How to learn wine faults

[RottenGrapeJuice]

I’m trying to get more advanced in my wine making skills, and I want to learn how to identify different types of wine faults. Has anyone every thought about purchasing the different spoilage bacteria (if this is possible), and purposely spoiling a small amount of wine for learning purposes? I thought this would be a fun and informative experiment

 

[NorCal]

I learned by doing

If you took a glass of wine and left it open, after a few days you would get a taste and brown hue of oxidized wine. Acetobacter will most likely take hold, consuming your alcohol and creating acidic acid and totally spoiling the wine over the next week or two.

 

[RottenGrapeJuice]

I learned by doing

If you took a glass of wine and left it open, after a few days you would get a taste and brown hue of oxidized wine. Acetobacter will most likely take hold, consuming your alcohol and creating acidic acid and totally spoiling the wine over the next week or two.

Yea I think vinegar is an easy one that all of us have experienced one time or another. Others such as cork taint, mousiness, geranium smell (whatever that is), etc are smells that lots of us probably haven’t encountered

 

[mainshipfred]

Back when I first started making wine I took an crash course offered by a local winery. It was a 6 or 8 week course based on making wine from grapes. It covered a broad range of topics and one of them was faults. The winemaker said if he lost all of his senses except for his sense of smell he could still make good wine. While I don't know how true that is in one of the classes he brought out a fault smelling kit similar to the link below. Each vial had a related fault smell and we had to try to determine which was which. Most of us had a rough time distinguishing the smells until he told us which it was. Even then I had trouble identifying some of them.

https://www.winestuff.com/products/make-scents-of-wine-12-aroma-faults-kit

 

[mainshipfred]

Jus to clarify it was one 4 hour session a week.

 

[Rice_Guy]

I have been exposed to these by being a wine judge/ training with doctored wines used to train judges. There is a judging course put on by WinemakerMagazine at their conference. There are flavor capsules that can be purchased to doctor clean wines to create standards, ,, (pricey like $500 for ten)

Yea I think vinegar is an easy one that all of us have experienced one time or another. Others such as cork taint, mousiness, geranium smell (whatever that is), etc are smells that lots of us probably haven’t encountered

What is funny is that a little adds complexity, so it is OK, ,,, and most folks will taste and not complain. I laugh reading the consumer complaint files sometimes.

 

[winemaker81]

The winemaker said if he lost all of his senses except for his sense of smell he could still make good wine.

This is very believable. Many moons ago I co-owned a LHBS, and customers brought in samples. There were some where the closest the wine was gonna get to my lips was to sniff it; no WAY the "wine" would touch my lips. I learned to trust my nose to be correct.

I put "wine" in quotes as some of the samples no longer qualified as wine. In a few cases I called it "toxic waste". I say that jokingly, but in a few cases the sample would work better than smelling salts.

The kit Fred pointed out is a bit pricey, but it's probably the easiest way to learn. If there's a local wine making club, it's worth doing as a group purchase.

Side note -- When in a restaurant and the waiter offers the first taste of wine to ensure the bottle is good, I just sniff it. If the wine is bad, the nose knows.

 

[BarrelMonkey]

I'm currently reading 'Flawless' by Jamie Goode which goes into this subject in detail. Of course there's no substitute for hands-on (lips on?) experience, but so far I'm finding it interesting and informative.