There’s One in Every Case

A friend said the wine tasted . . . oh, he wasn’t sure: “funny.” Sour, flat, lacking character. It was a bottle of a Riesling from the respected German producer Schloss Vollrads.

He had bought a case after tasting the wine--and loving it--after a long, enjoyable hike in the High Sierras. Later he asked me to try a bottle. “I was very disappointed in it,” he said. “It doesn’t taste like the same wine. Is it going bad?”

I took it home and tried it. It was fine. Not a great wine, but representative of the property and an excellent, very dry, crisp beverage that would go well with food. When I told him, my friend asked: “Could it have been one bad bottle in the case? Or was it me?”

It could have been either, or both. What is at play here is the multitude of factors that affect how you enjoy a wine.

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One of the greatest lessons of my life in wine was when an older, wiser friend, a longtime wine lover, told me: “There are no great wines, only great bottles of wine.”

His point was that every bottle of wine can be its own little chamber of horrors and--though it’s rare--a single bottle of a great wine can go bad while the other 11 bottles in the case are fine.

It’s obvious that no two pots of stew are exactly the same, because the minutest change in ingredients can make a major difference in the final flavors.

Two otherwise identical bottles of wine may be different too. Here’s why:

If you have a Chardonnay that has been stored in 10 different tanks, the best way to blend it is to combine a tenth of each tank, making a so-called cross blend. But this is a logistical headache, and some wineries do not do this. In fact, some do no blending at all, especially where there is a huge amount of a particular wine (say, for example, 100,000 cases).

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Anything but the perfect blend means the bottles may not all contain precisely the same wine. A typical small winery bottles between 2,000 and 10,000 cases of wine per day, so some wines may take a week or more to finish bottling. During that period of time, changes can occur in various portions of the master blend. As a hedge against such problems, some wineries pull the first few cases and the last few cases off the bottling line and do not sell them.

Moreover, wine is a living product. Specifically, wines that are unfiltered have a number of active elements. Some of the chemical changes that occur in a bottle make a wine taste better--so you hear the phrase, “The wine needs time.”

Other changes can make wine taste worse. This is very rare, especially nowadays, but it happens now and then.

The biggest mystery, of course, occurs when a careful master blend has been made, when the bottling has all been done on the same day under sterile conditions, and yet one bottle from a case of 12 turns up to be different from its brethren.

“It happens,” says Larry Levin, winemaker at Dry Creek Vineyards in Sonoma County, “not very often, but it happens, and I simply don’t know why.”

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One possible reason is the bottle’s closure. Cork is less reliable than other seals. Now and then a bad cork can impart an odd aroma to a wine that may not be described exactly as “corked,” but this makes the wine taste different from other bottles.

But I contend that the major reason two ostensibly identical bottles of the same wine can taste different lies not in the bottle, but in ourselves.

One night you’re in a great mood. You just got a raise, your kid came home with As on a report card, and your tax man says you owe nothing. You taste a bottle of Cabernet and it’s wonderful. This wine you remember.

Then there are the other days: A slight cold or headache; a beef with your boss; the irritation of a flat tire, or someone trying to cash a check ahead of you in the checkout line--all of this can affect how you feel. And whether you realize it consciously or not, this can affect your taste buds.

You open that same bottle of Cabernet and it tastes like dross. This wine you try not to remember.

Of course, the food a wine is served with can change our perception of it. Try one of the exceptional Chardonnays from Woltner Estate in the Napa Valley with blackened salmon and see how the wine is muffled; it is merely wet. Then try it with poached sole and hear it sing.

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One of my least favorite happenings is to have a great wine when I’m rushed or dining with people I don’t particularly like. In such cases, sometimes I would rather not drink the wine at all.

The late author H. Warner Allen said it best:

“The wines that one remembers best are not necessarily the finest that one has tasted; the highest quality may fail to delight so much as some far more humble beverage drunk in more favourable surroundings.”

Wine of the Week

1993 Toad Hollow Chardonnay ($10) --Todd Williams, comedian Robin Williams’ elder brother, has been known as Toad ever since he was a kid. In fact, when he played the bartender in “Mrs. Doubtfire,” Todd was listed in the credits simply as “Mr. Toad.”

Formerly a restaurateur, Todd Williams is now a wine broker in Sonoma County. This wine is his answer for those who like Chardonnay without oak. Fruit from the old River West Vineyard in the Russian River Valley was fermented in stainless-steel tanks, then the wine was bottled. The wine has fresh, lively apple and grapefruit aromas and a delicate, crisp finish.