These wines were all incredibly cheap, the most expensive was the australian yellow tail, it cost 4€ or so. I don’t even want to remember what it was. And the box wines cost no more than 1,50€ at best. I don’t even want to talk about it. It’s just disappointing to see, what sells in this country, at least in supermarkets. Imagine this, a figure that I picked up at some point was something like 2,30€ is what the german pays per bottle of wine, on average. That is the whole price of the bottle. You still have to discount 19% of sales tax, the stores margin, the price of the cork or screw cap, the label, the bottle itself, the grapes inside of the bottle, and of course the labour behind it. Who is profiting from something like this, and how can it be produced to be so cheap? I imagine it is only possible in massive quantities and with very cheap grape material, certainly not organic or biodynamic.

I’ll go through the wines in order of the picture, from left to right, but leaving out the yellow tail.
     1: A massively boring wine, not worth my time. I opened it one week prior to the tasting and it did not develop or change at all…
     2: The white box wine smelled like chlorine and urine and was made exclusively of grapes grown in… the European Union. WTF.
     3: The red box wine smelled like shit (formerly feces) and also had a slight note of chlorine. Hated with all my available brain capacity.
     4: Probably the cheapest Riesling Trockenbeerenauslese ever made… oh wait, I don’t even know the grape. I also don’t know the vintage. It was leaking, it was sticky, the cork was plastic, the wine smelled and looked rancid and it felt like I had 20 years of Aldi history in my hand. Oof.

Luckily we all survived this tasting. The yellow tail was first, and it was a definite winner in this tasting. We all agreed that it was very artificial, very boring, and surprisingly, very different throughout the vintages. 2021 was surprisingly like charcoal and vanilla and some coffee and ice cream, way too complex for what it was, and 2020, the year prior of course, apparently already developed sediment, which is usually normal in very old and somewhat high quality wine, not in australian Shiraz produced by the millions.

For this tasting we definitely had a no-shits-given attitude, and I carried it along even after it was over. I decided to keep a 3/4 full bottle of Yellow Tail Shiraz (2021), in my basement behind some old boxes of wine. That is now 1.5 months ago, and temperatures have risen, meaning that part 2 of my nefarious plan is now taking action. The sun is shining, and I have taken the bottle in question out of my dark basement and dropped it in the middle of my garden, in the middle of the sun, resting there through the early summer heat… It is a strange little experiment, I wonder what will happen to the bottle. To eventually round it all of I had the thought of adding both sugar and yeast, as well as spices and herbs to make a concoction that can lift me into the divine realms… Eventually I want to bring this bottle to friends and winemakers to taste together, my own version of Yellow Tail Shiraz, with my own twist. And I want to get it signed by everyone. The best part about it? No one knows that they’ll taste it yet…

Cheers!