[Transylvanian Accent] I never drink ... wine. [/Transylvanian Accent] (With a nod to Bela Lugosi.)
Seriously, I have never been able to enjoy wine. If you look up "super taster" you would find that such people (and I am one of them) have an unusually sensitive sense of taste, including enhanced sense of "bitter" tastes. When I drink even supposedly very good wine, I taste the vinegar that is ALWAYS part of the fermentation process. The only wine I've ever been able to drink has been some of the cheap fruit-juice-and-alcohol things like Boone's Farm Apple or Strawberry flavors, because those don't ferment very long and usually have supplemental alcohol to make up the lack of natural fermentation.
Before anyone jumps on my stuff, remember I'm a chemist. Fermentation on grape fructose can occur twice per molecule. The first step converts fructose to ethanol. The second step converts ethanol to acetic acid (vinegar). When there is active fermentation, a small percentage of the ethanol gets converted simply as a matter of random chance. The longer you let the fermentation continue, the greater the odds of making vinegar. And we cannot forget that white wine vinegar is a very elegant cooking ingredient, just as balsamic vinegar is another one, both based on grape distillates. Those vinegars started as wines and just got taken too far. So anyway, I can't drink fine wines because they all taste of vinegar to me.
The REAL truth is, after my liver started acting up, my gastro guy said "No more booze for you. Not even beer for you." So the last time I had anything alcoholic was a sip of champagne for a wedding of a close acquaintance a few years ago.
