How Can You Tell If a Wine Has Faults or Is Undrinkable?
There are many people who might feel that a wine has passed its drinkable stage upon smelling the wine and/or on the initial taste. Determining a wine’s aroma can be very challenging. It also depends on the taster of the wine when trying to figure out the aromas and flavors of the juice upon first introduction to their olfactory senses.
Since each of us is different in both make-up and preference, we usually find it helpful to have an organized method for tasting wine to determine what secrets the wine may be hiding. (See “How to Taste Wine” in our wine learning modules.)
Certainly, we are looking for more standard characteristics such as fruit, acidity, alcohol, tannins (in reds), and sweetness initially. But how can we tell when a wine may be showing faults or has gone beyond the winemaker’s desired flavor profiles?
By developing your palate and familiarizing yourself with many flavors and scents, you can build a mental library to discern the flavors and scents discovered in wine. Wines may not present the profiles one might always expect. With that in mind, it is important to test many wines and styles to gain a better perspective of those profiles.
For example, TCA, or trichloroaisole, is a taint that will give off an aroma of wet boxes or wet dead leaves. It can be difficult to determine but, if the fruit is light and minimal then, it is possible you have run into a “corked” wine where the cork itself is tainted.
A new example presented recently is “mousiness” or “mouse.” From the January 6, 2024 Forbes article by Per and Britt Karlsson, “A ‘New” Wine Fault You Need To Know About: Mouse,” they state “it is a fault that hardly existed – or at least was not noticed – a few decades ago, but today it is more and more common, due to the trend of using very little or no Sulphur in the winemaking as well as producer harvesting riper grapes with lower acidity.”
Further, “it is a fault that is usually undetectable by smelling the wine. You only notice it when you put the wine in your mouth.” And lastly, since harvests are happening later each season, they are riper grapes “which leads to lower levels of acidity and, thus, a higher risk of getting a mousy wine (of course, made worse by climate change).”
The good news is that the “mouse” is very difficult to detect and therefore goes unnoticed. It is the wet cardboard or wet leaves that you should be aware of when evaluating your wine.
(“The Wine Swirl” education modules in Grapeolicious.com is the best place to learn about the aromas and flavors to assist you in enjoying your wine experiences.)
