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How Do You Spot Faulty Wine
What can you do when the restaurant waiter, or the sommelier come across to your table and asks you to taste the wine? Do you bluff your way through, swirl the wine round in your mouth, try to look intelligent and say "Yes that's great" because you're not too sure what to look for. So what are you looking for; what are the clues to a bad wine? Ravi believes that people should not feel threatened by wine, they should enjoy it.
You should remember that supermarket our merchants wine can be off as well. So what are you looking for?
The Corked Wine
Corked wine occurs when a cork has been infected with a fungus that produces a chemical that gives the wine the unpleasant flavours. The debate about whether it is better to have a screw top bottle for our wine is a separate issue because much wine still comes with corks. Coking occurs in about 5% of all bottles of wine.
A corked wine does not have bits of cork in it. A lightly corked wine may appear fruitless, a little lifeless but without any real unpleasant taste. A more heavily corked wine smells of wet cardboard, mushrooms, mould and smelly socks! The taste similar will not be fruity and is often quite bitter.
The Cooked Wine
This is a common wine fault resulting from poor storage conditions. This is especially true if the wine is stored at too high a temperature.
Wine that sits in hot warehouses or lorries during hot summers is the main sufferer of this problem. Even dome wine merchants have shops that are too warm.
When a wine is exposed to high temperatures and the liquid expands. This may force the cork from the neck of the bottle, pushing it up under the foil or plastic cap, or the wine may leak past the cork. In both cases air may seep in around the cork and cause oxidation.
Never buy a bottle if the top of the cork isn't sitting level with the bottle top or just below. If you find a cork sticking out of the bottle, even by a little bit, there is good chance that you have a cooked wine.
So what does a cooked wine taste like? Well, to state the obvious, as if it’s been cooked. The wine will have no fruity aromas or flavours or freshness. Instead it will be more like stewed fruit. If you're getting blackcurrants and fresh summer fruits, for example, then you haven't got a cooked wine. The wine often tastes watery, lacking body and character. As with all wine problems, there degrees of faultiness, but if you get a really cooked wine, you'll know it - especially if you have tasted that wine before and it doesn't taste as good as usual.
Oxidation
Wine needs oxygen to develop. The wine and the small amount of air below the cork react to help the wine develop in the bottle. Some also believe that there is a small amount of wine seeping past the cork as it develops. However, a faulty cork will cause too much air to get to the wine causing oxidation.
So what do you look for? The wine will taste fruitless and tastes like a tired Madeira or Sherry. This is why oxidised wine is sometimes called madeirised.
Sulphur
Sulphur Dioxide is commonly used to preserve wine, indeed it can also stabilise wine during the winemaking. However, if carelessly used, it will produce the smell of mothballs, burnt matches or rubber.
To sum up, winemaking is more consistent today, but faulty wines still occur. If you feel that your wine is suffering from one of these faults, you should now be more confident to say yes, when the Waiter asks "Would you like to taste the wine?"
Ravi Zutshi
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