When Good Wine Goes Bad

With six you get a wine tote and a 10% discount.

Last Friday I bought six bottles of wine at the grocery store.  I decided to splurge and buy some of the “quite good” wine, not the mediocre stuff I usually get.  Who knew six bottles of wine could weigh so much?  The wine tote was quite heavy.

Since I had several bags of groceries to carry up 3½ flights of stairs, I brought up only two bottles of wine from the car when I got home.

And I proceeded the forget about the rest.

When I brought the wine tote with the remaining four bottles in Saturday afternoon, the bottles were warm.  I figured the glass would cool down and everything would be ok.  The bottles stayed in the tote until last Monday evening, when I took them out for longer term storage.

Oi!  One bottle of  red bottle and one of white appeared to have been partially opened, as shown in the photo at right.  My immediate thought was that I’d been sold samples,, although the bottles were full.  Then I noticed another white wine had no cork in it at all! That’s I knew I was the culprit, and that I was in trouble. Or would have been, if I had a more discerning palate.

Could these bottles of wine be saved?  Apparently not, according to several web sites.  However, I am a person who can drink vending machine coffee black, so I wasn’t going to let a little oxidized wine scare me away.  Of course, I won’t be serving the wine to anyone else.

I haven’t tried the Kendall-Jackson pictured yet, but the other white wine (the one with the missing cork), didn’t seem to be discolored (another sign of good wine gone bad).  It did have a rather sharp taste, as did the “partially uncorked” Merlot.  But after the first glass, my taste buds were sufficiently dulled so as not to care.

Lesson learned.

[Top photo credit San Diego Wine Storage]