I recently cleaned out a family member's wine cellar...a family member who did not drink wine. Needless to say, the wines had been sitting in that dusty cellar for quite a while, definitely not at the right temperature. I nabbed some anyway, and noticed some interesting qualities. The sauvignon blanc was very pink, and the reds were brown. I opened a white and it smelled like a vinegary raisin, in a bad way.
Finally I found a white that looked normal colored, opened it, and poured a glass. It was FIZZY! I didn't realize this was a sparkling, so I checked the label. It was not a sparkling. Gross.
In class when we received the tasting notes (the little card with all the potential flavors), I feel like some of them sounded like terrible flavors....remember that there's a big difference between "tobacco," "earthy," and "astringent" or "chemical."
To avoid your encountering this issue in the future, I've included below some tips I discovered for how to ensure your wine has not gone bad. Color is definitely a signal, but you really can't tell by color alone. So once you open it:
1. Smell (should NOT be moldy, musty, wet, or vinegary)
2. Red wine shouldn't taste sweet (this means it's been overexposed to heat)
3. Cork: shouldn't be moldy looking or pushed out from the bottle at all (the latter also could mean the wine overheated and expanded within the bottle)
4. Color: red shouldn't be brown, white shouldn't be deep yellow, brown, or pink unless they're rose
5. Flavor: should def not taste chemically, astringent, or like paint thinner
6. Bubbles: table wine should not have bubbles. This means it underwent a second fermentation
No comments:
Post a Comment