Bruce Schoenfeld in Stellenbosch, South Africa

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The first time I met the Namibian-born enologist Martin Meinert, nearly a decade ago, he’d embarked on a wine project as quixotic as any I’d ever come across. In celebration of the coming millennium change, he’d been hired to blend the contributions of 100 different South African winemakers into a single, coherent wine.

The result, predictably enough, was a South African blend lacking in personality, singularity, evident terroir, and just about any other attribute that might possibly make a wine interesting. “One of the worst experiences of my life,” Meinert calls it now.