Tasting in Texas
While visiting my in-laws in Texas, my husband and I embarked on a little wine tasting excursion to the Hill Country (aka, the Texas equivalent of Napa Valley). Maybe I’m spoiled living in Sonoma County (OK, not maybe: I am spoiled), but the experience was pretty odd. The first winery we visited (Stone House) had some very nice wines—a well-made dry sparkling wine, a tasty Tempranillo, some very good Shiraz wines. The odd part? They’re all produced in Australia. Stone House produces only two Texas wines—both made from Norton (and if you’ve never tried Norton, it’s definitely an acquired taste).
During the tasting, one single-vineyard Shiraz we sampled was obviously corked. I politely told the guy behind the bar, and he commented: “I’ve never really liked that wine.” Hmmm.. maybe that’s because the wine is corked! Did he open a new bottle of wine? Nope. I’m sure that, as soon as we were out the door, he continued pouring samples from that same bottle—which, by the way, was not cheap at 40-plus bucks. Crazy. The tasting room fees also seemed a bit steep: $5 for the standard tasting, plus an extra $10 for reserve wines and an extra $5 for two additional port-style wines. (And don’t expect anything to be knocked off the tasting fee if you buy a few bottles to take home.) Do these folks know they’re in Texas?
The second winery we visited—Spicewood Vineyards—offered more of a Texas experience. All of their wines are made from estate fruit—that is, unless a particularly crappy growing season, complete with hail, wipes out most of their grapes. That’s what happened last year, so the winery is buying some grapes from California to help get it through the rough patch. Spicewood makes a nice Sauvignon Blanc from local grapes, though they had to release the 2007 vintage a bit early since they had no 2006 left to sell. Our final stop was recommended to us by the tasting room manager at Spicewood. The winery—I’m not naming names to protect the guilty—was in the process of building a new log-cabin-style tasting room, but in the meantime, visitors sample wines in the cramped, musty-smelling production building. I’m a big fan of funky, low-key tasting rooms, as long as they’re pouring some good wine. But I can honestly say that these wines were, across the board, the worst I’ve ever tasted. They weren’t just bad: They were infected with something—some kind of bacterial flaw? Each of them had the same bizarre, disturbingly awful aftertaste. My husband and I exchanged astonished looks as the couple next to us complimented the hideous Muscat we’d just tasted. Could they have been serious? It was all we could do to keep our exclamations to ourselves until we peeled out of the parking lot. In a word: yikes!
Too bad we had to end our mini winery tour on that note. There’s no excuse for serving corked or flawed wines to tasting room visitors, even if they’re “just” locals. Winery owners (not only in Texas, but all over the country): Please train your tasting room employees (or, if you’re doing the pouring, train yourselves) to detect common wine flaws, and to taste every new bottle before pouring it for potential customers. Sure, dumping a bottle of wine down the drain costs money, but is it really good business to serve spoiled wines and hope nobody notices? That’s a rhetorical question, you know.
