I have an old bottle of Mateus Rose sogrape portugal wine. It does not
have a vintage date on it, but must have been sitting around my house
for 20 years easy. Is it still good to drink or has it been overaged and
now no longer any good.

Would appreciate any help.

On Sun, 12 Jun 2005 19:45:02 +0200, Mike Tommasi >
wrote:

>On Sun, 12 Jun 2005 11:23:29 -0400, Jeremy Dominik
> wrote:
>
>>I have an old bottle of Mateus Rose sogrape portugal wine. It does not
>>have a vintage date on it, but must have been sitting around my house
>>for 20 years easy. Is it still good to drink or has it been overaged and
>>now no longer any good.
>
>This is a low cost industrial wine made for ready consumption.

In other words: "no".

But do try it. Don't expect to enjoy it, but at least you will then
know how such wines develop.

--
Steve Slatcher
http://pobox.com/~steve.slatcher

In ,
Jeremy Dominik > typed:

> I have an old bottle of Mateus Rose sogrape portugal wine. It
> does not
> have a vintage date on it, but must have been sitting around my
> house
> for 20 years easy. Is it still good to drink or has it been
> overaged
> and now no longer any good.


This is a low-quality, low-priced wine made for immediate
consumption. It should never have been aged at all, and should
have been drunk (if at all) when first bought. So it's likely to
be terrible now.

But it won't poison you; it just won't taste good. If it were me,
I'd never throw away any bottle of wine without first opening and
tasting it. It's not likely, but surprises do occur.

--
Ken Blake
Please reply to the newsgroup

I don't know for certain that the inquiry was genuine (others have sometimes
been otherwise), but it may have been and anyway, in case of historical
interest, here is some background I wrote a couple of years ago.

--
The poor reputation of rosé wines in the US, which innovative wineries and
restaurants now struggle against, was established in the 1950s and 60s after
they were marketed hard to a largely wine-unfamiliar audience as wines that
"go with everything" (which Liebling in his 1964 _Appetite for Paris_
answered that unless a wine has quality it "goes" with nothing). The
reputation was strengthened by young men on the make in the 1970s with
polyester leisure suits and mustaches who, following instructions on TV,
ordered Mateus or Lancer's Rosé to try to impress their dates. The
reputation of such wines was entrenched, a little later, by sweet dull forms
of white Zinfandel.

(After a query from an astute wine consumer who enjoyed a recent pink
wine -- Bonny Doon's "Gris de Cigare" -- and wondered why more restaurants
do not promote such.)

Some of these wines are very fresh and agreeable, and I have seen some US
wineries moving that way, and some regions of Europe have always made good,
and bad, ones. Bonny Doon's unusual product name is a combination of the
firm's longtime flippant red blend -- "Cigare Volant," flying cigar (French
counterpart of US idiom "flying saucer" -- the Italian is Disco Volante by
the way, which was also the name of the sinister Emilio Largo's hydrofoil
boat in the novel and film _Thunderball,_ in case you were curious, and even
if not); and the "gris" from the European tradition of "grey" grape names --
which sometimes spills over into the naming of pink wines in various places.

== Max


Footnote: The fictional hydrofoil motor yacht "Disco Volante" figured in a
posting about heavy use of brand names, likened to the writing of Ian
Flaming. Newsgroup rec.audio, 1989.