‘I thought you needed something good to drink,” the server said, slipping two glasses of deep-ruby-red wine in front of me and my guest. My guest was a nationally known wine expert. The server wanted to apologize for the wines I had made my guest taste for the previous 90 minutes, which the server had brought to the table with mystified, foot-dragging reluctance.

We had come to the main restaurant of the Trump International Hotel, in Washington, D.C., to taste as many of the 11 wines bearing the Trump Winery label as we could. ...

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The Trump version of Chardonnay? “Oaked up,” my friend said. “Sweet. Too much residual sugar. Harvested too ripe. Flabby. Really clumsy. Goes with the cuisine.” Expensive too: $68 a bottle at the restaurant for the 2015, $22 on the Web site for the 2016.

What about the 2015 Trump Meritage, a blend of red grapes that are “sourced,” meaning trucked in from the West Coast. The label calls it “American red wine”; it sells for $30 on the Web site. My guest tasted the Meritage: “Welch’s grape jelly with alcohol. A terrible, fumy, alcoholic nose. If I served you that on an airline you’d be mad.” (A buyer at a well-known Washington wine shop I later asked to evaluate the wines—he once sold Trump vodka, produced from 2005 to 2011, because he liked it—took one sip of the Meritage, wanted no more, and said, “Grocery-store wine.”) My guest went on, “They’re lying about the alcohol on the label.” He knew this, he explained, by a strange method of marching his two front fingers down his chest after he swallowed, saying that when he could feel the alcohol down to his belly button he knew it was 14 percent alcohol, which is what the label said. But this wine pushed his fingers below the belt. He knew the Meritage was 15 percent—and a 1 percent variance, oddly, is permitted on labels. “This’ll rip you,” he said.

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I managed to engage my friend and one server in a discussion of Virginia wines, which both admitted could be decent or, in the case of a few wine-makers, much better than decent. But the server did everything possible in the course of a long meal to steer us away from Trump wines. The idea had been to impress a famous guest, and serving him products from Trump Winery was not the way to do it. “We sell these,” the server said with a theatrical eye-roll, taking in the collection of glasses that by then were crowding our table, “because we have to.”

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The real reason Trump helped out his old friend was the chance to buy the estate for a predatory price, so laughably low that the bank which had seized the house kept refusing his offers. So he went around them, buying 217 acres that surrounded the mansion—in effect, the front lawn—from the trustees for Kluge’s adopted son; then the 776-acre vineyard for $6.2 million, plus $1.7 million in equipment and leftover wine; then the mansion itself, for $6.5 million. Kluge had initially put the mansion alone on the market for $100 million. At the time of the sale, Rausse recalls, “she said, ‘Gabriele, don’t worry—he’s my friend.’ ” And, indeed, Trump hired Kluge as director of the winery. A year later, he fired her. Kluge, who now sells jewelry, called Town & Country’s Sam Dangremond last August to dis the wines after Trump made his preposterous claim about the winery’s size. “The wine is not good anymore,” she told Dangremond. “I have had several people in Palm Beach lament that it’s the only wine they have on the menu at Mar-a-Lago.” She did credit the official owner and current president of the winery for keeping up the grounds: Eric “is doing a great job at maintenance,” she said.

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At the winery, two long bars, one on an enclosed patio where lunch is also served, offer tastings of four or five Trump wines, with the single wineglass you’re allowed to use presented to you at the end as a souvenir. We opted for the deluxe tasting, which a young woman led us through by rote. It ends with a wine called Cru, a Chardonnay fortified with brandy, which is “unique to Trump Winery” and, according to Rausse, started when he salvaged defective Chardonnay that had been stored in a faulty tank, and that Patricia Kluge refused to throw out, by distilling it and then adding grape juice at the next harvest. (Sources close to Kluge dispute the origin story; a Trump Winery representative says the current method is to mix fresh grape juice and Chardonnay brandy and age it in wooden barrels.) Cru sells for $34 a bottle as an aperitif to sip before dinner, when apparently buyers mistake the mud I tasted for depth. The young woman and an associate behind the counter radiated the freckled freshness of the sorority sisters they may have been—a common look in Charlottesville, and my similarly enthusiastic young guest talked with them about the fact that they had all visited and enjoyed the same tasteful tasting room back when it was Kluge Estates. The women who conducted the tastings had the forced cheer of cult members who never meant to sign up.

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Even in the still-stunning setting, the wines suffer in isolation. The Viognier, the Virginia state specialty, was clean but tasteless; the rosé was water, the Chardonnay, the Cabernet, and the Meritage, alcoholic and sweet. At best the wines, such as the sparkling blanc de blanc and the Viognier, are, as my expert friend said, inoffensive; at worst, like the Cru, they demand to be spat out. “At the end of the day Trump wines suck,” my visiting friend said as our Washington dinner came to a close. “But they give a lot of good and loyal people paychecks.”

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