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If you drink wine with any regularity, you may have had this experience: you buy a bottle of a type and maker you have not previously sampled; you try the new bottle and find it a most pleasing wine—good fruit, vibrant but balanced acid, perhaps a bit of minerality, pleasing complexity. You then, based on that experience, buy another bottle of the same, or pehaps even two or three more. The next bottle you try seems like an altogether different thing: flat, thin, minimal flavor—just not at all appealing. Yuck!
Moreover, it may well be that that second bottle was of the same vintage, bought from the same retailer; perhaps even bought soon after the first one. So what in Heavens is going on? How can this be?
The phenomenon is, within the trade, quite well enough known to have a distinct name: bottle variation.
We call it “a dirty little secret”. “Secret” because it is rarely mentioned in the countless pages, web and printed, that deal with wine for the consumer. “Dirty” because it is something that should be well known to consumers, but is, apparently, not to be spoken of. (At least, not usually.)
What It Means
So what exactly does that term“bottle variation” mean? Here is the entry for it in the prestigious Oxford Companion to Wine, edited by the eminent Jancis Robinson:
Bottle Variation is one of the more tantalizing aspects of wine appreciation. It is only to be expected with a product as sensitive to storage conditions as wine that bottles of the same wine will differ—perhaps because one has been exposed to higher temperatures or greater humidity. There can, however, be a perceptible difference in quality and character between bottles from the very same case. Subjectivism may play a part, as well as a difference in levels, but the individual wines before they went into bottle may have differed, as indeed did bottling conditions. It was not until the 1970s, for example, that it became commonplace for Bordeaux châteaux to ensure that a uniform blend was made before bottling; some of the world’s more artisanal producers still bottle by hand from cask to cask. Similarly, wines bottled on two different occasions may find themselves packed in the same case (although modern lot number marking provides more clues on this respect.)
“Tantalizing” indeed! “Irritating” or “frustrating” might be more like it.
Look, we all realize, or should realize, that many of the determining matters are difficult or impossible to fully control. Those winemakers who do not care to trouble themselves to try to assure that the bottles they send out into the world are as alike as can reasonably be controlled are not that many, and their numbers are dwindling. But the conditions of transport and storage are by and large beyond any winemaker’s control. What we object to is not so much the fact of bottle variation as the apparent refusal of the trade to make it known and to clarify how and why it happens. The result of this excess of discretion is that consumers are perplexed and frustrated when they encounter it, as all regular consumers eventually will.
How to Deal With It
They key point is to understand that your first sample of a given bottling may not be representative of that bottling.
If you find that first sample quite good but then find a second sampling not so good, you owe it to yourself to go for a two-out-of-three vote. (That’s not ideal—five bottles would be better, but few of us can afford to spend so much on samples).) Or, if your first sample is disappointing, then—assuming you had good reason to expect a better result (such as substantial good reviews)—you really should try another bottle of it sometime before giving up on it.
(Mind, all that assumes that you have learned enough about wine faults to know the difference between a disappointing bottle and a bottle that has manifest flaws. Remember that “In a 2005 study of 2800 bottles tasted at the Wine Spectator blind-tasting facilities in Napa, California, 7% of the bottles were found to be tainted.” Flaws are not rare. The amateurs who post reviews severely deprecating this or that otherwise much-recommended wine are usually folk who have hit a flawed bottle—a one-off oddity that has nothing to do with the winemaker’s product—and don’t know flawed wine from inferior wine.)
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