my portfolio based on quality, experience of the producer, sustainability of their farming practices and lastly, when selling to a member of the trade, do I ever rely on the “score”. The points based system of rating wine has its limitations for too many reasons to get into here.

The “terroir” debate is real - certain wines have attributes that connect them to their place of origin. This identity is what we refer to as “terroir”.

“I drink wine with my mouth and not my nose” is in fact, a false statement, not an opinion at all. About 80% of what you can actually “taste” in a wine comes from the olfactory. The aromatics of a wine are integral to the experience. Try tasting a wine while wearing swimmers nose plugs and see how it differs from tasting the same wine without them.

There are good and bad wines everywhere and sadly, if one poster claims to never have had a good American wine, it is regrettable. There are some incredible wines out there and if you limit yourself to the industrial, supermarket, brand name wines, you are missing out on a great world out there. I travel all over the country selling wine and even in the smallest of towns, you find people interested in learning about good wine. Find a retailer who has the opportunity to taste many different wines from people like me and start exploring. They almost always (some states do not allow this) have in store tastings where you have the opportunity to taste different wines.

The days of 3x to 4x mark-up on restaurant lists is a thing of the past and if you come across a restaurant that is doing that, call them on it. Typical restaurant mark-up is 2.5x and retail markup is .3 to .5.

The beef argument – no a cut of beef should not be described as having hints of chocolate or cherry but you can certainly detect subtle taste differences in how the cattle was raised, A factory farmed cut of meat will not have the same flavor or texture of a grass feed steer the same way a factory farmed bottle of fermented grape juice will not have the same qualities that a bottle of wine has that came from a great site, farmed with care and made by hand from people who view their finished product as the final culmination of a year of hard work.

I said many things here and repeated some as well. Hopefully this can clear up some things for people about wine but know that I am always happy to answer questions. You know were to find me.