Bad Language

Bad wine is fun to talk about, too

I’ve been reading Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Passenger’ over the last couple of weeks. He’s a specialist when it comes to ugly things; illness, greed and carnage all get rendered in full, reverential colour, often by characters who aren’t exactly clamouring for the reader’s affection.

The flip-side is that the moments of beauty and decency that McCarthy slips in really land, escaping upwards from the platitudinal axis of Have-A-Nice-Day America. Happiness is a high-value currency in the McCarthy universe.

It’s a totally infuriating book in many ways, the plot lines picked up and thrown around at will only to be interrupted, repeatedly, by barely-cogent interludes written from the point of view of a schizophrenic girl. Just as you start to tire of wading, though, a great tug of the ropes pulls everything tight again and you find yourself up at midnight turning pages.

Amid more wrangling over wine language and criticism this week (I have long wanted to write a piece asking who the best wine-writer-writers are, and whether criticism of wine writers is still relevant to consumers of wine writing, etc etc), it occurred to me that it’s very rare to read about ugliness - yuckiness - in wine. To read, in full colour, about why something sucked.

I opened a few sparkling wines for a musician friend last year, one of which I described as unpleasantly ‘vegetal’. He found this hilarious. Vegetal. Vegetal wine. My rough notes from my week in Penedès last year included entries that read simply ‘NO’, or ‘wrongun’, or ‘f*cked’. How so, though? Aside from actual, categorisable faults, what is it that defines disappointing wines?

Most of the bad wines I have tried could fall into four categories: Flab, Weirdness, Vacancy and Hubris. Here goes.

Flab

I bought a case of sub-£20 wines last month rom a well-respected UK retailer. In it was a White Bordeaux, made of Semillon and Sauvignon Blanc, that was pure, liquified flab. Flab, which I tend to associate with whites, rosés and sparkling wines, is the feeling of thickness, oiliness and heat, alcohol perhaps, muffin-topping out over the top of a structure too feeble to contain it. In reds, the grape skins tend to offer up an accompanying dose of gristle and extraction along with the flab, somehow making it a bit more appealing. In whites, though….nowhere to hide. Prime candidates: people trying to make sparkling wines in places that are too hot, hot vintages, naturally-prone grape varieties (here’s lookin’ at you, Viognier).

Weirdness

There’s nothing wrong with quirkiness. Wines that don’t do what you expect, but still fall within the fairly wide tram-lines of essential wine-i-ness.

True weirdness is something else. You find yourself pulling books of your metaphorical shelf of remembered flavours in search of the right entry; I have distinct memories of wines that have smelt like rendering pheasant fat, glue guns, mackerel, basil pesto and silage, not to mention a litany of wines whose weirdness I never quite managed to pin down.

The sources of these flavours may well be textbook faults, odd microbial activities or even contamination. In truth, these flavours could, if they were a little more subtle, sit there quietly in the background and play nicely. Sometimes they don’t, though. Prime candidates; the tendency of the universe to move toward chaos. And dodgy winemaking.

Vacancy

The taste of emptiness. Holes. Wines that make a start, then stop. Wines that have frames, and no stuffing. Wines that could be mistaken for ‘delicate’, ‘restrained’ or ‘elegant’, but are actually just boring.

A great example recently was a Traditional Method sparkling wine in magnum I’d picked from my cellar at ten years of age. It had lots of good characters - all the magnum-effect-toasty-smoky-energy, lees-ageing creaminess, lovely mousse…but all this was dancing around a sort of hollowness. A bit meek ‘n mild. A wine with a frame - and some decoration - but not quite enough to fill it.

When you see a ‘meh’ reaction to a wine - rather than an ‘eugh’, or a ‘what-on-earth’, Vacancy is always a pretty good shout. Prime candidates - boring grapes, high yields, boring vineyards.

Hubris

Paulie ‘Walnuts’ Gualtieri, pretending to be Napoletano

Perhaps the grandest sin of all.

Part of my sub-£20 case was a Morellino di Scansano, a Sangiovese-based wine from Tuscany. The labelling was quite fun and modern. My wife offered her opinion that it “wasn’t very nice”; she’s not usually one to complain, so it needed some investigation.

In this case, the winemaker had clearly decided that they were going to try and make a fun, round, dark, juicy-fruity-type thing. From Sangiovese. You can put Paulie ‘Walnuts’ Gualtieri in a bouncy castle, but he ain’t gonna jump (yes I have been re-watching The Sopranos). I’m not sure what was going on here - maybe something creative with extraction, whole bunches - but the Sangiovese was not playing ball.

In Champagne and Sparkling Wine, the most common examples are wines released as ‘single vineyard’, or ‘parcellaire’ that serve to remind us all of just how wonderful blending is, or prestige bottles conjured up via recipe (old vines, oak, long ageing).

It’s possible to taste expensive whilst not actually tasting pleasant.

So, yes…

…don’t worry, readers. All those shiny-happy-bottles that us wine writers seem to find are reassuringly hard-won. I had a glass of Supermarket classic ‘19 Crimes’ at Christmas, which made me think of this:

Life's too short not to drink bad wine

It was a very memorable glass (and I mean that). Prodigiously ugly, at least to me, yet very interesting in a sort of commercial-technical-cynical way. I’m glad I drank it. But if life’s too short not to drink bad wine, perhaps it is too short to write about it?