WTN: The Great Sierra Car Crash Tasting (14 wines, mostly Spanish)

Wow. So interesting. I have followed the Sierra Carche thread and was totally astonished of what happens in the world of wine criticism, where a sample is provided to a critic, and then the wine in the bottle that gets to the market bears no resemblance to the wine that the wine critic rated.

The only way to solve this is, IMHO, to punish a winery when such a behavior appears. If I was The Wine Advocate I would not rate a wine by the producer or branding company for 5 years. Second time, no rates anymore.

Anyway, In the last couple of weeks I was invited to some tastings for the initial assortment of wines of a new wine shop in my town. I love this tastings because they provide such a good view of the panorama of a given wine region (plus sometime I take a few leftovers back home for free).

But this time, with most of wines from different emerging regions from Spain (read: Southeast Spain) has been so deceiving: 90% of wines were plainly undrinkable. Overripe and overextracted, with harshest tannins. Most of them were cut the same: dense, thick, syrupy and black. None of them showed the slightest balance or elegance.

If this is how Spain is to conquer the world wine markets, I bet we are not getting any success.

And, worst of all, my bet is that all this inmense quantity of crap wine is taylored to be tasted by Mr. Parker et al. And when you see the ratings of Miller of the same wines that smell like crap, tast like crap and are closer to crap than they are to real wine, I cannot but ask myself if he does have a clue or if he is presented totally a different product.

s.

Spain has hit both high and low notes. The make a lot of wine and some of it is just going to be awful as from any country. I'm big on Portugal but have had many outright stinkers. Weren't the Sierra Carche wines rated in Wine Expectator? If so, nough said for me.

Lawrence Leichtman wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@newsfarm.iad.highwinds-media.com:

We have just to accept that most of the wine produced in any country has not much interest to educated wine drinkers. France and Italy produce huge amounts of crap also.

In Spain, you can find decent wine that comes in 1 litre tetra-pak and is more than correct. Actually, it is much better than the crap of the wine tasting I wrote about previously. But most of the wines in those tastings I was referring to tried to be upscale wine made in a big, bold, in your face style. And they failed miserably to be drinkable wines.

I'm big on

I have only once browsed an issue of Wine Spectator and did not like it, so I cannot tell you if they tasted the Sierra Carche wines.

Best,

s.

Amen