It’s hush-hush, something you rarely read about. It has to do with all those often hard-to-read numbers that appear on different parts of a wine bottle. They may be appear anywhere: the back or front label, the capsule, the back of the front or back label, on the glass itself or even the top of the cork under the capsule. While one might be tempted to think who cares, these are the numbers revealing whether you are actually getting the wine you want.

In fact, most wines now have three sets of numbers. First and foremost, we have the six-digit CSPC (Canadian Standard Product Code) - a number arbitrarily allocated to a wine by the LCBO. This is the number that you and I use when buying a wine in Ontario. At one time the LCBO required that it appear on all bottles sold in Ontario. In fact, it was a system that was pretty much used by liquor boards right across Canada. One of the key problems confronting the LCBO was that they started running out of numbers and began recycling these numbers, much to the general confusion of everyone. As a result and with the advent of bar coded labels, which is almost universally used by producers to identify their brands, the LCBO dropped compulsory CSPC numbering, although still use them to identify products.

While all of this is important in making sure you get the right wine, it was only relatively recently that the EEC became increasingly concerned with the need to track down specific bottles in the event of glass contamination or other qualitative problems. This is especially important when confronted with huge quantities of seemingly homogeneous non-vintage dated blends. As a result, all beverage products sold in the EEC today must now have a bottling code.   

In fact, this information is the only way of determining whether a previously-tasted and/or released wine is the same as what you are buying today. It is, of course, not unusual for less expensive blends to incorporate a new vintage meaning that there will always be some stylistic changes.

When it comes to better, vintage-dated wines, however, I have been astonished to discover that occasionally there is little in common with what was tasted before. There are three possible reasons for this. First, flavours naturally evolve as a wine ages. Sometimes these changes –better or worse - are totally out of sync with the natural aging process. When the quality has fallen through the floor, for instance, poor shipping and/or storage conditions (both in transit and here in Ontario) are probable culprits. A skid of whites sitting in a baking hot rail car or truck for a week or so can be a very damaging (although the real consequences often do not appear until 6-9 months after the trauma). This is the second source of unanticipated variation.

Unfortunately, it can go far beyond this. Identical vintage-dated wines (with the same CSPC and bar code) may be totally different bottlings. In some instances, these individual batches can reflect substantial variations in vinification, and even, the final blend. Under such circumstances, the wine is simply not the same.

A worst-case scenerio occurred last January when I rang the alarm on what was supposed to be a Spanish stunner - a red that both Robert Parker and I had tasted and raved about. Unfortunately, what arrived here at the LCBO was not up to snuff. It immediately became evident that these were totally different batches with separate bottling codes.

back label from LCBO bottle

back label of the original bottle