The Wine Fairy

Wine critics and wine judges have devised some entertaining shorthand terms for awful wine. Scrawled in the margins of a notebook or whispered under your breath to a colleague, they allow a taster to diss a wine without offending the pourer.

Good ones that I’ve heard recently include FJ (“Fruit Juice”), TD (“Termite’s Dream”–meaning that a wine is over-oaked), and IAW (“It’s A Wine,” i.e, nothing more).

And then there is the ultimate ugly-wine acronym: DNPIM (“Did Not Put In Mouth”). This term is reserved for a wine that is so objectionable at first sniff, so obviously flawed that it’s just not necessary to put your palate through the ordeal of tasting it.

I ran across the Costco Wine Advent-ure Calendar’s first DNPIM wine last night, the Mendoza Nights Malbec.

Very quickly: If you are just now joining us for these reviews, I want to say upfront that the Costco advent calendar project is not a snobbish takedown. We drink cheap wine on this blog all the time. We love cheap wine.

So far, I have tasted many enjoyable bottles that have come from a Christmas calendar. In fact, I remember drinking the Mendoza Nights Malbec from last year’s 2024 Costco Wine Advent-ure Calendar and it was fine (if leaning a bit toward FJ).

But this one is a true NWJ (No Way, José). Even before it hits the glass, it smells really strongly of reductive faults: Clogged drains and sulfur and putrifying black cherries.

We’re earnest tasters here–but it was hard to hold our noses above the rim for too long. No amount of swirling would dispel the Gaping Maw of Heck aromas percolating from the surface of this wine. “Earth?” I wrote politely in my notes, before scratching it out and replacing it with “DNPIM.”

I actually did put the wine in my mouth, briefly, to check if there was any fruit flavor or structure lurking under that olfactory morass. (There’s not.) Fortunately, it didn’t taste bad. It just really didn’t taste like anything at all.

I left the glass out on the kitchen counter all night, but even the fruit flies wouldn’t touch it. In the morning, the vapors had blown off–no doubt expelling sulfuric clouds as they departed, like Beezlebub in a hurry. What was left was a flat, Concord-grape-smelling cup of purple.

Maybe it was just my bottle. I hope it was just my bottle. If not, then somebody needs to dial up the Malbec Police because Mendoza Nights is a CAW (Crime Against Wine).

Wine: Mendoza Nights Malbec (2024) – Argentina

Costco Wine Advent-ure Calendar Number: 19

Grade: F (for Faulty)

Finish the bottle? Not even on a dare.

Further Reading:

Tim Atkin in The Guardian: Codes of Misconduct: To spare a vigneron’s blushes, WWROA (wine writers rely on abbreviations)

I’m tasting all 24 wines in the 2025 Costco Wine Advent-ure calendar! See previous reviews here.

Review disclosure: I was not compensated or provided any free products for this review. Opinions expressed on The Wine Fairy blog are entirely my own.