Worst of the Worst
Hold your nose; these are real stinkers.
Enough with this “Best of The Best” stuff! Let’s get down and dirty. Here, then, are some nominees for the ultimate worst in winedom. To know them is to be truly appalled.
Worst Wine Brand
Vini Lunardelli in northern Italy’s Sud Tirol region offers a line of wine called — no kidding — “Der Führer,” whose labels, reports the AFP news agency, “show Hitler raising the Nazi salute,” and also include images of Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Hess and Eva Braun. And just to add to the tastelessness, says AFP, “The ... labels are imprinted with the mottos ‘Ein volk, ein Reich, ein Fuehrer’ (one people, one empire, one Fuehrer) and ‘Sieg heil’.” But what’s most disgusting about all this is that Lunardelli sells 20,000 bottles a year of Der Führer wines. Who says the human race is advancing?
Worst Homemade Wine
The website homemadewine.net, which bills itself as “a place for the gourmet home winemaker,” features a recipe for “Coffee Wine” that included 1 Tablespoon of instant (?!) coffee, 1.25 kilograms of sugar, two lemons, wine yeast and 4.5 liters of water. But why go to all that trouble, when you can obtain the same revolting result simply by dumping a few ounces of MD 20/20 Kiwi Lemon (which, of course, every gourmet has on hand) into day-old iced coffee? Yum!
Worst Wine and Food Pairing
I don’t know who came up with the idea of pairing chocolate with Cabernet Sauvignon. Perhaps it was the same lunatic who gave us “surf and turf.” All I know is that chocolate and Cabernet are about as compatible as Dick Cheney and Lady Gaga. The bitter sweetness in one obliterates all the nuanced fruit in the other, leaving one with a dry, dusty palate. So please, please, no more pig-outs with Château Margaux and Hershey’s Kisses.
Worst Wine Gadget
In 2008, British inventor Casey Jones introduced The Ultrasonic Wine Ager, an ice bucket-like contraption he claimed could make young wine taste older, and therefore better, by using sound waves to bounce alcohol molecules against each other in the bottle. Plop a $6 bottle of wine in the Ager for 30 minutes, Jones told the London Telegraph, and it would come out “tasting like it cost hundreds.” But nothing ever came of The Ultrasonic Wine Ager, and Jones, no doubt vexed by the rejection, has returned to his first love: breeding unicorns.
Worst Wine Notes
The worst wine notes are those which speak more about the author than about the wine. Yet such notes often have one saving grace: they can be incredibly funny. The following excerpt, taken from an actual blog called “Samantha Sans Dosage,” is a prime example. As the scene opens, we find our heroine quivering under the spell of Paul Bara Champagne. “It was twenty minutes later,” she gushes, “and I had still not tasted the 2007 Tissot Chardonnay Les Bruyères that was spinning around in my glass. You know those moments when you just say ‘F*** it, I’m going to do it anyway’ ... yeah I was not about to end the full on, heart pounding, mind bending, groan inducing spell this wine had me under. I was being seduced, my mind and body reacting, flashes of sweaty skin, raw bread dough and salt spinning around me. Paul Ba-who Champagne? This sexy, raw ... earthy, intriguing wine had me pinned up against a wall in some seedy restaurant bathroom while everyone else was waiting for me to return to the table. Something familiar in that Blanc de Blancs or Chablis kind of way but ... even drier, earthier and way goddamn sexier. Pretty, elegant, polished? Hell no, this wine is naughty in that ‘Damn that’s sexy in that unconventional or almost ugly’ way. Not an ugly wine but a wine that I know only has a limited audience ... an audience like myself, those people that get turned on by sweaty ... earthy, weighty and wild.” Edward Bulwer-Lytton, eat your heart out.