Fill del Temps 2004 Gran Seleccio Red Wine

*Bottle #50: Fill del Temps 2004 Gran Seleccio Terra Alta Red Wine
*Price Tag: $18
*Running Tab: $581

My wine shop owner tells me somewhere between here and Spain (via a LA importer), Spanish wines can tend to be a "little skunky," often times one bottle per case falling into that descriptor.

"Skunky" wine*: An analogous smell, which is caused by mercaptans.
"Mercaptans*:" The result of hydrogen sulfide combining with the components of wine. The result is a pungently offensive, sour odor that can smell like garlic, stale sweat, skunk, or rubber.
*Definitions courtesy Epicurious.com

This is often a sign of careless winemaking and let's you know the wine's turning into crap, for lack of better phrasing... No offense.

The first time I tried the 2004 Fill del Temps red blend of 55% Garnacha, 40% Carignan and 5% Cabernet Sauvignon, I was hopeful. I've really liked my recent Grenache experiences and Carignan is getting bigger and bigger in my local wine area, where as Cab is often times fail-proof and in this case is a backbone for the blend.

Upon tasting this wine, all hope, tastebuds and my stomach went to the wall. I could have sworn the wine was port from my first sniff of the wine. I smelled raisins, dried fig and some leaf-like aromas in the back. Beyond ripe fruits with oak came out a lot but I think the best way to describe it is that the nose was like the winemaker crushed the grapes and pressed the skins off the grapes but then bottled the skins with the juice.

Nose = Chewed up and spit out grape stems. Yeah.

And it tasted just like it smelled, but not in the good way that I get excited about. Remember, chewed up, spit out grape stems.

A sharp and acidic attack with lots of oak, grape skins, borderline fruit leather-ish on the mid palate and finishing out with, again, that acid and lingering sour on the tongue.

Yummy, right? So we figured there was something wrong with the bottle. It wasn't corked, it might have been oxidized or just a crappy bottle of wine. I took it back to the wine shop, told the owner about it and enter the "skunky" speech. He gave me a new bottle, promised with a sales smile that it was just as much of a "fruit bomb" as he had initially described and so I tried it a couple weeks later.

Low and behold, it was just as bad as the first bottle. Flat out undrinkable. Case and point, Spanish wine is known to have that occasional bad bottle in the bunch but not two bottles in a row from the same case.

This was simply bad wine. But gosh, did it look pretty!

Score: 1.