Am I the only person who really dislikes the taste of wine? All wine. It all tastes strange and unpleasant to me. I have had people instruct me on what compliments what, what food to order with which wines. Tasting, swishing, smelling. I'd love to be classy and show an interest in fine wines if I could get past how bad it tastes.
Patently false. You have the right to request whatever you want of course, but they are under no obligation whatsoever to accommodate you simply because you don't like the wine. Nicer restaurants may very well do so as they try to be as accomodating as possible, but rest assured you won't be a welcome customer in the future, especially if it happens more than once.
Not liking the wine is essentially your fault, not theirs. The rare exception might be if the waiter makes a recommendation that happens to be extremely poor, but overall if you pick a wine that you don't like then it's all on you.
Again, this is not the case when the wine is faulty. Faulty can also include a wine that is completely muted. This is sometimes the case with faulty corks that allow oxygen to interact with the wine, and while it might not yet taste oxidized it will have a very flat taste... the fruit will be entirely gone. This doesn't include, "Wow, I really wanted something that tasted like cassis to go with my steak, and all I'm getting is blackberry!" That's a bit extreme, but you get the idea.
In summary: If it's not the wine's fault, it's yours.
Originally posted by: ATLien247
Ummm... What does 'corked' mean?
I'd Google around if you want more information, but essentially it's a wine that's been contaminated by TCA. This usually comes from the corks, and that's why you're probably seeing an increasingly popular trend in screwtops. It can also come from barrels and other areas of the winery, but that's less common (or at least less commonly verified).
IMO, forget the formalities of what does or what doesn't compliment what. Just buy a bunch of bottles, taste them and see if you find any character that you enjoy. It's supposed to be a sensory experience first, a social experience second and an intellectual experience a distant third (imo). You'll have people say, "You drank a Sauternes with that?!" or some other nonsense, but if you enjoy it then who really cares.
There are exceptions of course. If you're in the food industry then people will expect you to know what traditionally pairs with what, but rather than stick to doctrine try instead to appreciate the fundamentals of certain wines and realize how the character compliments other foods. You'll get a sense for it over time.
- Oct 28, 1999
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A $30 dollar bottle of wine at a restaurant is really like an $8-$15 dollar bottle of wine if you bought it a store. You aren't exactly buying a top shelf bottle at that price. It's the equivalent of getting a $6 draft of Budweiser at a ball game. Do you expect that to be magically better since you are paying 3x the normal rate for it?
Nerva
Platinum Member
- Jul 26, 2005
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a sommelier actually told you that? that's really wrong, because in my opinion, no matter what restaurant the sommelier works for, his primary objective is to select good wine for diners at a given price range. who is this bastard? report his dumb ass.
So you would make the restaurant eat the cost of the wine simply because you made a poor decision? Regardless of how "trendy or big" they may be its not their fault you didn't make a good selection.
To the OP, I have sent a few bottles back for being corked and a few times I made a poor wine choice that I truly didn't want to drink. I asked for the manager and asked him if I could pay the restaurants price for the bottle I did not like and purchase a bottle I knew I would like. Every time the manager agreed. The markup of on wine is pretty high in most restaurants so I usually ended up paying about 1/2 price for the bottle I sent back. The restaurant didn't loose anything and I was still able to enjoy my meal.
Good call. Thats the middle ground. Bottom line, the idea of returning bad wine originated for a reason. There is a different between wine that is bad and wine that has gone bad. The only thing that justifies sending back the wine is if it has gone stale. Stale as in it has sat somewhere for two years and was not corked properly or was somehow mismanaged or left out of the rotation process. You'll know if either of these incidents have happened to the wine simply because the wine will taste god-awful. This is why wines are taken back.
But now the snooty b*tches that think their sh*t doesn't stink have all turned this otherwise harmless and very respected tradition into some sort of a taboo. You don't send back wine that you think tastes the wrong way. Who's to say the last 150 bottles of wine you had tasted right and this one doesn't. For all you know you could have eaten something an hour before that counter-balances one of the finer points of the one. You aren't as smart as you think you are. Get over it.
Granted, each glass you have of the same wine from the same season should taste as similar as possible, but it needs to be understood that this is an age old process (literally) with very many determinates. It's not like you are mixing 16 letter chemicals in a controlled environment to make fake orange juice.
If you are going to send in the whambulance when you think you aren't going to like the wine you ordered then do what (edit: Darwin333 said it) said. Offer to purchase the bottle back at wholesale. They will most likely be ok with it.
Any resteraunt that offers pleasurable wines with good food deserves a little more respect then sending a bottle back because you're an idiot.
I use to be like you... i use to think wine just tasted like sour juice. But after drinking high quality wine for a few months, i love the stuff now. I only like reds though, since that's all we drank at the pharmaceutical rep dinners (most white still tastes like sour juice to me).
MikeyIs4Dcats
Lifer
- Nov 5, 2001
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Sam Adams is far from a micro-brew. It's for people that liek to think they are drinking a microbrew when they are in fact drinking a mass-produced beer just like any A-B product.
MikeyIs4Dcats
Lifer
- Nov 5, 2001
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There's no denying that Sam Adams is a damn fine U.S. Brewery regardless of how "large" it may be. :beer:
BrokenVisage
Lifer
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If you don't like it, send it back. Geez, there no rule says you got to drink or eat what you ordered even if you don't like it. It's not like you some young kid and mom's not gonna let you leave the table until you finish, if you have a mom like that. If you don't like it, send it back and ask for something else.
ColdFusion718
Diamond Member
- Mar 4, 2000
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If you are not happy with it, you send it back. You should get what you paid for. No, it doesn't make you a snob. You also mentioned that the color was off.
Let's say that when you were paying your bill, you thought to yourself, "Hmm well the food wasn't bad, but not worth $123.45, more like $115 even." Do you think they will let you leave the restaurant? I don't effing think so.
Etiquette is a two-way street. The idea is, you give me what I want, I pay you and give you compliments for a job well done/good food. This is a pricey place we're talking about here, not some hole-in-the-wall (etiquette doesn't exist here hehe).
ColdFusion718
Diamond Member
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Crunchy? I didn't know wines crunched? This is wine snob talk. Btw, I've taken a few viticulture and enology classes so I know how to make wine and whatnot.
A lot of the BS jargon that wine-tasters use are just highfalutin talk. What happened to "this wine tastes good, I like it"?
I wanted to prove a point so in one of the classes I took years ago, I challenged a wine snob to a taste test. I gave him a few different wines to test (I made sure others were around). He went on and on about this one wine had flamboyant, rebellious character. Personally, I think he was the flamboyant one, not the wine. :evil:
Finally, I gave him a very cheap $5 bottle of wine to try and he said that one was the best and said how it was the same $200 bottle he had in France. You should have seen the look on his face when I said "Dude, I bought that for $5 down at the farmers market."
You've taken viticulture classes and you don't know about tartrates?
Sufficient for dinner, but not sufficient for qualifying a wine. Anything that delves into sensory overtures at a casual dinner is being a little pompous, but the descriptions used do have their place. There's nothing wrong with pointing out that a wine is tannic, oaked, fruity, acidic, etc.
Ok, never in my entire life have I heard anyone describe a wine as flamboyant and rebellious. That's florid nonsense speech, and it says very little about the wine unless he's saying that the style is rebelling against more common styles for a given region; for example, you'll sometimes find people experimenting with style. Pinot Noir in Oregon's Willamette Valley and California Carneros are primary examples.
Finally, I gave him a very cheap $5 bottle of wine to try and he said that one was the best and said how it was the same $200 bottle he had in France. You should have seen the look on his face when I said "Dude, I bought that for $5 down at the farmers market."
I'm calling shens on your entire story. In wine, you are paying for complexity in growth, preparation and style. Additionally, there is a premium for high-demand low-supply wines like those of the Cote d'Or. No one, and I mean no one, would mistake a $200 French anything for a $5 anything else as being comparable. It has nothing to do with price.
I think its quite plausible that someeone who would use the words flamboyant and rebellious in a serious attempt to describe the food they're eating has no idea what they're doing. I've seen similiar studies done over time that often find the same conclusion. I think many consumers aren't fully into the tasting experience and haven't really learned to pay attention to their palate and to discriminate among all the different flavors they're tasting, they're just drinking wine. If you don't know what it is, how you can find it or talk about it? On a smaller scale I find the same thing with beers, in fact perhaps even more extreme where people will prefer their $1 can of millerbudcoors to a $6 bottle of really some of the best beer there is because they want the bland tasteless water that budmillercoors work so very hard to achieve consistently.
Hey, here's a thought - maybe people just want to drink whatever they want to drink and have a good time. Drinking wine (beer, liquor, etc.) should be about enjoying it, whatever it is or however much/little it cost, without being looked down upon by others who don't think they could possibly be enjoying themselves as they aren't sufficiently "in touch" with their palates.
mugs
Lifer
- Apr 29, 2003
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Originally posted by: ColdFusion718
Crunchy? I didn't know wines crunched? This is wine snob talk. Btw, I've taken a few viticulture and enology classes so I know how to make wine and whatnot.
A lot of the BS jargon that wine-tasters use are just highfalutin talk. What happened to "this wine tastes good, I like it"?
I wanted to prove a point so in one of the classes I took years ago, I challenged a wine snob to a taste test. I gave him a few different wines to test (I made sure others were around). He went on and on about this one wine had flamboyant, rebellious character. Personally, I think he was the flamboyant one, not the wine. :evil:
Finally, I gave him a very cheap $5 bottle of wine to try and he said that one was the best and said how it was the same $200 bottle he had in France. You should have seen the look on his face when I said "Dude, I bought that for $5 down at the farmers market."
:laugh:
Penn & Teller did an episode of their show (Bullsh!t) where they served people water from a hose in LA and told them it was expensive spring water from different areas of the world; their results were similar to yours.
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