I COULD BE WRONG BUT I DOUBT IT (SORRY MR. BARKLEY)

It must be some sort of joke. I mean, there's no fucking way she was serious.

These two sentences are repeating themselves like a mantra in my head right now as I contemplate what may have been the most ludicrous assessment of a wine I've ever heard. I mean, I've heard Turley Zinfandel described as "elegant" and Kosta Browne Pinot Noir called "Burgundian," but the biggest steamer in my professional wine experience was laid today by none other than my septuagenarian boss.

The basement of the wineshop where I work is full of crusty old bottles of wine. Some of them are extremely valuable, and some of them aren't worth the time and effort it would take to break them. Many are unknown quantities whose value is pretty conjectural, value we could only determine by actually opening a sample rather than hording them like Viking plunder. Today, gripped by curiosity, greed, or possibly just boredom, the younger of my two employers brought up a forgotten bottle from the depths of our "cellar" (a term I use advisedly.) It was a bottle of 1986 Camp Gros Martinenga Barbaresco from producer Marchesi di Gresy in the Piedmont region of Northern Italy. Now, Piedmontese wines are my favorite wines from Italy and some of my favorite in the world - certainly my favorite reds outside of France. Naturally I was intrigued. So too was my boss, no doubt keen to discover how well the wine was showing and what bounty he could command for it.

Bossman tells me to pop the bottle and taste the wine, which I was only too happy to do. Corkscrew goes in just fine, and the cork seems pretty solid for an older wine. But there's little resistance as I pull it from the mouth of the bottle, and it's shrunken and oddly blackened on the wineward half in a way that's discomfiting. What's more, the cork left little stalagtites of wood adhering to the neck of the bottle as it was extruded. These are field marks that to me yell, "Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!!" and flail their little robotic arms. Not that you can get a foolproof sense for a wine from just looking at a cork. I've had sublime wines where the cork slipped out of the bottle like a Vaseline-smeared hot dog. But the look of this stunted little stopper coupled with the less-than-optimal cellaring conditions underneath the store left me with little confidence in what was about to hit my olfactory bulb. Tabling my concerns for the moment I poured a tasting-sized portion of wine into my glass and prepared to get crucial with the Barbaresco.

Color is a clue when tasting wines, sometimes almost as much of a clue as aroma or body. Older red wines lose the bright, dark, opaque hues of their youth and become what is (or should be) lovingly referred to as "bricked." They exchange their purplish tones for brown, sometimes orangish ones, and are paler and duller than their younger counterparts. Less brown = less oxidized = better chance the wine has held together and will continue to taste pleasant. Thus, before the glass ever hits your lips you are tipped off as to what will likely come your way, be it sublime or sucktastic. This wine? Still a hint of pinkish red, but brown, brown even in the center of the glass where the wine is deepest, which is a dismal thing to see when you're hoping for signs of life. Does it pass the sniff test? Actually, for the most part yes; muted hints of rose petal (for which Barbaresco and other wines made from the nebbiolo grape are famous), dry leaves, just a whisper of red fruit... Then on to the palate, where the rubber hits the road. Or rather, where the dead, dessicated carcass of this wine meets my sensory neurons. Fruit? This wine has forgotten how to have fruit, forgotten even what having fruit might conceivably be like. What it hasn't forgotten is how to have tannins, which bum-rush your palate and take turns reenacting their favorite prison rape scenes with your tongue as you cringe and wince and wait for the punishment to stop. There is no front to the wine, no middle, but there sure is a backside, and it stings like the morning after barebacking a truckstop whore. How to describe the sensation of tasting this? Imagine adding a tiny dram of rose oil and a squirt of cherry juice to a quart of water, then adding liberal amounts of garden clay and decomposing oak leaves. Add a generous slurp of white vinegar and the contents of ten used teabags, then hit 'Puree' and float a jigger of rubbing alcohol right before serving. That's what drinking this wine is like. The skeleton of wine is there - the acid, the alcohol, and the tannins, oh god, the tannins - but the flesh, that is to say the fruit has been picked off the bones by those enemies oxygen and unstable temperatures. This is what they get for leaving wine to age in a basement that goes from 45 degrees in the winter to 75 degrees in the summer. It's like storing your best bottles under the kitchen sink. But I digress. The point is, this goose is cooked.

Bossman asks for my assessment. I dissemble and make some mention of "lots of oxidation," which I hope he takes to mean, "you or some dumbass like you ruined this wine and I won't tell you what you want to hear, which is that it's the best fucking Barbaresco I've ever tasted." He grabs a glass, takes a taste, shrugs, and says, "Seems alright to me... I've got gum in my mouth, I'll let it sit for a while." I know from past experience these are codewords for "I'm going to have the other owner taste it; if she says it's good, then that's my firm belief as well." Wow. Gutless, craven, and he can't taste for shit. Awesome attributes in a wine retailer.

But the fun wasn't over yet. The "other owner" comes out, a dour, mannish woman in her mid-seventies who last enjoyed life sometime during the Eisenhower administration. She's got experience on her side; she's met John F. Kennedy, been to Europe more times than I can count, and sold wine since my mother was in rompers. She'll be the voice of sanity here, right? She'll back my play, right? Yeah, as soon as she stops crowing about how "beautiful" this wine is, how "well-preserved," how "youthful." Sure, if we're comparing it to the mummified Egyptian cats you served as an appetizer, this wine's incredibly fresh. Otherwise... well, what can I say? I haven't had a great many 20+ year old wines in my life. But goddamn it, I have had a few, and they all beat the everloving shit out of this wine because A) they still tasted like wine and B) they hadn't been cozying up to the water heater in a humid basement for years before being drunk. What's depressing is that at one point this wine was almost certainly great. Had it been properly cared for, even now this wine would still be drinking nicely; maybe on the downward slide but still pleasurable. The only pleasure to be derived from this wine now is to use it for hilarious spittakes. Not even, because that would require putting it in one's mouth.

In the end, it doesn't matter where the damage was done. Maybe my employers ruined the wine and maybe it arrived to them already on the road to ruin. Maybe, in spite of the producers' claims, the 1986 vintage of Camp Gros Martinenga Barbaresco was born under a bad sign. Maybe they both sincerely liked the wine and didn't believe it to be faulty. But barring the possibility they're both currently in treatment for late-stage maxillofacial cancer, I have a really hard time believing that. The real shortcoming, though, wouldn't be that these people own a fine wine shop despite having awful palates. The true lapse would be failing to call a spade a spade, cut your losses, and refusing to sell to your customers wines you know they cannot reasonably like. It's worse than bad business; it's cynical, a gesture of bad faith. The sooner I walk out those shop doors for the last time, the better I'll feel.