jamie goode's wine blog: Wine from plastic...how does it taste?

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Wine from plastic...how does it taste?

Continuing the PET wine saga, I've posted an article on the main wineanorak site about technical issues to do with wine in PET here. I also tried the two Sainsbury wines in these plastic bottles. The first was the Sauvignon Blanc. For £4.99, this is as cheap as New Zealand Sauvignon gets. It's bulk shipped in tank and then bottled at Corby in Northants.

I poured a glass and alongside the crisp, fresh grassy flavours there was a distinct detergent edge - a bit like when you drink from soapy glasses that haven't been rinsed properly, or when you taste from a glass that's already been drunk from by someone wearing lipstick.

So I got a fresh glass and rinsed it well first. Still the same detergent edge. Another two glasses were tried; each time the wine had an unpleasant detergent edge to it. How mysterious. Is this just a problem unique to my bottle, or is this a problem affecting this wine across the board?

The Australian Shiraz Rose was perfectly OK, though, with nice slightly sweet strawberryish friut. At £3.99 in PET an ideal picnic wine.

Labels: , ,

2 Comments:

At 9:35 AM, Blogger Peter May - The Pinotage Club said...

Jamie

Any idea how long these wines had actually been in the plastic bottle - hav ethey beenin them long enough to get tainted?

From the very recent launch publicity could it be that they were bottled in the past week and that the bottles you sampled had spent much less time in the container than ones the general public will buy via normal distribution channels?

(I have a dislike of bulk shipped wine and would blame dull and off tastes on that)

I thought the idea of the plastic bottles was to save weight in shipping from the antipedes, but if they are bulk shipped wines bottled in the UK then perhaps (by which I don't mean perhaps) it would be better for the environment to wash & reuse recycled glass wine bottles since the UK generates more empty wine bottles than we have a use for.

PS - you don't give a vintage for the wines, are they NV?

 
At 3:59 PM, Blogger Jamie said...

Not very long. I don't know if they'd pick up taint - PET is relatively inert as far as I'm aware. The rose is NV, the Sauvignon a 2006 IIRC.

 

Post a Comment

Links to this post:

Create a Link

<< Home