How can you be sure that what’s inside the bottle is what the label on the bottle claims it is?
The truth is: You can’t.
There are less than honorable people in virtually every walk of life, and the wine business is no different.
For centuries, a very small, ever changing group of individual winemakers have engaged in any number of shenanigans, with the ultimate goal of padding their wallets.
A few of their nefarious “methods”…
* Blending grapes of lesser quality into their “signature” (i.e., high-priced) wines.
* Taking an empty bottle of wine with a famous label, refilling it with relative plonk, recorking it, then selling it as the “real thing.”
* Gathering only the best, perfectly ripened grapes at harvest time, creating a fabulous wine, and sending that cuvee to influential writers for review — only to sell a very different wine (using all of the harvest’s fruit) to the public. Such specially-made bottlings are known as “critic cuvees.” If you’ve ever been “under-whelmed” by a pricy wine that received a 98-point rating from Wine Spectator or Robert Parker, you could have fallen victim to the “critic cuvee” ploy.
Ultimately, your best defense against such chicanery is to place your trust in a reputable supplier — such as the wine clubs of Vinesse.
The reputable wine businesses stand behind the products they make or sell.
The less than honorable ones seem to disappear in the night… just as their less than stellar wines disappear down the drain.
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Tomorrow on VinesseTODAY.com: A look at the new quality control system being implemented in the Bordeaux region of France.
