Читать книгу Wine Faults and Flaws - Keith Grainger - Страница 92

A couple of personal anecdotes will illustrate that the award of points or medals are little more than an illustration of how a wine is perceived at the time it was assessed. In April 2020, I escaped COVID‐19 lockdown to buy essential goods. The bottles of 2016 ‘Côtes de Bourg’ from a Petit Château look appealing on the shelf of my local Super‐U supermarket. The price is right, and hey – they bear a sticker proclaiming that the wine scored 90 points in the 2018 Decanter World Wine Awards: a Silver Medal. I buy three bottles, taken from an unopened box. I give them a few days to rest, open a bottle, and even before I can pour a glass, I can smell the unmistakeable odours of oxidation. I check the closure – a Diam technical cork, and this seems fine. Let's open another bottle – just the same. And so is the third. There are no signs of the wine being poorly stored. Assuming the Decanter assessment panel was competent, they made snapshot judgements of the wine. At the time in its life‐cycle that I would have expected the wine to be in top order, it was undrinkable. A similar situation had happened to me in the UK a couple of months earlier, with a 2017 South Australian Shiraz, a Trophy winner in the 2019 International Wine Challenge. When I twisted the screw‐cap, on this occasion, it was the ‘reduced’ nose of garlic that screamed out and did not dissipate with aeration in the glass. I could only reflect with sadness that the unwitting consumer was excitedly buying award‐winning, faulty wines.