Forcing a DNS failure

I need to test a change in our application's DNS retry behavior.

It previously switched into another mode to report the issue to the end user, but we've found a bug when the retry attempt worked, it would proceed to try loading the now-found far-end service in that "error reporting" mode.

To fix this, we have disabled the switch to the error reporting mode, and expect that on a successful retry we will load into the expected mode.

Thus, I need DNS (rndc/named) to fail once, and only once, and provide a successful result on the second attempt.

The only thing I can think is to run a large load test, and hope DNS fails like this at some point... But I am hoping someone on here might know of a better solution.

Maybe a way to block the connection attempt once ? The DNS server is part of the application, though, so it would be blocking the connection to localhost.