This was a new one for me; perhaps one of you has had a similar experience.

Last Thu. night some friends came over and brought a bottle of Corbieres-- 1999 Chateau Pech-Latt. Apparently, they were attracted to this bottle by a shelf talker that said it was an "organic wine," by which I assume they meant produced from organically-grown grapes.

My friend went to the kitchen and opened the wine while I spoke with his wife in the living room. When he returned and began pouring the wine, I had a sense that something was wrong, but I couldn't put my finger on it. He tasted the wine, looked puzzled, tasted it again, and asked me to taste it as well. I did, and it was pretty wierd. The wine had no aroma and no flavour. I mean, really no flavour-- no alcohol, no fruit, no tannin, maybe a faint hint of saltiness.

We swirled; we swished; nothing.

I poured some more into my glass, and that's when I realized what had been wrong when I watched my friend pouring initially: the wine was coming out very, very slowly. I looked into the neck, and sure enough, there was some kind of deposit right below where the bottom of the cork had been. I took it to the kitchen and used a metal meat skewer to try to open up the app. 1/2 cm. hole, but this stuff was hard as hell. Even though I was jabbing it hard enough to bend the skewer, I couldn't break it up at all. It looked to be about 2 cm. deep (about 3/4 of an inch) I considered getting a screwdriver or ice pick, but then I realized that my friend was going to have to return the bottle, and would need to show what was wrong with it.

I looked at the cork as well, and it had quite a deposit of tartrate crystals on it. I'm assuming that that might be what had closed up the neck, but can't believe that there could have been that much of it, or that it could have hardened to that extent. And how would that affect the wine? Is THAT what caused to become tasteless?

Anyone else ever have something like this occur to them?

Tartrate crystals even if in the neck of the bottle (comes from storing bottle on its side) should not affect the wine at all. I've never heard of them being as "thick and dense" as you describe.

There are two different signs of a corked bottle. The one that is usually found is when the wine smells of old, wet cardboard and one wouldn't want to drink it no way. It also has a gawd-awful taste. The other is the total absence of any nose at all and the wine tasting dull and flat. The latter way sure describes what you are saying.

I'd sure be curious what the problem was. Has your friend returned the bottle yet? If not he should ask that the wine shop ask the distributor to ask the winery what it is. I can't imagine that you are the only one in the world with this problem with this wine.

methinks that organic wine is a risky purchase proposition.

I could speculate on what's wrong with this wine (which I will), but really this is one of those cases where I'd rather have a glass of this in hand to know for sure.

Speculation: one normally associates microbial activity with some taste/smell defects, but sometimes, if it's normal microbial actifity (primary or secondary fermentation), this tends to totally dull down a wine as the yeasties and bacteria are doing all the smelling/tasting as they conduct the glycolytic reactions.

So, was the wine hazy? Was there a sludge (as opposed to the crusty tartrate deposites) at the bottom of the bottle?

Davidn -- I'd never seen or heard of a deposit like that before, either. It's definitely a badly corked bottle, though that doesn't account for the weird stuff in the neck. My friend has returned the bottle and requested an explanation (he gave his name and number), but I'm not holding my breath waiting for that-- a clerk who works for the local distributor will probably just destroy and put in for a credit from the winery. Unless a wine nut sees it and gets curious, I doubt that anything more will come of it.

Vitis -- I was hoping that you or someone else with winemaking experience would respond with a theory on this. The wine didn't appear hazy. The bottle is made of fairly dark glass and the wine was still quite dark, so I couldn't see whether there was anything down at the bottom or coating the sides of the bottle; I did look for more weird crap in it, but was unable to see any. That doesn't mean there wasn't any there, though.

Perhaps all the "weird" stuff went on ahead of the wine being put in the bottle and the bacteria was filtered out after it had done its damage.