So why does Rioja age so well in the first place?

Rioja, in northern Spain, is built for this. The region sits in a kind of geographic sweet spot — a confluence of Atlantic, Mediterranean, and continental influences — that gives its wines both structure and freshness. The main grape, Tempranillo, has the tannin backbone to survive long aging. But the real secret weapon is the oak.

Back in 1782, a winemaker named Don Manuel Quintano traveled to Bordeaux and came home with a revelation: aging wine in small oak barrels was what made French wines travel and age so well. His neighbors promptly created regulations to make the practice unprofitable. Decades later, a Peruvian named Luciano Murrieta tried again — same Bordeaux pilgrimage, same conclusion — but this time used cheaper American oak instead of French. The result was widely praised, and a tradition was born. (For more on Rioja history, check out this link to Wickham Wine)

American oak became the signature of classic Rioja largely by accident and economics. When phylloxera devastated Bordeaux in the late 1800s, French winemakers headed south to Rioja, bringing their expertise but unable to source French barrels. American oak was cheaper and more available. Because American oak is sawn rather than split, and kiln-dried rather than air-dried, it concentrates lactones that give wine those creamy vanilla notes Rioja became famous for. Vanilla, coconut, a little dill, leather.

The reason this 1987 Crianza isn’t overwhelmed by oak? Many traditional Rioja producers rarely buy new barrels, preferring to repair decades-old American oak already in their possession. Old barrels have already given their biggest flavors to previous wines. They become gentle. They oxygenate slowly. The wood steps back and lets the fruit do its thing — which, after 38 years, means cooked, complex, and still alive.

About that vintage.

1987 was not an easy year to be a grape in Rioja. After an extremely cold winter and a frost in May, the summer turned brutally hot, with August temperatures hitting 40°C and total rainfall for the whole growing season barely exceeding half the average. Then, right when harvest was about to start in September, it rained. Of course it did.

The growers who waited it out were rewarded — fully ripe, healthy grapes. The highest and latest-picked vineyards did best, which is why Rioja Alavesa came out ahead that year. Patience, as always, was the deciding factor.

A brief time capsule.

These grapes were ripening on the vine while Ronald Reagan was in his second term as president. A gallon of gas cost 90 cents. A gallon of milk ran about $1.07. A bottle of wine like this one would have set you back maybe $6–8 at a decent wine shop.

At the Grammys that February, Paul Simon won Album of the Year for Graceland. At the Oscars in March, Oliver Stone’s Platoon swept four awards including Best Picture. And on Broadway, Les Misérables was packing the house and took home the Grammy for Best Musical Theater Cast Album. It was a good year for things that took a long time to make and rewarded patience.

I was ten years old when those grapes were ripening. My family didn’t drink a lot of wine when I was growing up. For Christmas, my parents would splurge on a box of red and a box of white, expecting it to last through the New Year. It would take me 20 years to appreciate a glass of wine, and another 10 to fall in love with tempranillo. Nearly four decades later, the wine is still going. That’s not nothing.

Castillo de Sajazarra Rioja Crianza 1987. Cooked cherry, tobacco, quiet oak, and a whole lot of time.

Light strike: The Champagne that smelled like cheese

Aromas: dirty drain, stinky cheese, cooked cabbage

Last year, we traveled to Champagne with some friends. It was amazing! After a wonderful cave tour at one winery, we sat down for the tasting. Our guide opened a bottle, brought it to her nose, made a face, and said she was going to get another bottle. Before she took it away, we asked to smell it.

It smelled powerfully of cheese. Not a subtle, dairy-adjacent note, like you often get with malolactic fermentation, but potent, ripe, assertive cheese. Honestly, it was the kind of smell I would have appreciated enormously on a cheese board. In a glass of Champagne, it was deeply wrong.

This producer bottles several of their wines in clear glass, which makes them vulnerable to light strike. The fault occurs when UV light and certain wavelengths of visible light react with compounds in the wine, particularly riboflavin, triggering a chain of chemical reactions that produce sulfurous, cheesy, cabbage-like aromas. Direct sunlight is an obvious culprit, but fluorescent lighting in retail stores can cause it too, and the damage can happen surprisingly quickly. The answer for most producers is simple: use darker glass. If you as a consumer happen to receive a wine in a clear bottle, protect it from light.

Our guide knew immediately what had happened, replaced the bottle without ceremony, and the rest of the tasting was excellent (we even went on to purchase some of that clear-bottle wine). But that first sniff was a genuine education.

Tartrate crystals: The rosé that looked broken (but wasn’t)

Appearance: white crystals floating in the wine or settled at the bottom of the bottle

We picked up a lovely rosé of Tempranillo from a local Willamette Valley producer. We’d tasted it at the winery and loved it, and were looking forward to opening it with a friend. I put it in the refrigerator to chill, and when I pulled it out, there was what looked like a small snowfall of white crystals floating inside the bottle.

We drank it anyway. It was delicious. And as the bottle sat out and the wine warmed up, the crystals gradually disappeared.

Tartrate crystals (mostly potassium bitartrate, sometimes calcium bitartrate) are chemically harmless and don’t affect flavor. But many people understandably see them as a sign that something has gone wrong, and so most wineries, particularly for whites and rosés, where the crystals are most visible, put their wines through some form of tartrate stabilization before release.

The crystals form most readily in cold temperatures, which is why they appeared when we chilled the bottle and dissolved again as the wine warmed. Wineries can address this several ways: cold stabilization (chilling the wine deliberately to encourage crystals to form and drop out before bottling), various additive treatments that inhibit crystal formation, or filtration methods that remove the relevant ions. My best guess with our rosé is that it hadn’t been fully stabilized, but it made no difference to our enjoyment of the wine.

The fish wine: My best guess

Aromas: fish — “like trout,” per the winemaker himself

This one remains, honestly, a bit of a mystery, and a good reminder of how much I’m still learning.

Several years ago, we visited a tasting room in the Willamette Valley and were poured a Pinot Noir that smelled like fish. The winemaker was pouring, and he actually named it himself. He said it smelled like trout. I’m still not entirely sure why he poured it. Trout is not exactly a desirable characteristic in wine.

The wine was from his first vintage, and my best guess at what happened involves isinglass, a fining agent derived from fish bladders, that’s used to remove phenolic compounds that can contribute undesirable color or bitterness. Used in excess, or perhaps used inappropriately, it can leave a fishy character in the wine. It’s more commonly used in whites than reds, though, so I hold this hypothesis loosely. It’s simply the most plausible explanation I’ve found so far.

_____________________

I’ve come to genuinely value encountering faulty wine, because each fault is a story about what happened during the wine’s making: a yeast that struggled, a winemaker who reached for the wrong tool, a clear bottle left too long under bright retail lighting.

The other thing I’ve learned is that knowing these faults changes how I carry myself at a tasting, in a restaurant, or when I open a bottle at home. Now I know the difference between a wine I don’t like (though, honestly, there aren’t too many of them!) and a wine that has something actually wrong with it. It’s a very useful distinction, because you can and should return a faulty wine.

So, if you ever find yourself sniffing a glass and thinking something is off, trust yourself. You might not have the words for it, but you’re probably right.

The nose is your most important wine assessment tool. Even when what it’s telling you is deeply unpleasant, the aromas and flavors in a glass are clues to what happened during the wine’s making.

Here are some of the faults I’ve encountered over the years, and what I’ve learned from them.

Cork taint: The moldy bottle I almost convinced myself to drink

Aromas: mold, wet cardboard, damp basement

My first encounter with cork taint was early in my wine life, and I didn’t recognize it for what it was. We’d picked up a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon from a winery in Walla Walla, Washington. When we opened it, Katie wisely took one sip and put her glass down.

I, having never tasted an aged red wine, stubbornly suggested that maybe this was what aged Cab was supposed to taste like. I soldiered on through a glass, trying to convince myself that I liked it. But eventually, I had to admit that it smelled and tasted unmistakably like mold.

Since then, I’ve come to understand how common this fault really is. The culprit is a compound called TCA (2,4,6-trichloroanisole) which forms when chlorine compounds (like from cleaning or pesticides) react with certain molds present in cork. Even very small concentrations are enough to replace a wine’s pleasant aromas with that musty, wet-cardboard quality. Estimates put corked bottles somewhere from 3-5% of all natural cork-sealed wines, though improved testing and treatment methods are bringing that number down.

Cork taint happens. But how a winery or other retailer handles it matters enormously. We once bought a case of Pinot Noir from a Willamette Valley winery we loved. One bottle was corked. I called to let them know, and even though weeks passed before I could make it back, they replaced it. We bought more wine. On the other end of the spectrum, a Lodi winery we’d belonged to for four years included a corked library bottle in one of our shipments. I called. I emailed the wine club manager. I heard nothing. I cancelled the membership.

The lesson isn’t lost on me now that I work at a winery. A faulty bottle isn’t just an inconvenience to the customer. It’s a test of trust. The winery that replaces it without question understands that its reputation, and sometimes the whole region’s reputation, may be on the line.

Volatile acidity: The lunch wine we quietly left in our glasses

Aromas: vinegar, nail polish remover

A family member once invited us over for lunch and, knowing we love wine, opened a bottle from a winery near their home in Washington State. It was a generous and thoughtful gesture. But the wine smelled overwhelmingly of acetone. It was not subtle. It was the wine’s dominant character.

I didn’t have the vocabulary for it at the time, but what we were experiencing was volatile acidity (often abbreviated to VA) at fault levels. All wine contains some acetic acid (the compound that gives vinegar its punch), and a modest amount is considered normal, even desirable for complexity. But when oxygen isn’t carefully managed, when sulfur dioxide isn’t used correctly or at the right times, or when hygiene lapses allow acetic acid bacteria to proliferate, that acidity can climb to levels that overwhelm everything else. Add ethyl acetate (a related compound) to the mix and you get that solvent, nail-polish-remover quality.

Understanding this fault helped me appreciate just how many decisions go into preventing it: thoughtful fruit sorting, meticulous sanitation, diligent oxygen management, and judicious use of sulfur dioxide.

Reduction: From toasted marshmallow to rotten eggs

Aromas: struck match, smoke, rotten eggs, sweet corn

This is a fault that can be complicated, because at low levels it can be genuinely beautiful. One of my favorite wines of last year was a Willamette Valley Chardonnay with just a whisper of reduction — a smoky, toasty quality that reminded me of the caramelized outside of a perfectly roasted marshmallow. Delicious. Clearly intentional.

But the conditions that create that pleasant quality can spiral very quickly into something far less appealing.

We were visiting a winery in Paso Robles, a place we’d liked enough on a previous visit to join the wine club. It was just at the tail end of harvest. Before we’d even stepped inside the tasting room, we were hit with an overwhelming smell of rotten eggs. It was impossible to ignore. Other visitors seemed to be politely pretending not to notice. At first we wondered if someone nearby had... an unrelated problem. But the smell persisted through the entire visit and made the wines very difficult to assess or enjoy.

I now know that the most likely culprit was stressed yeast during fermentation. Yeast need nitrogen to do their work of converting grape sugars into alcohol. When they’re starved of that essential nutrient, or stressed by heat or other pressures, they produce volatile sulfur compounds as a byproduct. Reduction can also develop during aging if wine sitting on its lees isn’t given enough exposure to oxygen. The takeaway, as I understand it: take care of your yeast.

Reduction has another face I discovered only recently. Playing the board game included with the Aromaster Professional Sommelier Wine Aroma Kit, I encountered an aroma card labeled “sweet corn” and thought: surely that’s not something that actually turns up in wine.

Then, the very next weekend, we visited a winery where more than one white had that exact aroma: starchy, unmistakable, canned sweet corn. It’s caused by dimethyl sulfide, another reductive compound that forms when yeast are deprived of oxygen or nutrients. Once you learn to identify it, you can’t unknow it.

Continue to Part Two, where we encounter a bottle of Champagne that smelled like a cheese course, a rosé full of mysterious crystals, and a Pinot Noir that smelled like fish.

To be honest, I didn’t get it immediately, but as soon as someone else mentioned it, it was all I could smell (the power of suggestion is a topic all its own!).

I’d encountered banana before in white wines, Beaujolais Nouveau, and once memorably in a blueberry wine. But never in a Chianti. I had to figure out what was going on.

The components of wine aromas

Wine aromas come from organic compounds that can originate from the grape varietal (primary aromas), the winemaking process (secondary aromas), and aging (tertiary aromas). There are many types of these compounds, but esters are the biggest contributor to most fruit and floral aromas. Yeast produces esters during fermentation as it converts sugar into alcohol.

The banana smell comes from an ester called isoamyl acetate, which forms when isoamyl alcohol combines with acetic acid (basically vinegar). Isoamyl acetate is also known as “banana oil,” and it’s what’s used in all of your favorite banana-flavored products, from banana candy to banana Lip Smackers.

Factors that impact banana aromas in wine

Not all fermentations create the same amount of isoamyl acetate. Some yeast strains create more than others – for example, the yeast commonly used in Beaujolais Nouveau generates high levels of it. Carbonic maceration, which is a hallmark of Beaujolais Nouveau, increases isoamyl acetate production. Together, these factors explain why banana (along with bubble gum and candy) is a key tasting note for these wines.

Fermentation temperature also matters. Higher fermentation temperatures produce isoamyl acetate faster, but lower fermentation temperatures produce it in higher concentrations. Cooler fermentations are less volatile, so more of these esters remain in the final wine. That’s why you often find banana in aromatic white wines, which are typically fermented at cooler temperatures.

Banana also tends to show up more in young wines because these esters break down over time.

Becoming a wine sleuth

As I work to improve my wine tasting skills, I’m trying to become a better wine sleuth. Rather than just noting the aromas (though I’m definitely still working on that!). I’m starting to ask deeper questions, like “What does this tell me about the winemaking?” “Why might this note appear here and not in a similar wine?” Each aroma (especially the unexpected ones) is a clue, and putting those clues together is what makes wine tasting a type of detective work.

So, what about that Chianti? Chianti doesn’t typically go through carbonic maceration or particularly cool fermentation. So, my best guess is that the banana aromas were due to the specific yeast strain that was used and the fact that it was relatively young.

This experience also helped me spot another area for improvement – next time, I’ll take a picture of the bottle so I can research the producer’s methods later. 🤦‍♀️ Onward and upward!

A UPS is an uninterruptible power supply.

If you work from home and occasionally lose power, you either have one or you should get one. It’s the heavy, black box that sits under a desk or next to a router, quietly doing nothing most of the time, until the power goes out.

A UPS isn’t designed to power everything in your house. It’s designed to protect the things that need to stay on when the grid goes down. It switches automatically to a different power source, not because that power source is better or more efficient, but because it preserves what matters most. It’s a system built around priorities.

Choosing what stays on

I have one at home, and there are a few things I’ve intentionally plugged into it. My modem and Wi-Fi, for example. There are other things I could run off it in a pinch, like grinding coffee beans and brewing a pot, but those are choices. They would drain the battery faster, and one could argue they’re not essential.

When you don’t know when the power is coming back, you have to decide what’s critical and what’s optional.

Grapes, plugged into the grid

It turns out grapevines face a very similar decision.

Up until a certain point in the growing season, grapes are effectively plugged into the grid. Water and minerals flow in through the xylem. Inside the berries, cells are growing and dividing, acids are accumulating, and the whole system is focused on building structure rather than storing value.

Veraison, when priorities change

At veraison, priorities shift.

The berries soften. Color changes. Sugar begins to arrive in earnest. And at that moment, sugar stops being just another energy source and becomes the product.

Burning sugar to keep the berry alive during ripening would be like filling a bathtub while the drain is open. Water goes in, water goes out, and you never quite get full.

The system technically works, but it defeats the purpose.

Why malic acid?

Malic acid doesn’t suddenly appear so it can be burned during ripening. It’s been there all along, just like the UPS.

Early in the season, the grape is focused on growth. Cells are dividing and expanding, tissues are fragile, and the berry is managing water, pressure, and basic metabolism long before sugar is part of the picture. Malic acid supports that work. It helps regulate internal balance, stabilizes growing cells, and provides metabolic flexibility while the berry is still under construction.

By the time veraison arrives, the problems malic acid was solving are no longer the most important, since growth is finished and storage becomes the priority. The acid that once helped the berry grow becomes something the vine can afford to spend.

This is the grape’s UPS switching on.

Malic acid as backup power

Malic acid becomes the backup power supply that keeps critical metabolic functions running while sugar is protected and stored. Acid doesn’t disappear by accident during ripening. It’s being spent on purpose.

A UPS isn’t about efficiency, it’s about continuity. It runs on a different chemistry, has a limited fuel supply, and is designed to protect essential functions.

In grapes, the mapping looks like this:

• Sugar is the protected load.

• Malic acid is the backup fuel.

• Ripening is the planned outage where priorities change.

Warm nights make the UPS run harder. Cool nights let it idle. That’s why climate shows up so clearly in acidity.

What this explains in the glass

Once you see ripening this way, a lot of familiar differences stop feeling mysterious. High-acid wines from cool climates, and low-acid wines from hot regions aren’t accidents. They’re the outcome of how long the backup system was left to run.

It’s hard to overstate how wet this place is.

Periodic torrential rain. Trails turn into rivers. You walk through inches of mud. Under the canopy, the light is dim, and the soundtrack is constant: dripping water and the crash of surf from a beach you can’t see.

What surprised me most is how nurturing it felt.

Not oppressive and not threatening. Just part of a whole. The forest floor felt alive in the same way that “forest floor” aromas show up in wine: humus, decay, renewal, all cycling together.

At the same time, I’ve been deep in my diploma studies, learning about how water moves through grapevines. An onboard lecture about tropical rainforests combined with the experience of the mud and the humidity, brought a new dimension and texture to the coursework.

The plant physiology reset

My background is much more in animal and human physiology. In those systems, fluid moves because something pushes it. A heart. Muscles. Pressure generated by force.

So when I thought about plants, I had always vaguely imagined water being pushed upward from the roots, like pressure in a pipe.

That’s not how it works.

In vascular plants, water is pulled upward, not pushed. Evaporation from tiny pores, called stomata, mostly on the underside of leaves, creates tension. That tension pulls water up through the xylem from the roots like a straw. Nutrients dissolved in that water come along for the ride.

No pump. No force. Just evaporation and physics.

Same strategy, wildly different scales

Here’s the part that made me thoughtful: that same invisible force

• moves water a few feet up a grapevine

• and hundreds of feet up massive rainforest trees and palms

The scale changes dramatically but the mechanism does not.

Standing in a rainforest I’ve never experienced before, realizing that the same process is at work in vineyards I know well, gave me an unexpected sense of connection. This wasn’t an alien system. It was familiar, just amplified.

Evapotranspiration wasn’t an abstract term anymore. It was the reason the air felt thick. The reason clouds form. The reason rain keeps returning.

That made the rainforest feel deeply resilient to me. Not delicate, but cyclical.

Grapevines are climbers (and that matters)

Another surprise from my studies is that grapevines aren’t desert loners. They’re woodland plants, and they’re climbers.

I’d never really internalized the purpose of all those tendrils beyond “support.” In Ujung Kulon, we saw climbers everywhere: strangler figs, Monstera, vines using established trees as scaffolding to reach light.

Grapevines do the same thing.

Seeing this behavior in a rainforest made vineyards feel a little austere by comparison. Highly controlled. Artificial. Efficient, yes, but stripped of the collaboration these plants evolved with.

It made me curious. What would grapes taste like if they were grown in closer relationship with their ancestral peers? How does vitis vinifera behave in a more woodland-like system? What do we gain, and what do we lose, through monoculture and strict training?

Pull, not push

One final thing that’s been sticking with me.

“Push” systems feel effortful. They fail when force fails. They require constant input.

“Pull” systems feel different. Evapotranspiration relies on something basic and passive, like chromatography or capillary action. It’s sustainable precisely because it doesn’t require constant exertion.

That distinction feels important, not just for how plants move water, but for how we think about systems more broadly.

The rainforest doesn’t push.
The grapevine doesn’t push.
They rely on cycles and gradients.

Walking through mud under a dim canopy, learning about grapevines thousands of miles from a vineyard, I didn’t expect to come away with a clearer picture of how connected these systems are.

But here we are.

And now, when I select a wine from the extensive glass list on board the ship, I’m also thinking about rain, leaves, humidity, and the cycles that tie it all together.

Which feels… appropriate.

I’m writing this from Bali, where we’re kicking off 2026, meeting up with dear friends we’ve now visited multiple continents with (including Antarctica). When Barb says, “Want to go to [anywhere]?” the answer is always yes.

It also happens to be a moment of change in other parts of my life. I’m at a crossroads in my career in technology, I’m starting this program, and it feels like one of those times where you tug on a single thread and everything else starts to shift. You know the feeling.

What feels different about starting the diploma, compared to when I began WSET Level 3, is confidence. I loved Level 3. Not just because it took me deeper into appreciating wine, but because of the shared experience with my classmates. There’s something powerful about learning alongside people who are just as curious and nerdy and invested as you are.

This time, though, I’m walking in knowing I belong here.

The goal hasn’t changed: I want to enjoy wine more. And honestly, wine education has wildly over-delivered on that front. The more I learn, the more alive wine becomes. And somewhere down the line, I hope my career leads me into the wine industry itself—so this feels foundational in a very real way.

Yesterday, all of that theory collided beautifully with real life.

We walked into a grocery store in Seminyak (Bali), and I stopped short because I swear it smelled like someone had smashed a bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. That unmistakable aroma profile was everywhere. Bright. Zippy. Grapefruit. The kind of smell that snaps your attention to full alert.

Naturally, we walked past the wine section first. Nothing there explained it.

Then we turned the corner into produce.

Dragonfruit everywhere—lemon, pink, white, and deep magenta. Rambutans in big bunches. Citrus in more shapes and varieties than I knew existed. And suddenly it clicked. That aroma that first cracked white wine open for me all those years ago was standing right in front of me.

The first time I ever had that experience was with a glass of Kim Crawford Sauvignon Blanc, nearly eighteen years ago. At the time, I thought white wine wasn’t for me. Too sweet. Headache-inducing. Hard pass. That glass changed my mind entirely. It smelled like grapefruit juice and tasted impossibly refreshing. Standing in that produce aisle yesterday, I could almost feel the acidity on my tongue.

That’s why I love wine. It’s not just flavors and aromas—it’s memory, sensation, thought, and feeling all tangled together. A full mind–body–spirit experience. And the deeper I go, the more often these moments happen, where the world starts quietly explaining wine back to me.

This is also why I built MySipNotes.

Like everyone else, I take photos to remember moments (usually terrible but occasionally awesome ones). You look at them years later and you’re instantly transported—not just to what something looked like, but to how it felt to be there. I want to remember wine that way. Labels help, but they’re just the surface. I want to capture the experience: what I noticed, what it reminded me of, how my understanding was shifting in real time.

This blog is part of that practice. Notes from a journey that’s still very much in motion through wine, through place, through paying attention.

This is one stop on a longer journey, and I’m glad you’re here at the beginning.