Is bottle variation in wine fact or fiction?

It seems like a dark little secret in the wine trade. No one ever talks about it. Instead we talk around it. We blame the closure. We blame poor handling, excess temperature, or bacterial contamination.

I know that many of these things can ruin or at least adversely affect the taste of a bottle of wine, but it is my experience that wine can vary considerably from bottle to bottle without any of these wine perils being involved – pure bottle variation.

Some reasons for bottle variation

Bottle variation seems to be more pronounced as wines age, but it can be found just as easily at release. In my experience, it seems to be a problem for small or traditional wineries that do not have the room or inclination to blend all their wine before bottling. Bottling wine from individual barrels or from a small number of barrels, can lead to variation in a wine over the course of the bottling process. Even when the wine is combined into two or three large vessels, there can still be differences in the finished product.

And unlike say a corked or cooked bottle, most bottles that exhibit bottle variation are drinkable — sometimes very drinkable.

Bottle variation in house wines

My wife and pick one or two red and white house wines each year. Depending on availability and quality we might buy 8 to 10 cases of a particular wine and use them as our vins de pays. This means that I sometimes personally taste 100 more bottles from a single winery and vintage. At times, the differences are amazing.

For example, last year we bought 10 cases of a Cotes du Rhone. We’ve bought this wine several times over the years and it is typically a delightful, easy drinking wine. However, with the 2004 vintage, we found bottle variation in both directions. A few of the bottles displayed a completely different fruit structure and mouth feel compared to the rest. Some of the “different” bottles were exceptional. Some of the other “different” bottles were lackluster.

I’ve also noticed bottle variation in wines from other producers.

Typically wine pundits will say that if the wine is not spoiled, most of the variation comes from the taster. No doubt this is often true, but when we noticed a distinctly different bottle, we’ve been able to open another bottle to compare. And in my experience, the simple fact is that the “same” wine in “different” bottles can be, well, just different.