Grapevine: Trust your instinct if a wine smells bad
Almost anyone who has spent some time training their palate has begun the process in a state of confusion. You find yourself trying to figure out what “tannin” tastes like (what do you mean, it’s like sucking on a teabag?); meanwhile, the meat-head next to you is rattling off wine descriptors like an auctioneer at a garage sale. “Pencil lead! Charcoal! Moist earth!” and so it goes – a litany of fruits and flowers, chemicals and fungi, forest and barnyard.
Admittedly, this can be tiring (you smell nail polish remover, you say? I thought it was airplane glue…) but there is a point to it all. Rather than worrying about the exact flavors of lychee and breadfruit, gooseberry or the dreaded cat’s pee (a descriptor for sauvignon blanc), it’s very helpful to learn a few of the more important scents that indicate a wine with problems – serious problems.
A reader recently sent me the following note:
“Hey Paul, I have a question for you about something I have never run into before. I was out tasting today at a pretty new winery (and) I noticed a fairly strong chemical smell I could best describe at nail polish remover. The wine was a viognier, blended with about five percent sauvignon blanc. It was the strangest viognier I have ever had, although the winemaker seemed quite proud of it. So, I got online, and came across an article about volatile acidity, and how wines with high levels of volatile acidity can have a nail polish-like odor to them. I have heard the term before, but I don’t totally understand what volatile acidity is, where it comes from, or whether it will kill me! As a side note, I noticed a bit of the same smell in a syrah they were pouring. Needless to say, I was not impressed by any of the wines. Any help you can give me with the nail polish thing would be appreciated!”
This reader has pretty much nailed the problem. That distinct smell of nail polish remover – to which some people (I am one) are far more sensitive than others – is a sure indicator of excess volatile acidity. Volatile acidity, which you will often hear referred to simply as VA, can be noticed as a sharp, acidic smell that can range from nail polish remover to airplane glue to actual vinegar. It is one of the more common winemaking flaws, though certainly not the worst of them.
Individual sensitivity to VA differs widely. At lower levels, VA can be a plus, by “lifting” aromas and adding a bit of snap to a wine’s flavors. It is not harmful, but any time that you find truly unpleasant chemical odors, whether nail polish, airplane glue or vinegar, dominating the scent and flavor of a particular wine, that wine should be avoided.
Two more common wine flaws that you should learn to recognize (and avoid) whenever possible are a bacterial infection called brettanomyces (brett for short) and TCA, the chemical behind so-called “corked” wines.
Brettanomyces is a type of bacteria that can infect winery barrels and ultimately impact the wine itself. It is detectable primarily in the aromas of red wines, and can be picked up as a sweaty saddle, tack room smell. Sometimes it can turn mousy, or slightly rubbery, like a band-aid. It is generally considered to be a serious flaw in a finished wine, although in many parts of Europe brett has been an accepted component of the barnyard character in rustic reds.
As a professional wine judge and taster, I have a moderate tolerance for brett in wines, as long as it is a nuance and not a full-fledged flavor. But it is very difficult, if not impossible, to manage, and American wineries seem to have different, more aggressive strains of brett than those in Europe. When strong flavors of barnyard, sweaty saddle and horse overwhelm all the fruit in even a young wine, you have far too much brett on the loose in your winery. And that is a problem.
TCA – the villain behind corked wines – stands for 2,4,6-trichloranisole, a chemical compound that imparts an unpleasant moldy, musty aroma to the wine. It can be detected (by some people) in extremely small concentrations, so small that the wine may not be overtly musty, but rather shows little of the fresh fruit that you know should be there.
TCA is not a danger to health, but unfortunately there is nothing that can be done to fix it. In fact, corked wines tend to get worse with exposure to air. One of my chief worries as a wine columnist is that someone will purchase a wine that I have enthusiastically recommended, and they will have the bad fortune (about one bottle in 24) to get a corked wine. They might easily conclude that I don’t know a good wine from an old sock, and though that may be true, in this instance it is the fault of the cork, not the wine columnist. Wineries (and cork producers) are going to great lengths to reduce the instance of TCA contamination, and corks are certainly getting better all the time.