Faulty Wine. The Good, The Bad and The Downright Ugly.

The wine business is not all fun. Take my word for it. Last week, I spent a day at a winery in Dorset tasting some of the most awful wine imaginable. Weirdly , it was fascinating and , yes, I actually enjoyed most of it.  It’s strange what some people call fun but, chacun a son gout, as somebody probably once said. 

I was on a wine faults course, something that I have done before and once in a while ,it’s useful to re-calibrate your palate.

The point was to be able to attribute which faulty tastes and aromas align with which specific wine making practice so that you can eradicate them. An example are reductive flavours. During winemaking people often try to reduce ( hence the name) the amount of oxygen that the fermenting juice is exposed to. This is done to maintain freshness but, if done to an extreme, causes aromas of rotten egg or struck match. Now, the problem is that of course nobody wants wine that smells of rotten egg but, a lot of people like the struck match/flinty aromas in something like a Chablis or Sauvignon Blanc. One person’s fault can be another person’s favourite flavour. At the opposite end of the winemaking scale, wine with too much exposure to oxygen (oxidised) tastes off. On the other hand, a wine which has just enough oxygen is called oxidative which can give a nice rich bruised apple aroma. Some of the top Champagnes such as Krug have this attribute and more extreme examples are Sherry or Madeira. With our own winemaking, we constantly look at achieving a balance between these two poles. That being said, we do tend to err slightly towards oxidative rather than reductive. This is achieved mainly by making some of our wine in (very expensive) old French oak barrels. They don’t impart any oaky flavour but, because the wood is porous, they breathe.

Another interesting ( well it is if you’re a wine geek) molecule is call Brettanomyces. Brett for short. This pesky microbe can give a cheesy parmesan meaty aroma to wines. In extremes, it smells farmyardy. And we’re not talking arable here. In the days of yore, many wines were infected with this, pretty much every bottle of red Burgundy had it and, some people really liked it. Myself included. Nowadays it’s seen as a fault but for me, a tiny bit adds complexity to wine beyond basic fruit aromas.

One last major one is called Trichloroanisol or TCA for short. Not to be confused with THC, that’s another thing entirely and not something that you should ever get mixed up when in an important meeting as I once did.  This is what we all call corked. It smells of mould. If you think of washing that hasn’t dried properly then you’re on the right track. Now, this stuff is evil. We were given a sample to smell that was truly awful. One of the other winemakers actually tasted it and said it wasn’t that bad. `So, like an idiot and, in the spirit of experimentation, I tried it. It was foul. Being a true professional,  I’ve put some spectacularly unpleasant liquids into my mouth over the years but this was absolutely rank and as a bonus, was a gift that just kept on giving for the rest of the day.