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Home > Blogs > Uncorked > Archives > 2005 > December > 02
Friday, December 2, 2005
A Trader Joe’s Wine-Buying Experience
Editor’s note: Two weeks after this blog entry was published, Trader Joe’s pulled all of this wine off of its shelves nationwide.
Do these look like the same wines?
Well, they don’t smell or taste the same, either, even though they’re labeled identically. What to make of it? A simple matter of bottle variation? Perhaps…
Here’s the story behind these two bottles of wine:
I walked into my local Trader Joe’s in Kettering, Ohio on Monday night (11-28-05) …
…to shop for a few things I had seen in the Trader Joe’s Holiday Guide catalog. I was particularly intrigued by a wine mentioned in the TJ’s “Fearless Flyer” — a Chiaro del Bastardo Italian white wine that costs $6.99 in Ohio — in part because it came “from the same folks who brought us the very popular Bastardo Red,‿ the catalog said. I had tried the red, an Italian Nebbiolo described on the label as a close relative to Barolo and Barbaresco, and it was quite fine for $9.99.
There were 30 or so bottles of the Italian white on Trader Joe’s shelf, but something was clearly amiss. About two-thirds of the bottles were what I’d expect to be the color for a 2003 dry white: straw/pale green. The other one-third were deep golden; they looked more like 15-year-old Sauternes. The bottles sat side by side, labeled identically. I picked up one bottle of each color, found a guy I assumed to be a manager sitting in the corner of the store near the wine department doing paperwork, held up both bottles and suggested to him that something might be wrong with some of the bottles, probably the golden-colored ones. He looked up at the pair of bottles I was holding, acknowledged and expressed some surprise at the color difference, and said he’d be sure to check it out. He then quickly went back to his paperwork.
I dropped by the following afternoon (11-29-05), and found the situation on the shelf unchanged, the deep golden-hued bottles sitting side-by-side with the others. This time, I bought one of each, and popped the corks that night to compare.
The pale straw-colored wine had a distinct floral note in the nose, decent fruit and balancing acidity, and was a bit thin – about what I would expect, and not disappointing considering the price. The deep golden-colored version was not, as I had suspected, oxidized; it did not smell like sherry as I thought it would, based on its appearance. But it had no floral note in the nose, showed little fruit and had bracing acidity, and was more viscous than its identically labeled “companion‿ wine.
There was one other difference: the two wines had different corks. The pale straw-colored version had “Chiaro del Bastardo‿ printed on the cork, while the golden-hued and identically labeled version had “Messo in Battiglia Nelle Proprie Cantine‿ printed on the cork.
How very odd.
The following day, 11-30-05, the two different versions of the wines were still on the shelves.
I bought one more of each. And I started asking questions.
Alison Mochizuki, a spokeswoman for Trader Joe’s, responded to my inquiry about the wines with a voicemail late Thursday afternoon (12-1-05).
Trader Joe’s “is absolutely aware about this wine,” Mochizuki said. “There is no difference in the wine or the quality of the corks. It’s just that the glass in the first lot is 100 percent clear, and the second one is off-white glass. That’s the only difference. It’s the same product, same quality cork, just different glass. That’s why you see a change in color, but it actually isn’t a change in color. I hope this explains everything for you.”
Oh, so that’s it. Mystery solved. It was just the tint of the bottle.
Funny thing, though. The bottles sure looked the same. So I poured each wine into identical stemware, and …
Hmmm.
Cheers!
Mark Fisher
(Photos by Jim Witmer)
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