Please choose only one. All of the options are off-putting to some extent. For me it's "fake fruit".

Question:
What one thing bothers you most about cheap, mediocre wine?

Choices:
Thin/green/unripe fruit
Fake-fruit flavors
Too simple, lacks complexity & nuance
Over-oaking
Too much residual sugar
Too much bottle variation
Unattractive, cheap packaging
It's not the wine that bothers me, it's the idiot who gave/served it to me!

 

Over oaking for me. I hate the wood chippy taste of many cheap California Chards, Zins and Cabs.

Residual Sugar. For example, Beringers latest effort, Bohemian Highway. Blech.

Thin un interesting wines for me. No complexity. (yawn...)

You forgot one. This is the biggest one for me in identifying a cheap wine....."the wine that bites you in the back of the throat".

thin, astringent, alcoholic (in a bad way) and tastes bad?

Boring fruit bombs....

Agree with Foghorn and Dale...when it is painful to swallow, you know its bad

I chose "too simple, lacks complexity and nuance".

Wait a minute... we were talking about the band Cheap Wine???

Actually, same answer then.

- Jeff

It's the highly manipulated "fake fruit" for me. Layer Cake Shiraz comes to mind...

quote:

Originally posted by Vinyrd Skynyrd:
Foghorn, I've never tried any of the MD2020/Tbird style wines. Is that what you're talking about with "bites you in the back of the throat"?

Not sure. I've never tried those. Try just about any $10 Cab and perhaps even more expensive for some, and you can't even choke them down. A wine shouldn't make you cough.

It's a combination of fermentation/alcohol, residual sugar/cotton candy taste and fake fruit....any of those will be a turnoff so I picked fake fruit.

bitter, throat burners

All alcohol and NO notable notes!

Chose thin fruit, green fruit, but in reality, it is stemmy wine that is astringent from stems and seeds. Hand sorting and de-stemming are good things that you don't get in $7 wines.

Over-oaking and - just as important - the use of too much cheap oak (resulting in an unbalanced vanillan nose with sickly sweet overtones).

Too bitter and sharp, alcohol is too high, too sweet. All these flaws casn occur in the same bottle.