4 Most Common Wine Faults that We Often Face – Part 2

As you probably already know it yourself, “life is too short to drink bad wine”. Did you know that billions of people actually do have faulty wines on the table every day? What’s worse is…it’s without even knowing it! Good news is bad wine wouldn’t do any harm to your health. It’s just gonna leave you with an unpleasant experience! Last time we discussed 3 of the most common wine faults, right? In case you want to have a look once again, go read the article here. Today we continue to topic with 4 more things you need to be cautious for:

1. Maderisation

An interest thing to know is that one of the most popular and expensive wines in the world – Madeira wine – carries the name of a bad defect. Madeirisation is a process that has to do with an extreme heating and oxidization of the wine. Namely Madeira wine is made by this very strange technology of exposing the liquid to super high temperatures. This results in an “exotic” smell of burnt marmalade, sugar and caramelized nuts. Well, this process tends to be irreversible and however attractive those flavors may be for the Madeira drink, they are not very much needed for the rest of the wines!

2. Brettanomyces

Also known as Brett, that wild yeast in wine has to give a ‘smoky’ or ‘animal’ character to the drink. It’s been a long time since people started arguing about whether this is a drawback, or not. For most experts, though, it is an unnecessary thing and they usually consider it as a fault. However, this is most common with red wines with lower acidity. If you stumble upon a drink with an extremely intense smell of stable, keep in mind there is probably too much Brettanomyces in the wine.

3. Smell of stewed dried fruits

Some people also describe it as wet hay’s odor, which doesn’t sound like something you would sniff, huh?! In general, these are flavors that come from the oxidative processes. They can occur during fermentation, which may result in a smell that resembles stewed dried fruits. This doesn’t seem to be so unpleasant, but when the oxidizing process goes too far, you can definitely feel the bad notes of wet hay. As always, moderation is the key!

4. Screw cap

Some producers prefer to storage their wines with screw caps. By doing this they minimize the risk of getting the ‘corked wine’ effect that you probably know from the previous blog post. Screw caps are not that harmless, though! They can form a very, very bad mouldy smell. If that does not sound so unpleasant to you, imagine drinking wine that smells like dirty socks! Luckily, our wines don’t have such faults so you can enjoy them in a good company whenever you feel like it! Check our Wine selection as you click here!