A shiraz with legs

An odd bit of correspondence arrived a week or so ago. A reader (I'll keep names confidential) wrote that he bought some wine for a dinner party and, after he'd poured glasses of an imported shiraz, his girlfriend "noticed something in her glass (after tasting), and upon further inspection realized it was a cockroach.

"As you can see by the picture, it was kind of pickled. I tried to identify the bug by checking online with pictures of different roaches ... but this one just seems to be a common American cockroach ... I returned the bottle and the bug to the big LCBO on Rideau and the person at the info counter was very nice and offered me a refund."

The reader did, indeed, attach photos of what I suppose a pickled cockroach would look like. He ended the

e-mail (fairly casually, I think, given the circumstances), "I was just wondering if you have ever seen or heard of anything like this before?"

My response? "That's pretty disgusting! It must have been in a bottle before it was filled. .... It's unlikely to have been in the wine itself, and the sealing process takes place as soon as the bottle is filled, so it couldn't have jumped into a full bottle. ... On the bright side, there are worse ways to die than by drowning in decent shiraz."

I forwarded the reader's e-mail to the agency representing the country's wine in Canada. She, in turn, sent it to the winery. The reader quickly received an e-mail from the winery. "It appears that it is a cricket not a roach, but that is, of course, completely beside the point," it said. "This shows a serious lapse of quality control for which there is no reasonable excuse on our part. We have quality controls in place that, if properly followed, should not allow something like this to happen.

"All our wine is sterile-filtered at bottling. Even if an insect was present, there is no way for it to pass through the filter; furthermore, the lines which actually fill the bottles are of very small diameter and would not allow something of this size to pass through. ... We can say with almost complete certainty that the insect was not in the bottling line nor was it in the wine before filling.

"There is little doubt the insect was present in the empty bottle at the time of filling. The empty bottles pass through an 'inspection station' on the bottling line where they are supposed to be visually inspected prior to being rinsed. It is clear that this bottle was not properly inspected. After this inspection, all of the bottles are given a sterile rinse before filling, but this insect was obviously too large to be dislodged by that rinse."

The reader was impressed by the winery's candour (so was I) and is happy to overlook the experience. Then again, he tells me he was drinking beer that night!

Rod Phillips is the author of The 500 Best-Value Wines in the

LCBO 2009, coming in the fall.