Question about wine gone awry

Greetings everyone! You all have been so welcoming to new participants on the forum that I thought I’d chime in with a question. I’ve had a couple of bottles of wine go wrong recently and wondered what the causes are. The bottle faults I am familiar with are as follows (and please do correct any of my misconceptions!):

Corked/corky: Bottle goes wrong due to TCA or other fungus-related problem, most often in the cork itself. Immediately identifiable from the unpleasant odors that emerge (wet cardboard) and pretty much undrinkable. I have very rarely encountered this.

Oxidized: Oxygen somehow leaks into the bottle (perhaps a shrunken cork from dry storage conditions). The wine has long since turned to vinegar. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered this.

Cooked: The wine was subjected to unfortunately high temperature for some period of time. My tell-tale sign of this is residue within the cap that covers the cork—presumably wine that was forced out by the heating of the bottle. When I have noticed the cooked bottle due to my own risky transporting, I have consumed it as soon as possible and noted almost no problem. When it has gone unnoticed, however, and been stored for some time the wine often has a bit of a peak when first opened before quickly degrading. The at-first promising bouquet disappears and the wine seems to oxidize incredibly quickly, turning into vinegar overnight, if not sooner.

My question is whether they are other bottle-specific faults that would lead a wine to ‘shut down’ quickly and dramatically change by the time I pour a second glass. I just had a bottle this week that was nice from my recollection when I bought it at the winery 6 months ago, promising with the first sniff and sip, but quickly shut down and was undrinkable by the day after. I was pretty careful about the transport, so I doubt it was cooked after I bought it and there was no telltale residue. The wine was much darker in color than I recall, but I am not sure about that. And I don’t know if this might be something more common in wine-growing areas that are new or modernizing. The particular bottle that shut down this week was a Pošip from Croatia and I had a lot of similar problems with unstable bottles that I enjoyed at the winery but quickly went flabby at home when I toured Virginia’s wine in the US. Or are the gods trying to send me a subtle message? Thanks!

Hi and welcome - there are a couple of misconceptions here.
1. tca is not a fungus related problem - it is the result of chlorine cleaning sulutions reacting with the cork itself. very lightly corked wines are known to show a lack of fruit even when the usual mustiness is not present. the only way to tell is to compare to another bottle.
2. oxidation can occur before the wine is bottled and in some 'third world' wine areas - you mentioned a couple - that can be a problem. it is the result of not using enough sulfites.
3. vinegar - the presence of acetic acid - is a much different thing from oxidtion. it is the result of a bacteria and is present to some degree in nearly all wine; and is considered a fault only when it is more than obvious. fairly common in pinot noir and ice wine.
4. there probably is no such thing as 'telltale residue'.
5. it may be that in 6 months a wine that was not correctly sulphured could behave as you have said. it could also have been just bottle variation. i have also had wine gather some off odors the next day - once oxigen is introduced all kinds of things can start up.

hope this is a bit of help

Greeting Keith,
Just my .02 cents;
I don’t believe it is fair to link TCA contamination with just corks alone (but I will admit that improperly treated natural corks are a major contributor to TCA tainted wines). It is very possible that TCA contamination can be found in wines enclosed with synthetic cork and screw-caps. So IMHO a better definition of a “corked” wine would be that the natural cork just failed to do the job that it was suppose to do. (Would you call a wine (enclosed either with a synthetic cork or screw-cap) that you assume is TCA tainted “corked’?)
Besides oxidation there are reduction problems. In the early stages of winemaking a reduction problem could be detected by a rotten egg smell and if detected early can be eliminated. Much latter on in the wine’s development this fault may be detected as onion, garlic, or sewage aromas. Most people say that a reduction problem is a winemaking problem not an enclosure problem. But let’s think about this for a minute, bottling and bottle aging before being released is a winemaking decision and part of the winemaking process IMO. So therefore (especially in today’s age, where there is a various number of enclosure to choice from) selecting the best suited enclosure for a wine is a winemaking decision.
Remember all these faults come in various degrees (sometimes one can detect them other times one can’t) and everyone has different perception thresholds for these faults.

Salute

You should add microbial action/contamination to your list.

Welcome, Keith. Great question -- hope you stick around.

Marian Baldy has a very good tutorial on wine faults and how to identify them at http://www.wine.gurus.com/marian1.html

Regards, Bob

Thanks, everyone, for your very informative comments. Who would have thought that a bad bottle could be so interesting!

I also ran into a series of articles in Wine and Spirit after I posted regarding wine faults (or non-faults) that I found quite helpful and thought I'd post links to here. Thanks for helping to get a handle on these concepts.

Wine and Spirit articles:
Reduction
Brettanomyces
Oxidation
Volatile Acidity

The bottle faults I am familiar with are as follows (and please do correct any of my misconceptions!):

Corked/corky: Bottle goes wrong due to TCA or other fungus-related problem, most often in the cork itself. Immediately identifiable from the unpleasant odors that emerge (wet cardboard) and pretty much undrinkable. I have very rarely encountered this.

Oxidized: Oxygen somehow leaks into the bottle (perhaps a shrunken cork from dry storage conditions). The wine has long since turned to vinegar. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered this.

TCA smells like potato peels more than wet cardboard. It is not always easy to notice, so it affects more bottles than you might think. It can be caused by microbial contamination of the cork as well as improper use of cleaning fluids in the winery.

You probably have encountered oxidized wines more often than you think because you have misidentified its signature. Vinegar is caused by secondary fermentation in the bottle due to acetobacillus. It cannot occur without bacterial contamination. Oxidized wines include such perfectly normal wines as tawny port, Madeira, Marsala, aged sherry (like Oloroso). The telltale signature is a brown sugar/molasses/dried fruit smell.[/b]

Keith, you might want to buy this kit of 12 flaws -- I purchased a similar set several years ago, and it was a great aid to my becoming a wine lover.

http://www.lenez.com/scents_of_wine-wine_faults.html

The other kits are also quite useful.

Regards, Bob

Wow. Again, great stuff. I am learning by the minute here. Let my update my thinking here a bit.

1. I’m starting to think of this faults as less of a dichotomous variable (is the wine corked or not) and more as a continuous variable (is this wine sufficiently affected by TCA such that I find some perceptible objectionable features).

2. TCA has probably been more prevalent in my wines than I have realized, but that doesn’t trouble me. A fault that no one who is drinking finds objectionable isn’t really a fault, is it? Kind of like that old saying about the tree that falls in the forest with nobody around to hear it.

3. Oxidation has actually been a bigger problem for me than I have realized. The flabbiness and darkened color of my Croatian Prošip can pretty likely be attributed to unintentional oxidation either during winemaking or storage. And, of course, oxidation does not vinegar make!

4. Alas, I popped yet another flawed bottle since first posting. This one’s nose was not really affected, but it had an alas all-too-familiar volatile spiky acidity thing going on that made it really unpleasant. I have encountered this a few too many times in Virginia wines that I have bought. Possibly, this could be due to a secondary fermentation due to the presence of unwanted bacteria?

5. Now one person’s flaw is another person’s fancy, but a lot of the flaws I’ve been experiencing would be unwelcome for most folks, I think. The fact that many of them come from ‘emerging’ wine regions such as Virginia and Croatia makes me think that a lot of this may be due to newcomers finding their way. What the best tradeoff for oxidation versus reduction? What are the proper precautions to take so that bacterial contamination doesn’t hijack a wine? And so on . . .

But the thing that continues to puzzle me a bit is that the wine didn’t have any obvious flaws to my palate when I tasted it at the winery—but definitely had them when I opened the bottle I purchased at home. (I have certainly tasted a lot of wines with the flaws mentioned in the thread, but didn’t purchase them!) Some possibilities come to my mind:

A – The time elapsed between my tasting at the winery and my consumption at home made the flaws perceptible to my palate (and, of course, tasting fatigue when at the winery is a possibility, but these flaws seem really obvious—I don’t think I would have missed them).

B – The wine that I tasted and the wine that I bought came from different batches (theirs from an uncontaminated barrel, mine from a contaminated one). I have no idea if winemakers in general blend everything together before bottling or not.

C – There were different storage conditions for the tasting bottle and the purchase bottle prior to purchase.

D – My transport and storage of the wine were to blame. Or an enclosure problem on the purchased bottle.

E – I have lousy luck and got the random bottle that, say, didn’t get all the oxygen flushed out of the bottle before the wine went in.

Anyhow, thank you everyone! You’ll be hearing from me again on the better bottles . . .