Wine you hate or find horrid!
 

I'm wondering what everyone's "wine to avoid" suggestion would be. Tonight I tried (oops) 2005 White Carmenère and it was vile.

I have a preference toward whites and find many reds to be "gym sock" like in taste sometimes, but i can appreciate their notes and such - but this wine was just overall gross. One review says it's like jalapeno poppers on the nose.

Just, yuck. Eww.

Any suggestions on what else to avoid in the future?

Not a huge fan of buttery, oaked up california chardonnays. also, never ever got into "fume blanc" wines from here (mondavi, ferrari-carano, etc). but i do love a good pouilly-fume.
for reds, there's nothing i'd say i hate or find horrid..i dislike pretty much any wine that is unbalanced, so i guess i dislike a lot of california wines :(

Any red grape that decides to go white, i.e. White Merlot or White Zinfandel.

LOLOLOL I can't believe I left out that stuff!

Yes, that might be wines that I hate.

I also hate Valdigue.

Pretty much any white grape lighter than a chardonnay

A lot of people might find it as a good value but Beuojalais has sunk deep on my list. I had to gift a lot of them away after the SO bought 2 cases from a supermarket :rolleyes:

I will second cordelli's opinion.

Some combo wines (ie two grapes together) also don't fare well with me either.

The term for this is "corked" and it is a defect in the cork and/or storage conditions of the wine. It can happen to all wines, even very good ones. You might want to check into how your wines are being handled if this is happening to you a lot.....

Modern wine making technique has progressed a lot, to the point that even very cheap wine (e.g. $2/bottle) does not have these taste defects "as shipped". You show a location of TPA, which definitely requires wine storage equipment (you cannot cellar ad hoc in that climate).

Chardonnay.

But it's not for a taste reason...for some reason, I get horrible headaches from Chardonnay. And only Chardonnay. I can drink lighter wines than Chardonnay and be fine. I can drink heavier wines than Chardonnay and be fine.

I don't know what it is with Chardonnay, though.

Two Buck Chuck. I've tried it and I don't like it. If I want cheap wine, I actually prefer jug Gallo. :td: :td:

There are plenty of "cheap" wines at Costco for $7-8 which are just as good, if not better.

Actually, the ones you drink are made to a "style" that is not very good, but if made into a proper dry rose, can be excellent. Most "white" reds are too sweet and made to make the non-wine-drinker drink wine. They taste the same from week to week and year to year, made with "Fresno's Finest" harvest, no matter the Napa or Sonoma (etc.) winery label. I've had quite a number of non-French rosès that are delicious, crisp, and dry, including recently, a malbec rosè.

As for wines I generally don't like, California Pinot Noir and New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. (There are a few exceptions to this.) Pretty much every thing else, for me, can turn into a nice wine, each for its own mood and place, if made properly. For example, finally a number of California winemakers are leaving the oak and butterbomb ruination of Chardonnay. It is a nice grape, but "the people" want their wine to taste like an oily tree, so the winemakers make it to this style. Merlot is another fine grape, but when made to fill bottles of Martha Stewart NV Merlot, it is going to be bleh. I cannot tell you how many times people have said "I only drink this," or "I don't drink that" and I pour something and they can't believe that they are drinking it. (That's a zinfandel??? But it is so smooth, blah blah blah.)

Don't blame the grape. It is just like the puppy pit bull before the bad owner taught it how to fight.

Well, i think "gym sock" is more of my personal opinion of the flavor of a red then a problem with the wine - though i'm sure some of them were mistreated.

Any suggestions on some good "starter" reds to perhaps change my mind?

I always avoid the vertical tastings at the food/wine festival because I know they usually mean reds. Might be nice to give it a try.

Ginger wine - if the stuff actually deserves the name "wine".
Anything too sweet.

Stay away from the MD20/20. :D

Best regards,

William R. Sanders
Online Guest Feedback Coordinator
Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide

[email protected]

I'm not a big Two Buck Chuck fan, but it does vary widely from batch to batch. This stuff is bought in bulk as excess production from a variety of producers and then bottled until the Trader Joe's lable. Sometimes you get lucky, but why gamble. They do have a Two Buck Barolo that is pretty decent for making Barolo sauce with however. Save the good stuff for drinking!

There's an old adage: if you won't drink it, don't cook with it ;)

Merlot, If somebody orders Merlot I'm outa this place!!!!! :D:D:D

In all seriousness within a month of Sideways comming out my friends dragged me to see the show claiming the wine scenes fit me to a T.

Generally true, but two buck is actually drinkable, I just choose not to. Its perfectly fine for cooking.

Let's skip cheap and defective wines. I dislike the taste in Carmenère(seems to be in almost all Chilean wines), viongier, Gevertztraminer, sparkling shiraz & some of the reds from Venito that are usually not exported(taste like Carmenere, but are supposidly cab franc).

Sauvignon blanc. Yech, yech, yech! Like licking a lawnmower clean. I'm told there are two styles of SB, one yech, one not, but I've not been told what countries and vineyards produce the non-yech style. If anyone has any good suggestions, I'm ... possibly... willing to waste another $10 to be proved wrong.

have you tasted french SB? the aussies also make some nice ones.

It sounds like you detest the NZ style, especially the one where the cat peed on the lawnmower, before you licked it, which is mostly a NZ thing, with an occasional Chile and California winery making a similar wine. There is a lot of good "non-yech" SB. I drink a lot of it.

California S.B.'s might be what the poster is searching for, or a Pouilly-Fume or Sancerre..even a white Bordeaux. or if you wanna get crazy, search out something from the pacific northwest. :)

Not sure what it was, but the foulest I've ever tasted was at the Seattle Music Experience for a school board shindig. Even worse than the stuff my grandmother bought at a dollar store in nor. Cal.

Great museum, though.

I hate the 'house wine'. Never ever drink that stuff. And if you do, tell them to open a new bottle. This way the wine will just taste bad, instead of horrible. ;)

dh

Not a fan of Pinotage at all, or any wines made with that grape. I steer clear of SA reds for that reason.

another one for two buck chuck! YUCK.

How rude is it to bring my own wine? I'll be staying at my Dad's for a week while my step-mother is out of town. (He has recently been diagnosed with ALS, and it is progressing rapidly).
Anyway, she drinks CASES of Chuck, so will I offend family if I bring my own? I suppose I could always smuggle it in after they go to sleep.....

Okay, so here's how the advice went on non-cat-pee sauvignon blancs:

French ^^
New Zealand:td:
Australian ^
California ^:td:
Chile :td:
Pacific NW :confused:

Sounds like something from France is the safest bet. Any specific suggestions?

i usually avoid Beaujolais (now for a few years) but was nicely surprised a few weeks ago by one of these cheap Beaujolais bought (not by myself) in a french supermarket.
it really make me laugh when i see these cheap beaujolais bottles in japan or usa sold for more than 20 USD...

As mentioned, Two Buck Chuck is SWILL. I just shake my head when I see people walking out of Trader Joe's with cases of that garbage.

The problem with TBC is that it's so wildly inconsistent. Each "vintage" is made up of different "batches" of wine that comes from pretty much everyone imaginable in California. So while you may have some decent quality commercial wine (beringer or mondavi excess juice), you might also get some very good quality wine through the Bronco factory too..then again, at the prices good ol' uncle fred pays, you get a ton of central valley swill, and that also goes into the factory as they "make" each batch.
also, the company seems to skirt the 75% rule wherever and whenever possible, so you really don't know how much cab or merlot is in their "california" cab or merlot.

Just to be more precise, corked wine has nothing to do with the storage conditions of the wine. It is a flaw that comes from the presence of a chemical called TCA, and which is present at bottling. A bottle cannot develop TCA as it ages or is poorly stored- it either had it at bottling or does not. Of course storage can and often does affect a wine, which is why ensuring the provenance of the wine is essential. There are many wine shops you walk into in the winter in a cold climate that are absolutely broiling- don't buy there!

To answer the OP's question, though, I find wines that are out of balance due to too much oak or too-extracted fruit very difficult to drink. I also don't like wines that are not representative of what they purport to have in the bottle, e.g. pinot noir vinified to taste like syrah, or burgundy made to taste like Russian River Valley pinot.

Anything from Peju Winery in Napa. I did a wine tasting there with some girlfriends and it was terrible.

We quickly learned that cute exterior = awful wine.

Tonight at Wal-Mart two women were looking for wine and I overheard one say to the other: "Oooooh, look how pretty this bottle is. Let's buy this one!"

I've made several mistakes based on looks and price in the past - from thinking "it's expensive it must be good" to "cute bottle" to "that looks classy."

I still buy the occasional cute bottle, but usually get something i know will be good to accompany it (just in case).

most producers pay a lot of attention to creation of the label. It is possible to generate a label that makes the wine very difficult to sell. the merchants do not want to purchase it, unless it is a 92+ point wine(then it can have any label).

does a wine labeled "california" have to be bottled in CA?

I think not, and if not, it becomes trivial to bottle a CA wine label it CA, and not observe any of the 75% rules, or any other CA rules.

for a number of years, one of the best wines of VA was labeled "bottled in VA" and used CA juice. brings more money that way.

bottled, no. contain CA grapes, yes. that is what the "California" means on the label. that the wine contains california grapes. there is usually a second line on the back of the label specifying where the wine is bottled and/or made.

hope that clears things up.

A few years back, against my better judgement, I purchased two bottles of wine in mainland China. One was called Dynasty and the other was called Great Wall. Both alleged to be cabernets and made with French "Bourdeux wine making skills". Both were swill. I had one glass from each and promptly subjected my garbage disposal to a chug-a-lug. My garbage disposal wasn't happy; it wound up smelling foul for a week...

Hopefully, their wine making skills have improved over the past few years...although my winie (like foodie) friends over there still hold a very low opinion of those labels.

Here in Dublin soomeone bought a shiraz from a highly dubious (non wine) region - in Queensland!
You might as well say ireland, greenland, wherever, as they are proably just as cruddy wine areas.

Some shady importer is really taking advantage of the uninformed wine buyer here... Buyer beware! ;)

Though that was enough, I pulled off the cork's foil and found it was a plastic cork.

As you could imagine, it hasn't been and will not be opened! :p