The World's Worst Wine?

There are a lot of posts on this blog about the world’s most expensive bottles of wine or the world’s highest quality wine, but I recently got thinking in the other direction: What is considered the world’s worst wine?  Googling around produced some quick, incredibly cheap winners like the fortified MD 20/20, jug wines like Carlo Rossi, traditional boxed wines like Franzia, and really anything made by yellowtail.  A Bloomberg article that did a special on Trader Joe’s and Walmart wines picked out the Walmart Winemaker Selection Sparkling Rose ($13) as particularly bad given its sweet, gummy aftertaste. They also highlighted TJ’s Charles Shaw Shiraz as tasting like burnt matches.

  Those findings were a helpful start, but I wanted to dig deeper and find a more legitimate, supposedly reputable wine that was absolutely terrible.  Ultimately, the best and most prominent example of awful wine I could find was not actually the fault of the winemaker, but rather the cork put on the bottle.  In the mid-80s, a famous wine producer named David Bruce was gaining a name for himself in the Chardonnay game.  Unfortunately, his 1985 vintage was plagued by a complete case of cork taint that made his wine almost undrinkable by the time it hit consumer’s tables.  It seems that the corks had originally been for Robert Mondavi, but were rejected as bad and the producer, not wanting to make a loss, turned to a less experienced winery to make his sale.  Bruce was essentially driven out of the Chardonnay business when customers lost all trust in the brand, but thankfully he was able to switch gears and his now known for fine Pinot Noir.