There are a 1,000 reasons why this might happen. The more processed and industrialised a wine is, the more likely you are to find uniformity from one bottle to the next.
At the extremes of this scale, you might say it’s like buying a lurid packet of Mr Kipling’s cakes (Blossom Hill, anyone?) compared to a box of plums (natural wine), some of which will taste sweeter than others and one or two of which might have a little bruise.
But what about all those wines in between? The ones we find in the supermarket that aren’t corked or oxidised or anything else but just… don’t taste as we remember them?
Timing makes a difference, of course: wines develop, which can be a good thing or, on occasion, a very bad thing. Some cheap wines don’t have the power to last the year they need to be on shelf before the next vintage comes along.
Like a marathon runner who hasn’t put in the training, you can feel them flagging after six months; by the 10th they’re lying by the side of the road waiting for St John Ambulance.
There were a couple of those at the recent Asda press tasting. “This is completely shagged,” as one of my tasting colleagues put it of the Asda Corbières 2009 France (£3.56), a technical term that didn’t go down awfully well with the buyer.
The 2010 of the same wine, by contrast, looked really good – but it was an as-yet unbottled tank sample, due to arrive some time before Christmas, so I’d want to taste it again in its finished condition before recommending it.
With the cheapest wines, it’s common practice for supermarket buyers to tweak the blend that goes into a particular label across the year to keep it tasting fresh.
For example, a white blend of colombard and ugni blanc from southern France might be made dryer as the year wears on because as its acidity fades, too much sweetness will make it taste lazy and sluggish.
You’re not necessarily being short-changed by being given a different wine; the idea here is to create a greater semblance of consistency, although you may well notice a difference.
Talking of blends, a bottle of wine looks so neat and tidy it is easy to believe that one is identical to the next, but it’s logical that the number you can make from the same batch is dictated by the size of your largest mixing bowl.
That’s why Ernest & Julio Gallo have a subterranean blending tank so large they have been known to invite a full-sized orchestra to play inside it.
And why, at the Cave de Saumur, an excellent co-operative in the Loire, they have eight tanks each with a capacity of 100,000 litres, or about 130,000 bottles of wine. This blend can then be stored in smaller tanks and bottled to order – wine ages more slowly in tank than it does in bottle, so the idea here is to keep the wine fresh until it’s sold.
In theory, new bottlings should taste virtually the same but, somehow, sometimes, they just don’t.
I’ve known buyers ask for fresh samples to be sent out to journalists because a new bottling wasn’t showing as well at a tasting as they felt it should.
I’ve also tasted wines that appear to be the same but vary so wildly in quality I find it hard to believe they could possibly have come from the same blend at all.
A case in point was Waitrose’s own-label claret which, last autumn, I tried on several occasions inside a week, fascinated by its extreme awfulness. How could anyone let such a wine through? It tasted as if a small family of mice had been drowned in it and left to decompose.
Two months later, I called the wine in again, feeling certain that it would make the grade for an article I was writing on what not to buy. And guess what?
It tasted completely different – an improvement I would find hard to put down to a couple of months of ageing in bottle.
Sometimes wines go the other way. I’ve seen competition judges frowning in lack of recognition over wines which, just a few months earlier, they had garlanded with awards.
Could it be that, sometimes, a winning blend sells out and a lesser blend, from different tanks, is made and bottled in its stead?
“That would be a very big accusation,” Philippa Carr at Asda points out.
All of this variability might seem taxing, but it’s life: if we really want wine to be produced on a grand enough scale to stock every supermarket in the land, then different bottlings and blends are an inevitable outcome.
And, most of the time, they do work in our favour.
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