Jesus may have been able to turn water into wine, but did he ever go the other way around?
This happened in a wine competition last weekend in San Diego: three bottles of Napa Valley Chardonnay contained nothing but water.
| Related stories: |
| California Growers Left High and Dry |
| Looking at a World Without Wine Bottles |
| The Editor and the Wine Competition |
Three bottles of 2020 Black Stallion Napa Valley Chardonnay were sent to Critics Challenge for the annual competition (disclosure: I have judged at this competition in the past, but not in recent years.) Judges evaluated the first bottle and thought that for Napa Valley Chardonnay, it seemed a little light. So the backup bottles were called for and it turned out they all contained the most precious fluid in drought-stricken California – instead of wine.
By Monday afternoon, the winery, owned by Delicato Family Wines, had figured out what happened. Corey Beck, vice president of production and head winemaker, said no bottles of water under the Black Stallion label were sent out to the general public. Beck told Wine-Searcher that it was a bottling-line mistake; 12 bottles of water were mistakenly created but only the three sent to Critics Challenge left the winery.
Michael Apstein, who writes for publications including the Boston Globe, Wine Review Online and Decanter, was one of the judges asked to score the Chardonnay.
"We're doing a judging, and we're supposed to be judging Chardonnays, and out comes this very pale-colored wine. It looks like it could be unoaked Chardonnay," Apstein told Wine-Searcher. "The glass was put down in front of me and it looked like water. At first I thought somebody was playing a trick on us to see if we were awake. And we tasted the second bottle and that was also water."
Bottling bungle
Beck said that the winery uses 180-degree Farenheit (82C) water to sterilize the bottles, and that someone mistakenly pulled a case of bottles containing water off the line to use as press samples. He said that the winery impresses the lot number on the glass of the bottles and that he was able to verify that it was the only case of water instead of wine.
"I feel awful about it. It was a mistake and it was an isolated mistake," Beck told Wine-Searcher. "We take all the measures to make sure that what we're putting in the bottle has no bacteria. It's the first time this has happened. God willing, it will be the last."
I asked a couple of winemakers on social media how commonplace this kind of mistake is. One Sonoma County winemaker said that on most bottling lines, the bottle is inverted when it is sterilized; he did not think such an accident was even possible with the bottling line he uses. Another winemaker said "someone goofed".
But let's keep this in perspective: it's water. In the 1980s, wineries in Austria were caught adding diethylene glycol to wines to make them more full-bodied. Last year a winemaker there was convicted of adding synthetic glycerine to his wines. Wineries in many regions have been caught using grapes other than those stated on the label (that does raise a terroir question: was it Napa Valley water, or did it come from outside the AVA?) And you should see the list of additives allowed in conventional wine! This was just water, and if the drought continues long enough Californians might pay wine prices for a nice bottle of it.
"I guess you could call it a transparent wine," Apstein said. "There were a dozen Chardonnays. This showed very well in comparison. They should have done it with the rosé flight. These pale, Provençal rosés – a glass of water might have gotten a medal."
