Wine Goblins

What are your biggest fears?  Tarantulas, snakes, getting stuck in a lift, falling from a plane?  Well..who isn't scared of these?

Some of us winos can add wine faults to that list. Picture this, after cooking up a storm in the kitchen, you're sat with friends around the table ready to tuck in and crack open a bottle of very carefully chosen wine.  What could go wrong now?  The answer; a wine fault.  These gremlins take many different forms and can distort the appearance, aroma and flavour of the wine.  As I have experienced, they are a huge inconvenience, especially if you haven't got a replacement bottle for that evening!

The most common faults are:

Old and past it

How to spot it: The wine is dull, lacks fruitiness and has little character

The culprit: Putting wine, which is meant to be drunk young, in your cellar/kitchen and forgetting about it.  Or having the misfortune of picking an old bottle off the supermarket shelf.

Fact: Wine does not necessarily always improve with age, for example most Sauvignon Blanc and Beaujolais wines.  Most wine is drunk 'young', within 12 - 18 months after it has been produced.  Some wines and Champagnes do improve and take on a more interesting character with age. 

Maturation depends mostly on the type of wine and the form of storage used. 

Cork Taint

How to spot it: The wine has a musty mouldy smell and flavour, like damp cardboard, off mushrooms and quite simply cork!  You can detect a corked bottle just by smelling the wine

The culprit: Caused primarily by the chemical TCA (2, 4, 6 trichloranisol), stemming from a reaction between the material in the cork and the chlorine-containing chemicals used when sterilising corks.  A corked wine does not mean that you have bits of cork floating in your glass.  Plastic corks and screwcaps are safe from this one

Fact: Trade estimates indicate that around 5% of wines are victims of cork taint

Oxidation

How to spot it: The wine has a slightly brown colour, lacks any fresh fruit character and can taste bitter, often with meaty or caramel flavours

The culprit: Too much oxygen getting into the wine, usually through careless handling or storage

Fact: Some wines benefit from a very small, controlled amount of oxygen - Riojas and Sherries to name a couple

Volatile acidity

How to spot it:  The wine smells of nail varnish and tastes like vinegar

The culprit: Bacteria in the wine can convert the alcohol into acetic acid (the acid of vinegar)

Fact: Too much volatile acidity, whilst caused by bacteria that are present and active, is often a result of careless wine-making

Second fermentation

How to spot it: The wine is cloudy and can be slightly fizzy

The culprit:  Yeasts. If the wine contains fermentable sugars, stray yeasts in the wine may get to work on these, upsetting the wine's clarity and producing carbon dioxide

Fact: With the building pressure of the carbon dioxide, corks can pop off and wine spills everywhere!  Fortunately, with better equipment and knowledge, this is rarely a problem nowadays.

Tartrate crystals

How to spot it: These small crystals can look like tiny segments of glass in, well, your glass!

The culprit: Tartrates are one of the by-products of using tartaric acid in wine production.

Fact: These small crystals are not harmful and only impact the wine visually. They can be removed, but lots of treatment in the winery can be detrimental to the quality of the wine, so many winemakers choose not to carry out this complex and unreliable stabilisation process.