WTN/Wine Advisor: Cooked!

Yes I read it.

I understand what you are proposing - I just don't think we need more descriptive terms. There are too many already!

I think there are levels of "cooked," "baked," maderized, whatever you want to call it. Like any defect.

But what you are describing sounds more to me like wine made from overripe grapes. Raisiny but not oxidized. That's what those magnets due to wines, isn't it?

Flash pasteurization does it, too, I think. Maybe your controlled "cooking" process is yet another technique to make the wine seem like the grapes were overripe. Very fruity, but...

For what it's worth, Craig, and around here it ain't worth much, my experience agrees with your opinion, and I've done my own experiments, too. I used to cook wines for my classes, then compare them with the uncooked versions of the wines and with sherry and Madeira. The interesting thing: when cooked, the wines took on that caramel quality of Madeira, but they hadn't had enough time to oxidize, so the sherry quality was subdued greatly.

I should explain that, to me, prunes and raisins indicate cooked on the vine; caramel indicates cooked in the bottle. I believe that's because grapes on the vine don't have the amine/sugar concentration that finished wine has.

I am sitting here sipping a Sercial as I post!

[Robin Garr]

I used to cook wines for my classes, then compare them with the uncooked versions of the wines and with sherry and Madeira. The interesting thing: when cooked, the wines took on that caramel quality of Madeira, but they hadn't had enough time to oxidize, so the sherry quality was subdued greatly.

How exactly did you "cook" them, Thomas? Time and temperature? In my somewhat casual experiments, when I try to "cook" wines by approximating real-world conditions (leave it in a car all day in the summer, etc.), I just don't get caramelization, even when the heat is sufficient to shove the cork through the foil. I'm thinking you'd have to use an oven and get it well past back-seat-of-the-auto temperature to get that immediate an effect.

I used to cook wines for my classes, then compare them with the uncooked versions of the wines and with sherry and Madeira. The interesting thing: when cooked, the wines took on that caramel quality of Madeira, but they hadn't had enough time to oxidize, so the sherry quality was subdued greatly.

How exactly did you "cook" them, Thomas? Time and temperature? In my somewhat casual experiments, when I try to "cook" wines by approximating real-world conditions (leave it in a car all day in the summer, etc.), I just don't get caramelization, even when the heat is sufficient to shove the cork through the foil. I'm thinking you'd have to use an oven and get it well past back-seat-of-the-auto temperature to get that immediate an effect.

Yep. Baked them. In a small convection. Probably heat transfer is more intense and quicker with a bottle in a small oven than it would be with a bottle in a large car. Don't know if it means anything, but the oven is dry heat.

Maybe what happens in a car isn't cooking but only excessive heat exposure, which of course makes the problem of describing what's wrong with the wine all the more complicated.

I don't know the answers, only know what the aroma reminds me of, and it isn't sherry.

Robin wrote:
How exactly did you "cook" them?

Recreate or duplicate the heating process used to produce Madeira wines.

Salute

[Robin Garr]

Robin wrote:
How exactly did you "cook" them?

Recreate or duplicate the heating process used to produce Madeira wines.

I was looking for something a little more specific, Victor. Did he bake them in a kitchen oven at 350F for six hours? Leave them in his car on a sunny summer day? Or merely keep them in a wine rack on top of the refrigerator?

Robin wrote:
How exactly did you "cook" them?

Recreate or duplicate the heating process used to produce Madeira wines.

I was looking for something a little more specific, Victor. Did he bake them in a kitchen oven at 350F for six hours? Leave them in his car on a sunny summer day? Or merely keep them in a wine rack on top of the refrigerator?

Robin,

Don't have my notes handy, but we poured the contents of a bottle of wine into Pyrex, put into a cool oven set at 325 and baked for about 2 hours and then let cool for the class. During the class we opened a fresh bottle of the same wine to compare it with the cooked version, and we all made notes about the aroma of each.

Then, we sniffed a Madeira and a sherry, blind, made notes about each of them and compared our notes with the notes of the baked wine. The notes between the baked wine and Madeira aligned more closely than the notes between the baked wine and sherry.

Not exactly scientific, and done with novices, but my aroma notes didn't vary too much from the class.

[Robin Garr]

Don't have my notes handy, but we poured the contents of a bottle of wine into Pyrex, put into a cool oven set at 325 and baked for about 2 hours and then let cool for the class.

Okay, I guessed it was something like this, and this is the point I've been trying to make through this and the precedent thread.

I would agree that your oven-baking technique is an excellent way to demonstrate maderization in a classroom setting. But with all respect, it is NOT a good way to determine what happens with wines "cooked" as defined by many modern wine geeks. Whether you leave your wine on a rack in the kitchen, a box car on a rail siding, an over-the-road 18-wheeler or an un-air-conditioned warehouse, wines "cooked" in shipment and storage aren't going to get anywhere close to 325F. No way, nohow.

When I've tested cooking by leaving wine in the real-world setting of a car parked in July sunlight, I haven't been able to get it to a temp higher than 140F. That's hot enough to push the cork out significantly, but not, I would argue, hot enough to maderize.

Hence my disagreement that maderization/oxidation is a typical characteristic of wine "cooked" as most latter-day wine enthusiasts define the term.

I would agree that your oven-baking technique is an excellent way to demonstrate maderization in a classroom setting. But with all respect, it is NOT a good way to determine what happens with wines "cooked" as defined by many modern wine geeks. Whether you leave your wine on a rack in the kitchen, a box car on a rail siding, an over-the-road 18-wheeler or an un-air-conditioned warehouse, wines "cooked" in shipment and storage aren't going to get anywhere close to 325F. No way, nohow. ...

Robin, if 325 degrees for 2 hours isn't cooking something, then I'm at a loss for what to call that effort. By definition, if you purposely Madeirize a wine, you've cooked it.

As I said earlier, maybe wines subjected to warm temperatures for extended periods of time suffer from heat damage, but maybe the damage isn't that they have been cooked.

Is it possible that "cooked" is the wrong descriptor for the problem? Who assigned that word to the condition?

That leads back to Oliver's question about people using "cooked" to describe possibly otherwise damaged wines, and to my original post that I describe cooked wine as having the aroma of caramel, among other burnt-like aromas, but not necessarily oxidation.

[Robin Garr]

Robin, if 325 degrees for 2 hours isn't cooking something, then I'm at a loss for what to call that effort. By definition, if you purposely Madeirize a wine, you've cooked it.

As I said earlier, maybe wines subjected to warm temperatures for extended periods of time suffer from heat damage, but maybe the damage isn't that they have been cooked.

Is it possible that "cooked" is the wrong descriptor for the problem? Who assigned that word to the condition?

That leads back to Oliver's question about people using "cooked" to describe possibly otherwise damaged wines, and to my original post that I describe cooked wine as having the aroma of caramel, among other burnt-like aromas, but not necessarily oxidation.

For a couple of professional communicators, we're not communicating very effectively.

What you say above is generally true, but I don't see its real-world application.

In my opinion - and I'm comfortable about standing on it - "cooked" is, and for at least the last decade has been, a wine-geek term for wine thought to have been damaged by poor treatment in shipment and storage.

As I thought I wrote clearly in my article, this is an iffy term because it's not well defined, and there is little general agreement among wine enthusiasts as to its character or description, other than a belief - hard to explain in chemical terms - that wine thus mistreated does not age well.

But I don't get taking the Madeira treatment or a 325F oven bake as synonymous with this at all. At the risk of repetition, wine overheated in storage or treatment doesn't even approach that degree of heat. At most it approximates low-temperature pasteurization. Bringing in the Madeira process in a discussion of the purported damage caused by ambient heat in a truck, ship, warehouse or wine shop is simply a non-sequitur, and it has little application in a discussion of wine flaws because it's physically unlikely to happen in the real world.

My opinion, of course ...

You are damned right we ain't communicatin' well

All I'm saying is that the aroma of a cooked wine reminds me more of caramel than of oxidation. To point out why, I purposely cooked wine for an experiment.

As Mark pointed out in an earlier thread, to make caramel you cook sugar that reacts with amines--two things common in wine--and if you count ethanol as a kind of sugar, add that, too. The hallmark of making caramel is slow cooking, which is exactly what Madeira undergoes.

Therefore, in my mind, a cooked wine is not exactly the same thing as a heat-damaged wine, which may or may not be exposed to slow heating but may be exposed to sudden heating and then cooling, and may not have been exposed to cooking temperatures either.

I agree with you--the word is not useful to describe what might have happened to a wine between producer to consumer.

[Robin Garr]

I agree with you--the word is not useful to describe what might have happened to a wine between producer to consumer.

Ah, but there's the point: I don't think we DO agree. Like it or not, I'm arguing that "cooked" has come to mean "what might have happened to a wine between producer and consumer" and that virtually all wine enthusiasts these days use it in that sense.

And whether we like it or not, describing the effects of oven-baking wine at 325F is not useful in a discussion of how (if at all) we can describe wines subjected to less than optimal storage and shipment conditions.

I agree with you--the word is not useful to describe what might have happened to a wine between producer to consumer.

Ah, but there's the point: I don't think we DO agree. Like it or not, I'm arguing that "cooked" has come to mean "what might have happened to a wine between producer and consumer" and that virtually all wine enthusiasts these days use it in that sense.

And whether we like it or not, describing the effects of oven-baking wine at 325F is not useful in a discussion of how (if at all) we can describe wines subjected to less than optimal storage and shipment conditions.

Because it's been described one way for a long time, you accept the descriptor, even when you doubt its accuracy: "cooked" has come to mean "what might have happened to a wine between producer and consumer."

Interesting position to take, and maybe goes more to personality trait than wine geekdom.

My confrontational personality trait demands that inaccuracy not be excused by longevity. If I were a cynic, I'd call that misinformation

[Robin Garr]

Because it's been described one way for a long time, you accept the descriptor, even when you doubt its accuracy: "cooked" has come to mean "what might have happened to a wine between producer and consumer."

Interesting position to take, and maybe goes more to personality trait than wine geekdom.

My confrontational personality trait demands that inaccuracy not be excused by longevity. If I were a cynic, I'd call that misinformation

Whoa, back up. Let's start from scratch: What, if anything, is the utility of a wine-flaw term ("cooked") that cannot occur in the natural order of things but happens only with a specific type of wine in which it is not a flaw but a feature? Why substitute "cooked" for "maderized," a perfectly adequate term?

Frankly, I'm not sure where you got the idea that "cooked" has been historically used as a synonym for maderized/oxidized. I've looked through my older wine encyclopedias (from the '70s and '80s) and find them silent on this subject. I've been writing about wine about as long as you have, and don't recall "cooked" being in my vocabulary until it came into use as a synonym for "badly handled in shipping" as a Kermit Lynch coinage. So where's the inaccuracy?

Because it's been described one way for a long time, you accept the descriptor, even when you doubt its accuracy: "cooked" has come to mean "what might have happened to a wine between producer and consumer."

Interesting position to take, and maybe goes more to personality trait than wine geekdom.

My confrontational personality trait demands that inaccuracy not be excused by longevity. If I were a cynic, I'd call that misinformation

Whoa, back up. Let's start from scratch: What, if anything, is the utility of a wine-flaw term ("cooked") that cannot occur in the natural order of things but happens only with a specific type of wine in which it is not a flaw but a feature? Why substitute "cooked" for "maderized," a perfectly adequate term?

Frankly, I'm not sure where you got the idea that "cooked" has been historically used as a synonym for maderized/oxidized. I've looked through my older wine encyclopedias (from the '70s and '80s) and find them silent on this subject. I've been writing about wine about as long as you have, and don't recall "cooked" being in my vocabulary until it came into use as a synonym for "badly handled in shipping" as a Kermit Lynch coinage. So where's the inaccuracy?

Let's try to communicate here:

1. I have never once in the course of this discussion stated that "cooked cannot occur in the natural order of things."
What I have stated is that when I smell a wine that reminds me of caramel I think "cooked." I use Madeira as my benchmark for that smell in wine, and I have had to use it over and over, because some in the discussion seem not to agree with Victor, Craig, and me on the caramel descriptor, and I believe you are one of the non-believers.

The cooked experiment was for the class and for me to identify what we smell and to see if what we smell has any relationship to reality. In other words, when a wine is cooked, does it smell more like sherry or more like Madeira? Madeira was our answer.

2. I didn't get the "idea" that cooked has been historically used as a synonym for maderized/oxidized. I made the historical reference from your words: "cooked has come to mean..." By longevity, I didn't mean to imply ancient history--just enough time for wine geekdom to pick up the catch-all term to identify a flaw that may or may not be an accurate identification, as Oliver surmised in his original post, and you have even hinted at with your tentative "cooked" has come to mean "what might have happened to a wine between producer and consumer." Operative tentative: "might have happened." In other words, cooked is a guess.

In my view, if you are going to make a guess at a flaw, why not have a benchmark from which to draw your opinion? Your guess is "cooked," then what does cooked wine smell like. My class and I said it smells to us like Madeira, and to me that calls up caramel, a word that Madeira promoters use to identify their cooked wine. When I smell that caramel, I think cooked. When I don't smell that caramel I start sniffing for other clues to come with the possible flaw.

Incidentally, to me, the descriptor "maderized" doesn't call up sherry; it calls up, well, Madeira!

I do hope I've made myself clear; cannot imagine how else to do it from this point on

[Robin Garr]

I do hope I've made myself clear; cannot imagine how else to do it from this point on

Oh, I think we're clear, and I think we agree that "cooked" is a relatively new term in wide use, and that it is very imprecise. But I *do* buy, based on some experience, the argument that wine exposed to ambient heat in shipping or storage may find its longevity compromised. That, to me, is "cooked," but I've been arguing all along that it cannot usually be detected by maderization/oxidation effects.

I just don't see how any wine is going to reach 325F unless someone puts it in an oven ... or estufa ... so I don't find this of much practical use.

I do hope I've made myself clear; cannot imagine how else to do it from this point on

Oh, I think we're clear, and I think we agree that "cooked" is a relatively new term in wide use, and that it is very imprecise. But I *do* buy, based on some experience, the argument that wine exposed to ambient heat in shipping or storage may find its longevity compromised. That, to me, is "cooked," but I've been arguing all along that it cannot usually be detected by maderization/oxidation effects.

I just don't see how any wine is going to reach 325F unless someone puts it in an oven ... or estufa ... so I don't find this of much practical use.

We are getting there, Robin.

The reason you don't find it of practical use is because you consider "...that wine exposed to ambient heat in shipping or storage may find its longevity compromised. That, to me, is "cooked,"

You are hung up on that 325F, but that was to fast cook the wine as an experiment; I didn't have five to six months, which is how long Madeira is kept at about 105F. I'm not sure the process is ambient--seems rather focused heat instead.

If wines take that long to cross the ocean and they are warm all through the trip at or above 105F, or if they are stored for six months under that level of heat, they might very well be cooked. But if they are exposed briefly to heat, they certainly can be damaged, but not necessarily cooked. Maybe the reason your wine in the car doesn't smell like caramel to you is that it's damaged but not cooked.

For the sake of sidling up to accuracy, I propose that unless you know for sure, using heat-damaged instead of cooked is the better way to describe the wine's problem. For me, if I don't get that caramel aroma, I won't call the wine cooked.

I believe somewhere there was a study that proved light damage can cause plenty of off aromas and tastes--I'll bet a lot of the wines are diagnosed as cooked!