After spending five days in California visiting wineries in Suisun Valley, Lake County and Napa, I’ve heard other wine travelers from outside California make a statement indicating that wines from some other state or region “aren’t very good” or “are bad.” Well this is Sunday so I hope you don’t mind a sermon. I have to get back on the soapbox and preach.

Since it was a blanketed statement, I interpreted “aren’t very good” or “bad” as “I don’t like the wines from …” I wish people could actually say they don’t like wines from an area rather than using the word “bad” or phrase “not very good.” In the wine industry a “bad” wine has a certain meaning. The wine has a fault that is at a degree where the consumer can perceive it. How frequently does this happen?

Kathy and I have visited 440 wineries since we began Wine Trail Traveler. We have tasted over 2,200 wines at these wineries and countless wines at other functions. Of these, we believe that one winery had an entire portfolio of bad wines. That only represents 0.22% of the wineries we visited. There was an off aroma and taste to all their wines both whites and reds and those aged in oak and those aged in stainless steel. We believe that some bacteria is in the winery and equipment. One out of 440 is rather small for serving faulted wine. We did encounter TCA, cork taint, twice. One time was at a winery in only one bottle and one time was at a class at the New York Wine and Culinary Center. At the winery, the corked wine was not readily detectable to some of the customers who sampled it. The owner of the winery spotted it immediately. The one corked bottle opened at the culinary center was so potently “corked” that one could smell “the musty cardboard box in a humid crawl space for twenty years smell” from several feet away. We did encounter a bottle of wine that had a strong household chemicals smell at another winery. The winemaker smelled it and opened another bottle that was fine. These wines were bad.

So I’d like to suggest that wine travelers who like to say that wines from a certain area are “bad” or “aren’t very good” back it up. State why the wines are bad. If it is simple that you don’t like the wines, go ahead and say you don’t like the wines. You might then decide to learn about terroir. Often wines that people don’t like are different, not bad.