What's Wrong With This Wine? Learning to Read a Glass — Through the Bad Ones: Part 2
In Part One, I wrote about the faults I’ve most commonly encountered over the years: cork taint, volatile acidity, and reduction. This time, a few less common (and in one case, still somewhat mysterious) experiences that round out my education (to date at least) in faulty wine.
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.
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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.