How could something so pretty:
…be so evil?
It doesn’t *look* evil, does it? I mean, look at the lovely color in the bottom of the glass. How could something that color be awful? I mean, it’s VIOLET. It’s PRETTY.
And yet it was mean. Ill-natured. Vindictive. BAD.
See, as far as I can tell (to bastardize a quote beyond recognition): Bad Merlots are all alike. Good Merlots are all good in their own ways.* Because my most recent bottle of bad Merlot was so forcibly reminiscent of every other bottle of bad Merlot I’d ever encountered, I felt the need to see if I could finally put my finger on whatever it is that makes an otherwise innocuous bottle of wine truly, truly suck.
Here’s my most recent experience:
Open bottle, pour wine into glass.
*sniff*
Feet. It smells like feet. Stale feet, even.
At this point, I wasn’t alarmed. Many reds smell like stale feet when they’re first opened. It’s because they need aeration, which is why wine types will sit with a glass and swirl it absently while they’re chatting. Once the wine aerates, it starts to smell like all kinds of things: fruits, flowers, colors, mushrooms, earth, whatever. Before aeration, however, it’s pretty much stale feet. (Or whatever you’d like to call that smell – for me, stale feet is what comes to mind. Not particularly dirty, stinky feet, mind you, nor particularly clean, fresh feet. Just, you know. Feet.)
Undaunted by the foot smell, I gave the wine a quick, forceful swirl, and ignored it for a few minutes while I threw together an alfredo sauce.** Then I returned to the wine.
Swirl.
*sniff*
Feet.
I ate dinner.
Swirl.
*sniff*
Feet.
Tired of waiting, I decided to give it a try.
It tasted like feet (I’d imagine, anyway – I don’t make foot-tasting a habit), plus something that struck me as slightly plummy and slightly dusty, plus something that struck me as raspberry vinegar.***
I decided to wait longer. So I read a Cracked article.
Swirl.
*sniff*
Feet.
I read a Salon article.
Swirl.
*sniff*
Feet.
I read a few Hyperbole and a Half posts.
Swirl.
*sniff*
Feet.
*sigh*
Frustrated, I gave the wine the sort of vigorous swirling that makes me relieved to own 16 oz glasses, because smaller glasses would result in one hell of a mess. Then I leaned in, breathed deeply, tried to smell around the feet for something else. I got a faint whiff of plum and violet. The taste remained the same: foot-dust-plum-raspberry vinegar.
The smell *had* changed slightly, however – opened up a bit, I told myself - and this was enough to keep me invested. I left the wine on the coffee table and picked up a book to lose myself in for a while. A solid hour passed.
Swirl.
*sniff*
Feet.
Swirl (violent)
*sniff* (deep)
Feet.
*growl*
*sip*
Foot-dust-plum-raspberry vinegar.
I gave up.
In my mind, a good Merlot is a sensuous creature, velvet in texture, deep purple in color and layered in flavor. A bad Merlot is what I just described - so tightly wound that even if there is anything in there beyond the feet-like smell and taste of tannins, it flat won’t relax enough to let me discover what that might be. A few tantalizing hints might pop up from time to time, seeming heralds of a glorious glass, ultimately meaningless. While I’ll happily wait an hour or two on a Sunday afternoon for a glass to take its time to develop, I do need it to actually do so.
Bad Merlots don’t develop. They just leave you hanging, ultimately wishing something else - something worth drinking – were in the glass in front of you.
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*To Leo Tolstoy, wherever you may be, allow me to offer the deepest of apologies.
**If you don’t make your own alfredo, you should (if you eat alfredo and all that). It takes ten minutes and it’s much better than that jarred stuff. Seriously, throw it together while the pasta boils – it takes about the same amount of time.
***Please note, because this is important to remember: the wine hadn’t gone bad in any way. As in, it wasn’t too old, it wasn’t corked, it wasn’t cooked. It was just BAD.
