What is the WORST wine you've ever tasted?

[Rebel Rose]

There was a time in this forum when people would flap their hands in distress and say, "Rebel Rose! How can you ask that? Let's not discuss such indelicate things when there are so many wonderful wines in the world."

To whom I say, "Go away. You're no fun."

There are some pretty awful, gut-wrenching wines out there. One of them even made me sick. (It had been doctored with too much copper sulfate.) So I tell you what, you don't have to 'name names' if you're squeamish about that, but I'll bet you have tasted at least one wine in your liftetime that made you want to gag. And if you haven't ... well you just aren't trying enough new wines.

One of mine (and I've had many) was memorable because it was proudly served to me by a blind date. He knew nothing about wine, but he knew I liked wine, so he had somehow found an old 1980's era Mastantuono cabernet. It tasted like pureed asparagus, sea slug, and mouse fur with an aluminum foil finish.

So tell me, what was YOUR worst experience with a wine?

[Chris Hennes]

Well, if we're talking about non-corked wines here (my worst wine experience was one of those, where I was careless and didn't bother giving it a good sniff before taking a sip... blech), I had a pretty awful white a few months ago from Mount Aukum. It don't recall the grape: not their Viognier (which is what I thought I was buying), but something in a very similar bottle. It was a clearance for $15, I think, and it was horrendous. I don't know what sea slugs or mouse fur taste like, but this wine had a bizarre cloying quality to it coupled with a lingering ... fattiness? some kind of unpleasant mouthfeel that just hung around getting progressively more bitter ... it was definitely in my bottom five.

[Panaderia Canadiense]

I'll say my worst was a Reunite "Merlot" - served to me as a table wine at a restaurant that really should have known better. (Even the Clos box wines are better, but that's damning with faint praise.) Upfront and meaty garlic sausage tones followed by a metallic clash and an unpleasant, overripe naranjilla bitter finish. I believe it's the only wine I've ever set out to drink and then spit out. I had to gargle with Listerine to remove the lingering garlic and oily clinginess - a simple sparkling water didn't suffice.

[Edward J]

You have never had the luxuury of growing up in Saskatchewan in the '70's.....

Although my parents weren't big drinkers, they did like wine, but alas! only the following drexck was avaialble in Gov't liquor stores at the time:

-Moody blue

-Lonesome Charlie

-Baby Duck

and

-Schloss Laderheim

-Black tower

Now, I did sepearate the first group from the second, as the first group is in a category of it's own.....

[Panaderia Canadiense]

OMG, Baby Duck! I thought that was unique to Alberta.... It's still not the worst, but it's definitely in the bottom 5.

[gfweb]

A thing from Lebanon. Really foul. Had a fancy French-y label, but tasted like asphalt with a hint of napalm. Chateau Arafat or something like that.

edit for clarity

Edited August 19, 2012 by gfweb (log)

[thayes1c]

I bought a four foot tall bottle of 1969 chianti at a garage sale a few years ago. I just thought the bottle was cool and mentioned off hand that the wine probably wasn't good anymore, which got me the Jersey accented reponse "Whaddaya mean IF it's still good? People drinks wine all the time that's like four hundred years old!"

I did try the wine, and it was dreadful. A Japanese friend of mine thought it tasted like fish sauce. And I think he was the only one that finished his glass.

[Dave Hatfield]

Blue Nun!

Once at a business dinner an engineering colleague insisted upon ordering the wine. He choose Blue Nun.

We made him drink the whole bottle while we ordered something palatable.

[dockhl]

I had a cheap bottle from TJ's that was an ugni/viognier blends that just tasted like.......feet ............bad stuff !

[Paul Bacino]

The ones that taste like "Bell Pepper"!!

[munchymom]

You know how sometimes Sauvignon Blanc is described as having a note of "cat pee"? I had one once that was full-on litterbox. It was the most disgusting thing I've ever tasted. I threw up in the sink and promptly poured the rest of the bottle out.

[rotuts]

this would be the worst of the "mass produced" : Trader Joe's 2 Buck Chuck.

it available in Mass. for the bonus of One Buck ( 3 buck chuck ) to support local graft and corruption. If you keep them employed this way, they wont branch out else-ware!

[annabelle]

The worst? Some white sherry from Spain that I bought on clearance about 25 years ago.

[ChrisTaylor]

All the big supermarket booze chains here, as well as the supermarkets themselves, sell cheap cleanskins. $5-10 per bottle, which maybe sounds expensive in US terms, I know. I know about two buck chuck. That's a price point that for a while, at least, those big outlets didn't lower themselves to. I mean, wine, normal bad wine, the real entry level stuff, starts at $7-10. I mean, we've come along way, as a civilisation, from mostly drinking goon (Australian to non-Australian translation: cask wine). But at some point one of the big chains decided they'd roll out a range of $2 clean skins. Now, I mean, booze in Australia is expensive. I say this again and again but I really need to make this clear. So on top of the usual production costs associated with a $2 or $200 bottle of wine--the cost of the bottle, shipping, grapes, wages, etc--there's also the fairly steep tax we pay on booze. Plus the store's profit margin. And we have a fairly small population--I mean, I'm sure chuck in the States is a bad wine, but you have a really big population, so I can sell something at a low price and kind of bank on sales figures getting me over the line. You can't do that in a gigantic island populated by about 20,000,000 people. Not going to work. Especially not where you can buy drinkable wine for not much more per bottle. So just think on that for a moment.

Anyway, at the time I was running a cooking class, sort of, for a bunch of kids. We were steaming some mussels and I was a poor student and this was all coming out of my pocket, so the $2 Chaaarrddee (at a certain price point, it stops being Chardonnay and gets said in the worst kind of Australian accent you can imagine) sounded like a plan. And, sure, it worked for its purpose: pouring into a scalding hot pan with $5 worth of shellfish. It worked for that. I mean, so would water. And this stuff was cheaper than bottled water. That in itself was a bit controversial, even, with the supermarket chain in question being told they were encouraging drunks. But, the wine. Once the children left, a couple tutors and I decided to try it, mostly to see what $2 wine tastes like. The same kind of novelty value, I guess, you associate with a really old whisky or expensive wine. You want to know what's special about it. Why it's all worthwhile.

Tasting notes: urine from someone who doesn't drink enough water, who places said urine in a manky old plastic bucket and leaves it outside pn a summer's day until it's mostly evaporated, mostly concentrated, then ages it in old socks, like he's in prison.

[Kerry Beal]

OMG, Baby Duck! I thought that was unique to Alberta.... It's still not the worst, but it's definitely in the bottom 5.

You can still get it in some places in Ontario and Alberta (although they don't call it wine anymore - instead it's a refreshment drink). It was made by Andres wine which is now Peller Estates in Grimsby, Ontario. It was made with labrusca grapes (the same type Welch's Grape juice and jelly is made from) instead of wine grapes. I don't remember it tasting so bad when I was 16 - but sure wouldn't want to drink it now.

[blue_dolphin]

this would be the worst of the "mass produced" : Trader Joe's 2 Buck Chuck.....

I've tried Two Buck Chuck and I can't call it the worst wine I've ever tasted. It's innocuous, boring, soul-less and entirely uninteresting. I have no desire to drink it again but "worst-tasting?" No.

That honor (horror?) goes to something that tasted like a watered down blend of kerosene and vinegar. It was about 20 years ago at a tourist trap "farmhouse" cafe outside Athens on a cruise tour and had the same lingering, oily mouthfeel that Panaderia Canadiense describes above. Awful, awful, awful. Two Buck Chuck could never be so memorable !

Edited August 20, 2012 by blue_dolphin (log)

[haresfur]

You have never had the luxuury of growing up in Saskatchewan in the '70's.....

Although my parents weren't big drinkers, they did like wine, but alas! only the following drexck was avaialble in Gov't liquor stores at the time:

-Moody blue

-Lonesome Charlie

-Baby Duck

and

-Schloss Laderheim

-Black tower

Now, I did sepearate the first group from the second, as the first group is in a category of it's own.....

My immediate thought was Canadian wine from the same time period. In comparison to Kelowna muscatel, baby duck was divine.

[Zeemanb]

Haven't imbibed in a few years, and I would drink ANYTHING, but Fisheye brand wines were too terrible even for me. Oh, and honorable mention to Night Train Express.

[Nyleve Baar]

A thing from Lebanon. Really foul. Had a fancy French-y label, but tasted like asphalt with a hint of napalm. Chateau Arafat or something like that.

I had that one! Someone bought it to our house once and the name contained the word "terroir" which my son doctored up with a sharpie to read "terrorist" instead. It was horrible.

But wait, there's more. My husband once ended up with a case of wine from a Finger Lakes winery (long story) which contained several bottles of their flagship wine: Black Russian Red. This was made from some kind of rare grape that we were told no one else was using to make wine. With good reason. It was impossible to choke down and, believe me, I'm no delicate flower.

[Alex]

On my one and only visit to France, in 1971, we were going to have a "French lunch" of bread, cheese, and wine (and maybe some charcuterie; my memory's fuzzy on that). I suspect we ate it al fresco despite the cool, grey January weather. Having recently graduated from college and with limited income, I had picked up what I thought was a great bargain -- a genuine French rosé for the equivalent of about $1 U.S. It was vile.

[KennethT]

A couple of years ago, my wife and some friends were in the midst of Unit 3 of the WSET Diploma course.... The practical part of the exam was (IIRC) 12 wines served blind, which could come from anywhere in the world, so in preparation, for months we did weekly tastings of all the possible wine regions, and then comparitive tastings of regions that could be confused with each other. Most of the weeks were a lot of fun, and quite tasty, until we got to the wines of Eastern Europe - mostly Romania... most of them were pretty bad - definitely a result of unclean winery practices at the very least, but the one that stole the show was from Ukraine. It smelled and tasted like a dirty diaper that had been left in the sun for a few days. And the length!!! Wow, it just went on and on...

[Hassouni]

MOST Lebanese wine is quite good.

I think three buck Chuck is about as bad as I've ever bought myself

[Porthos]

Kick around 2 buck chuck if you want. I know why a BV Georges de Latour is worth the money and that for my money Grgich Hills Zinfandel is a quality wine but I don't care for the mouth feel compared to other good Zins. I drink 2 buck chuck Shiraz as a simple week-day table wine and I enjoy it.

That being said i went through a phase many years ago of trying to find a "real find" in the wines that pic'n'sav used to sell off. I think all the the money I wasted and the schlock that I ended up pouring down the drain finally convinced me to quit experimenting in that fashion and spend my money on wines of which I know who the producers are.

I do have a geographical advantage in that I am a California native and can actually visit wineries without having to go broke travelling. I also get to try a lot of different Cabs and Zins courtesy of my FIL who is a long-time member of the Orange County Wine Society.

[nibor]

Boone's Farm Apple Wine.

Tastes much worse coming up than going down......

[Pierogi]

Boone's Farm Apple Wine.

Tastes much worse coming up than going down......

*shudder* Word, sister !

Also the Almaden Rhineskeller Moselle that I encountered after the "return engagement" it made when I was a junior in college. I had gone home for the weekend, gotten rip-roaringly pukey drunk from it, and just jammed my shall we say, "soiled" clothes into a plastic shopping bag to take home to the dorm to wash. When I opened that bag, after the wine puke had fermented overnight and most of Sunday it was....not pleasant. I had also poured some out of the 2 or 3 liter bottle into a plastic refrigerator jug to live in my little dorm fridge. I knew there was no way I could drink it, so I dumped it and soaked the jug in like 4 or 5 changes of very hot water, even with Tide. Never could kill that smell......I'd go to take a swig of cold water from the fridge and my toenails would curl up again. I ended up pitching that plastic jug into the trash.

I still can't drink sweet wines, of any ilk.