I have officially become the “wine person” of my family. This baffles me as I am still just twenty-two and my knowledge of wine has mainly stemmed from some bumbling around, reading, and drinking. The upside of fooling people into thinking that I “know stuff” about wine is that I am often gifted this treat. If there’s one thing I enjoy more than a nice glass of wine, it’s an okay glass of wine that I don’t have to pay for. That being said, every so often the wine I am gifted is pretty darn awful. This was the case with the Rosemount Estate‘s 2000 Shiraz.
A rusty red color, thinner than Fiji water, and somehow smelling like day-old salsa, this was just plain bad. Admittedly, this wine shouldn’t have been aged, and I still have no idea how it was stored, where the hell it came from before someone passed it off to me, or when it was in its prime, but I’d guess that all three of these unknowns led to this wine’s demise. Scrunching up my face a bit with the two sips I managed to swallow, I marked this one down as a loss. My dad stuck his nose in the glass, declared that it smelled like vinegar, and then refused to try it. Afterwards, he told me that he knew more about wine than I did since he didn’t even have to take a sip to know it was bad. Considering the fact that the man drinks glasses of cognac as if they’re Pepsi, I have no doubt that he is well-versed in booze. However, I still believe if I hadn’t made a face of disgust when I first sipped the Shiraz, he wouldn’t have been so confident in his original assessment of it.
Opening up a wine and realizing it is bad is akin to going to the movies to see Guardians of the Galaxy and then discovering the theater is solely playing rom-coms. There’s disappointment, despair, and the chilling realization that you may just have to suffer through the worst evening ever. Luckily, with this misstep, we just placed the bottle aside, mixed up some cocktails, and proceeded with our Friday night family time. It wasn’t the way I intended to spend my evening, but this was a great learning experience on the caution with which to approach gifted wines. Hopefully, it’s one I won’t have to learn twice.
A Famished Foodie 
Well, you have to give a slack to the 15 year old bottle of wine, with unknown storage conditions and also not meant for aging from the get go. Bad wine can always happen, you should just accept it as an oenophile, and the only way to deal with it is to have another bottle always available “just in case”.
I certainly wasn’t expecting much from the bottle, though I was still holding out some hope that it might have been okay! I’ve had plenty of great bottles to make up for it.
Not sure which Rosemount it was, but if it’s their regular one Anatoli is right – best way to drink it is to get in a your time machine back to 2001. But free wine is free wine. Cheers!
Haha, well, I only had it for a week before I opened it, but I’d go back to 2001 and tell whoever bought it to open it up before it turned into this hot mess!