Is Your Wine Lousy or Simply Having a Bad Day?

(WSJ) - Sometimes what seems like a regrettable wine is actually a flawed beauty. From corkage to 'brett,' Wall Street Journal wine columnist Lettie Teague look at all the ways a swell bottle can lose its charms

ACCORDING TO THE law of large numbers (vinous edition), anyone who drinks wine on a regular basis will eventually encounter a bottle that is flawed. Whether they recognize it as something that has gone wrong with a good bottle is another matter altogether. Will they call the wine out as corked or oxidized or even afflicted by excessive brettanomyces (more on this soon), or will they simply vow never to buy that particular lousy-tasting wine ever again?

According to the wine professionals I spoke with recently, it's more likely the latter. Very few wine drinkers are actually able to recognize when a wine is flawed, let alone identify the problem. But then wine professionals have trouble detecting flaws as well. As Ian Dorin, wine buyer at the Wine Library, a store in Springfield, N.J., said, "If professionals can't get it right, how can we expect consumers to get it right?"

That may be why so few customers return bad bottles to stores. "We actually see a very small percentage of wine returned; I'd put it at less than 1%," said Mr. Dorin—and that's not because the store doesn't have a generous return policy. Customers can always return a bad bottle, according to Mr. Dorin, and there's no time limit, although most do so "within a year of purchase," he said.

The people I spoke with agreed that the most common wine flaw is a corked bottle, although Joe Salamone, wine buyer at Crush Wine & Spirits in New York, said the word has become something of an all-purpose expression. "For some customers, 'corked' has become a vague, catchall term for a flawed wine," he wrote in an email.