The Lemon Fool

I bought a bottle of this in Tesco the other day. I did so as I'd not had a Shiraz for a while, and as it was to accompany an everyday meal I wasn't going to buy a premium wine. I think it was `reduced' from £7 to £6, and as I'd tried most of the other brands on the shelf I thought I'd give it a try.

It was the most undrinkable red wine I think I've ever had!

It smelt a bit odd when I had a sniff of the glass, but when I took my first gulp I almost gagged. It was sweet! I mean properly sweet, not just fruity. It was vile - like alcoholic Ribena.

As I resented wasting £6 I forced a glass down, vaguely hoping it might grow on me, but if anything it just got worse, and I ended up pouring the rest of it down the sink, something I can't ever recall doing unless a bottle had gone off. I wouldn't have dreamed of using it for cooking.

I Googled reviews of it, expecting similar horrified reactions, but to my astonishment it got consistently high scores. I can't ever recall my perception of a wine being so utterly at odds with that of the majority of other drinkers.

So whether it's that most of the reviewers simply enjoy sweet red wine or it's just some peculiar feature of my taste buds I'm not sure, but over the past 20 odd years the overall standard of even cheap wine has increased very considerably, and it was therefore something of a revelation that it's still actually possible to buy wine that I found undrinkable.

It also got me wondering whether any other Fools had tried it and if so what did they think?

What you need for moments like this is not an online community, but a proper local one where you can solicit opinions with the aid of a taster of the offending wine itself.

On a more serious note, do you not sometimes find a wine you loved last time now tastes bland or even unpleasant, or vice versa? My taste in booze does a bit of that, sometimes with the season and environment (e.g. a Pinot Grigio particularly suits sitting on the terrace on a hot summer day), sometimes pretty-much inexplicably. On a macro scale, I completely lost my taste for Brit-style real ale whilst in Italy, not just in the mediterranean summer, but year-round. Maybe another day you might react differently to this tipple?

(Never heard of, let alone tasted, the wine you so loved).

I have previously returned both wine and Sherry to Tesco when I felt it was undrinkable. The sherry had half a cork floating in the bottle though the stopper looked intact to me so we didn't notice until a couple of glasses in. I returned the complete cap and part bottle of sherry for a replacement. I think our supermarkets are more concerned with customer satisfaction so I'd have taken it back.

Clitheroekid wrote:I bought a bottle of this in Tesco the other day. I did so as I'd not had a Shiraz for a while, and as it was to accompany an everyday meal I wasn't going to buy a premium wine. I think it was `reduced' from £7 to £6, and as I'd tried most of the other brands on the shelf I thought I'd give it a try.

It was the most undrinkable red wine I think I've ever had!

Maybe they got the Jam and the wine grapes mixed up I simply never drink this kind of wine under any circumstances - life is too short and good wine in plentiful supply. The picture on the Tesco website is very poor but I think the warning signs are there:

1. The wine looks like the 2016 vintage. These wines are not really made to keep and spend next to no time in barrels, so it's possibly a bit long in the tooth although I suspect the "fault" you found was intended to match the increasingly sweet tooth of the average gormless UK consumer. Of course, the 13.5% alcohol also tells a story - that's pretty low for a hot region like SE Australia and any sugar in the grape juice that doesn't convert into alcohol stays as sugar in the final wine.

2. It's labelled as "Wine of South East Australia" - you need to take into account that this is a HUGE area and means the grapes can be sourced from pretty much any of the major grape growing areas in Australia. This wine has no soul!

I would check the label to see where it was bottled. This is more than likely a bulk wine that was shipped half way round the world in a huge plastic container and bottled in an industrial estate on the outskirts of Manchester. I think you'd be far better off spending your £6 down Byrne's next time

All the best, Si

simoan wrote:I simply never drink this kind of wine under any circumstances - life is too short and good wine in plentiful supply.

Indeed. "Life is too short for bad wine" would make a good motto for any kitchen, including mine. Which is not to say that I don't ever buy £6 wine - I'm just a bit picky about which ones. Cheap Californian, cheap Rioja, cheap Argentinean Malbec - forget it!

Sainsbury's Taste the Difference Primitivo is often to be found at six quid, and it's fairly complex, warm and rather spicy. Whereas the bottle of Padthaways (Australian Sauvignon) that I once bought "on special offer" was more like sick squid. And it gave me the most horrendous hangover, something I have rarely experienced since my student days.

The OP could probably have cooked with the offending wine, rather than tipping it straight down the sink, but that's always a calculated gamble I suppose. It would be a shame if a £6 wine killed a £20 boeuf bourguignon!

BJ

kempiejon wrote:I have previously returned both wine and Sherry to Tesco when I felt it was undrinkable. The sherry had half a cork floating in the bottle though the stopper looked intact to me so we didn't notice until a couple of glasses in. I returned the complete cap and part bottle of sherry for a replacement. I think our supermarkets are more concerned with customer satisfaction so I'd have taken it back.

I quite agree that if the product's faulty it should be returned, but with this I don't think it was faulty - at least not objectively. It tasted revolting to me, but I don't think there was anything technically wrong with it, so I'd no grounds for requesting a refund.

I think you'd be far better off spending your £6 down Byrne's next time

I'm invariably better off spending my £££ in Byrne's rather than Tesco. Unfortunately, Byrne's aren't open at 9:30 in the evening!

Medium sweet red wine is a definate 'no' for me. I'm sure there are good ones but they just don't tickle my taste buds.

Thank you for the warning CK. I've put the bottle OH was given for sorting out a friend's computer to one side, no doubt someone will be asking for donations for raffle prizes for something or other.

R6

You're right that Jam Shed Shiraz is remarkably, surprisingly, almost sickeningly sweet.
My taste in reds has always been towards the French style of dry, oaky, complex with loads of tannin, but I also like a full-bodied wine, so some Portuguese fit the bill as well.
However, when I first started drinking in my late teens, there was an Australian cask wine available in New Zealand called Velluto Rosso, which was as you described, alcoholic ribena. Having a very unsophisticated palate, I loved it, and various girlfriends and I got drunk and had some great nights out with a cardboard cask of this stuff. I can't remember its alcohol %, but it obviously worked for us.
The first time I tried the Jam Shed Shiraz, I was transported back 40 years to those halcyon days of youth, with all their breathless drunken parties, first kisses and wild dancing.
It's not a wine I'd tell anyone else I liked, because it's like drinking Southern Comfort and Lemonade - it's a kid's drink - but it still makes me smile. It's far too sweet for the heatwave we have going on at the moment, but it's a guilty pleasure I can enjoy sometimes with friends who don't judge.
Taken for what it is, it has been consistent over the last few years, and I still buy it when I'm looking for a casual, overly sweet, value for money red.
Just don't expect anything too sophisticated!

Um... with. name like "Jam Shed", I would have thought the outcome you experienced was highly predictable!!!

Suggestion to the importers: double the price & rebrand it as a dessert wine.

GrahamPlatt wrote:Suggestion to the importers: double the price & rebrand it as a dessert wine.

A RED dessert wine, now there's an idea!!

But on reflection though.....

There used to be a delicious deep purple Californian dessert wine available as half bottles in Costco called Elysium. It was terrific about fifteen years ago, then, within some five years (probably a victim of its own success) became a shadow of its former self, comparatively watery, both in colour and flavour.

like alcoholic Ribena.
That's right up my street - thanks for the tip !
Make a change from Beaujolais and Marzemino

Mike4 wrote:

GrahamPlatt wrote:Suggestion to the importers: double the price & rebrand it as a dessert wine.

A RED dessert wine, now there's an idea!!

But on reflection though.....

You mean you've never had a glass of Banyuls with a Chocolate dessert? If not, you should try it!

All the best, Si

simoan wrote:

Mike4 wrote:

GrahamPlatt wrote:Suggestion to the importers: double the price & rebrand it as a dessert wine.

A RED dessert wine, now there's an idea!!

But on reflection though.....

You mean you've never had a glass of Banyuls with a Chocolate dessert? If not, you should try it!

All the best, Si

No, I haven't!

Is it as good as a mug of Jam Shed?

Mike4 wrote:

simoan wrote:

Mike4 wrote:
A RED dessert wine, now there's an idea!!

But on reflection though.....

You mean you've never had a glass of Banyuls with a Chocolate dessert? If not, you should try it!

All the best, Si

No, I haven't!

Is it as good as a mug of Jam Shed?

Would you be surprised to hear I have never had the "pleasure" of drinking Jam Shed? Let alone from a mug! However, Banyuls is a red grape based dessert wine that goes very well with Chocolate. I imagine it's very much nicer than Jam Shed.

Sorry if this post's sub-title raises any wholly predictable misunderstandings on this side of the Pond, but I was reminded the other day of the first and only time I encountered something called Thunderbird. That was more than forty years ago in Birmingham (West Midlands, not Alabama), and the question that needed answering was how they could make a wine with 17.5% alcohol and sell it for £1.50 a bottle?

The answer, of course, was that it wasn't wine at all. It was E&J Gallo's solution for all of life's problems, made from the dreggiest sweepings-up from the winery floor, along with what might well have been fermented corn syrup. And it was formulated to get you half a night's sleep in the gutter before you woke up and threw it all up again.

An American classic, in the unashamed words of its progenitors. Or, as the highly entertaining http://www.bumwine.com puts it: "if you like to smell your hand after pumping gas, look no further than Thunderbird."

But what kind of a cheapskate would bring it to a party in Brum? Somebody who was presumably hoping to drink somebody else's kitchen booze instead. Suddenly, even the ghastly Nicolas gut-rot of the 1970s seemed almost palatable by comparison.

BJ

Ah Nicolas..Nicolas...
In 1973 or thereabouts my wife and I won a competition advertised on bottles of Nicolas wine.
Q (on bottle): What is a master spy's greatest asset
A (us): A code in the head
and this was worth four nights in Paris's George V plus flights, limo etc etc but sadly excluding dinner

Clitheroekid wrote:It was the most undrinkable red wine I think I've ever had!

Never tried it but drifting O/T slightly undrinkable wines can be put to other uses than cooking - we've had a tub of walnuts off our tree macerating away since June in some cheap stuff, the first year we are attempting a Vin de Noix. You've just reminded me it needs another shake, we'll be bottling it at the end of the month, and trying some at Christmas.