It never ceases to amaze me, the number of new labels I see around the world.  I travel quite a bit and I’ve worked in the wine industry for quite a while on 4 continents.  I’ve seen many different wines and wine labels. 

It’s nearly impossible for me to walk past a wine shop without going in for a little browse.  And that I did just recently on the amazing island of Phuket in Thailand.  I just had to see what the tourists were being offered outside the hotel scene.  The selection was good.  Not great, but certainly worthy of being a recommended wine shop.  There was at least 200 wines to choose from.  And every wine producing country was represented.  Including Thailand. 

Next door to the wine shop was a convenience store.  And in this store,,, right next to the banana chips they had about 50 different bottles of wine to choose from.  Fifty wines which were not in the store right next door.  There was something different about these wines though.  It was the obvious condition of many of the wines and the vintages.

Now I love to browse obscure markets, searching for a rare gem that may lie un-detected by the novice wine drinker.  But here in Thailand.. Where it’s always hot and air-conditioning is a luxury… even if I found that gem, I’d have to seriously look at the storage conditions. 

I was standing in the new convenience store with Air-conditioning.  They had some older vintages of wine from around the world.  And the prices were great for the wines being offered.  In fact the price tags looked to be older than the wine.  The bottles were still priced from 8+ years ago.  What a bargain right?   I stopped for a moment,  I looked at the great storage conditions and realized that the store I was in was much newer than the wines in front of me.  So I decided to get a little chatty with the store owner.  She told me how happy she was in her new store of 2 months.  And it’s so much larger and cleaner and of course cooler.  AH .. Ha… So these wines were not stored here for long.  And as I took a closer look I could see that the Chardonnays of recent were already turning a dark yellow and some of them were getting a brown tinge to them.    How unfortunate.  So it was time to go back to the wine shop.

Then I got to thinking about how truly unfortunate this really was.  Because one day someone will by those wines.  And likely it will be someone new to wine and they will not be impressed with their experience of drinking wine.  It’s this kind of situation that can ruin a potential wine drinker for life. 

I thought about going back and talking with the shop owner to explain to her the issue of the potentially bad bottles of wine sitting on her shelf.  Would she really care?  Would her suppliers support her?  Already her suppliers must know that what she has on her shelf is not good or they would have purchased it themselves.    So in the end, the suppliers of wines in these parts of the world are hurting themselves in the long run by allowing stores to sell wines that are simply abused and actually spoiled.  It is up to the industry to uphold the integrity of wine quality. 

Thus far, all the wines I’ve had at the hotels and resorts have been of good quality.  That’s a good sign.

Cheers.