Pointing Fingers for Faulty Wine

Two nights ago I opened a bottle of 2007 Silver Palm Cabernet only to find that it didn't quite taste like it did a few days before when I tasted a bottle at work. Last Thursday my boss opened up a bottle of our soon to be new premium cabernet sauvignon by the glass so we could taste it. When I smelled it, it smelled of fresh cherries, and it was really smooth and clean. I thought it was great. This bottle at home smelled a little "hot", meaning I felt like it was going to taste like a wine with a higher alcohol content than what it was. It tasted raisiny and left a bitter aftertaste on my tongue.

I'm not sure what exactly is wrong with this particular bottle, but many wines end up with an "off" taste or smell. This can mean numerous things, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to describe them:

"Corked" wine is something that describes a wine has been tainted by TCA (trichloroanisole). THis is given off by a cork that is tainted. This will make a wine smell moldy or musty, which is often describe as wet newspapers. This is a smell that you won't forget once you've smelled it once. This is actually pretty common, in fact it occurs in about 2-5% of corks. Many producers are working on TCA-free corks or switching to plastic corks to minimize faulty wine.

A wine that has been treated with a high level of sulfur might smell or giving you that feeling in the back of your throat as if a match was struck. Wines with considerable amounts of residual sugar might be treated with higher levels of sulfer to stop refermentation. This usually disappears with time or if you swirl your wine around your glass, although you may feel a parched feeling the next morning.

Oxidation is something that takes a little more time to get familiar with. A wine will taste flat or stale if it is exposed to too much oxygen. A wine will start to brown (similar to a cut apple), but this is obviously easier to see in white wines. Some older wines need the air to open up the esters, one reason why people use decanters for older wines (the other is to keep sediment in the bottle instead of your glass.)

Practice: Set aside a small glass of wine, somewhere where you where you walk past often such as your kitchen counter. Each day take a sniff of the wine and notice how it changes. After a while, if you have the same kind of wine, open a fresh bottle and taste the difference.


There are many other faults to wine, these are just a few of the most common. If you ever come across a wine that is faulted, don't be ashamed to take it back to where you got it and ask for a new bottle. It's common and not really the fault of a producer, especially corked wine, so stores usually get credited for bottles like this, and you deserve to taste the wine the way it was meant to be tasted.

I happened to have a second bottle of Silver Palm so I opened it and compared the two glasses which confirmed my first opinion. This isn't always the case, as I usually only buy one of a bottle, unless it's something I know I enjoy already.

Cheers!