The Whine List – Top Wine Hates

There are many more things I love about wine and the wine business than things that I hate. In fact, listing the things one loves is much easier (and a lot more productive) than doing so for the things you hate but there are some things in the business of wine that can really annoy me, and I am sure many others out there too. So here’s a list of the little things that annoy me, it is Monday morning after all and, were Monday to be a wine, it would most certainly make the list!

Counterfeit Wine

Counterfeit wine, it seems, has made its main home here in Asia, much like many more of the breaches of intellectual and actual property rights. In Hong Kong and China you will find counterfeit products all over the place from Ralph Lauren socks to Gucci handbags, but thankfully in Hong Kong we very rarely see much counterfeit wine. This is mainly due to the fact that the majority of it is consumed (and I dare say produced) across the border in mainland China. Counterfeit wine dupes the customer and passes off either a completely different wine as what it says on the label, or in some ‘lucky cases’ the right wine, but from a completely different vintage. All this does is make the real wines more and more expensive, thus out of the financial reach of most mortal wine drinkers. The thing most annoying about counterfeit wine is that it’s so blatantly fake. I have seen Chateau Margaux from the Languedoc, Chateau Lafitte passed off as Chateau Lafite and a white AOC Languedoc Domaine Romanee Conti whilst doing this job and, what is so aggravating is that counterfeiters rely on the lack of people’s knowledge to sell their fakes. At least when you buy a copy DVD you know it’s a fake, but when you buy a food product (such as the horse meat problems in Europe) you expect to get what the brand you are buying is exactly what it says it is.

Poorly Trained Staff

Don’t you just hate it when you walk into a restaurant, bar or retail shop and the staff have no idea about the products they are selling? Two main gripes are when staff in restaurants do not know their own list and cannot tell the customer what the wine tastes like or what food it may potentially pair with. Training is an integral part of the service industry (both restaurant and retail) and thus I would expect the server to be able to tell me the sweetness of the Riesling or the weight of the Cabernet on the list. Additionally, I should be able to walk into a retail shop and have a member of staff recommend me a wine for the dinner I am about to cook. It’s all part of the service of selling wine – knowing your products – and it’s up to managers and trainers to make sure their staff are fully equipped to do their job. One other thing that is aggravating is when a staff member fills your glass up to the rim. I have had this happen to me a number of times and it really annoys me! No, I do not want half a bottle of wine in my glass making it so top heavy that I barely get the glass to my lips. This style of pouring is either produced from ignorance or from an over-zealous staff member hoping to push sales of a second bottle.

Wine Teases

I don’t know about you but I have many friends who own and cellar a great deal of mainly fine wine. One thing that can be really annoying is for your friends to take you down to their cellar with a ‘look, but don’t touch – and certainly don’t open’ approach to their cellar. I often buy fine wines not for myself but for the pleasure of sharing it with others and very seldom (actually never) buy wines for investment or as a museum piece. For a wine lover to ‘show’ another wine lover a great bottle of wine without offering to opening it is teasing you and is rather like going to a strip club where the policy is look but don’t touch. What’s the point of having the wine if you are not going to drink it ever, but just own it and show it off to your mates? People don’t like people like that and in my view it’s the highest form of wine snobbery to say “oh, look what I can afford” but then lock up the cellar and head upstairs to drinks something ordinary.

Badly Chaptalised Sauternes

I understand why they allow chaptalisation in Sauternes as farmers who make wine annually as a source of family income need to make a wine even if the climatic conditions are not perfect that year. If there are not enough bortytised grapes or none at all, it is very hard to make a decent sweet wine. Additionally, if the weather does not suit late harvesting or if it rains during the harvest, the farmer’s income for the year is under threat. Thus, one is allowed in Sauternes to add sugar to the wines to enhance the sweetness. However, sometimes this is to the detriment of the brand itself and some wines from Barzac and Cadillac I have tried from supermarkets have actually tasted like normal Semillon wine with added sugar syrup. It must be said that this type of wine is most foul and that it really makes people think twice about a) buying that wine again and b) buying wines from that area or from Sauternes as a hole due to an unfavourable first impression. So, if chaptalisation should occur, I think buyers should be told on the label so they can make up their own minds whether to buy this wine or one that probably will cost more that has been made naturally without any added sugar.

Corked Wine

Now I reckon that everybody hates corked wine. Not that it’s the fault of anyone other than the little cork inside the neck of the bottle, but these things happen to a bottle of wine now and again. It’s a real bummer when a bottle you have been saving for a special occasion turns out, through no fault of your own, to be corked. It’s not like you can go back to the person you bought it from a decade ago and ask for a refund or to exchange the bottle. Wine, in general, does not have a return policy – although I’d happily frequent a retail shop that would exchange and refund corked wine within 24 hours of purchase. Corked wine is different to a wine that has been ‘cooked’, that is one that has been stored in the wrong conditions (generally too warm) and the wine has aged super-fast and is now undrinkable. This is the fault of you (if you keep a bottle on top of the fridge for a year) or of the retailer of the wine. But corked wine is the fault of no-one, can really mess up a potentially lovely dinner and, if you are opening a special bottle in the presence of good company, it’s really deflating when the wine itself turns out to be corked.

Chablis and Chardonnay

I have heard over the last couple of decades so many people telling me they don’t like chardonnay but when presented with a fantastic Chablis they are in high praise of the wine they are drinking. “I don’t like chardonnay but I like Chablis” is usually what I used to hear in the hotel. Well, as we all should know (and if you didn’t, now you do) Chablis is a chardonnay made in the Chablis region of Burgundy. So, you do like Chardonnay, just not the ones you had tried before, probably made in a new world country with additives to make it taste and an overwhelming oak flavour from all the oak chips used instead of barrels. But the lack of open-mindedness is not limited to Chardonnay only. In Hong Kong you get many people saying “oh, I don’t drink this” or “I don’t drink that”. Personally, I have never been a big fan of Australian reds from Barossa, but I have to admit that there are some fantastic wines made there, although you have to know what you are looking for first. People do, unfortunately, count first impressions and, if their first experience with a wine was not a good one, the likelihood of them trying a wine in that style again is low. But people, we need to be a little more open-minded when it comes to wine and give everything a try. Without trying wines you may never find that one really, truly amazing wine that you may have shunned before were it not for that little sense of adventure that lurks within all of us.

There are of course many other little things that can annoy people in the wine world such as winemakers insistence on making wines to get Parker points, the formality and seriousness of wine tasting, generic low quality wines and wine snobs – as well as the smaller things like not knowing the sweetness level of ‘that’ German wine, where exactly grapes from ‘South Australia’ come from (it’s a large expanse) and people still asking the cork vs. screw cap question. But the gripes listed above are some that, in my mind are ones that we need to remedy quicker than the smaller ones and I hope one day to open a bottle of good Burgundy without questioning its authenticity, that global warming aids the growth of botrytis in Sauternes and that wine service in all retail and restaurant outlets is something the servers can pride themselves on. One man cannot change an industry, but enough voices in unison can make changes to an industry that will only do it good.