Is it you or the wine?

Before you drink your wine, you inhale the aroma deeply through your nose with your eyes closed. Searching for the exotic scents in your glass, perhaps of a fine Pinot Noir, or elegant Zinfandel, instead an acrid smell jabs its way up your nose. This is not the essence of fleshy cherries rolling across a bed of violets that you were expecting. It’s more like burnt matches.

Is it you or the wine?

It’s probably the wine, but how can you be sure – especially when you are debating whether or not to send the bottle back in a restaurant. Just as wine can absorb and exude exotic aromas, it can also pick up and give off pungent odors. The key is to recognize the most common wine faults.

Most wine faults are caused by either sulphur compounds or bacteria. The most common fault of corked wine results when fungus interacts with a chemical that’s used to sanitize the corks, producing a compound that taints the wine. You can recognize tainted corked wines by their wet-cardboard, musty, mildewy aroma.

Oxidized wine, the second most common fault, occurs when the wine is overexposed to air while being made, aged, bottled or stored.

Too much oxygen makes nails rust, fruit turn brown, and wine taste stale, turning it a deep yellow or brownish color.

Of note, visual characteristics such as cloudiness and crystals are not faults, and they do not affect the wine’s smell or taste adversely. Cloudy wines, with suspended proteins, often haven’t been filtered. Crystals, or wine diamonds, are tartrates that can form in wines that haven’t been cold stabilized – a process that chills the wines below their natural cold stable point to purposely create the crystals and then remove them. More natural winemaking has decreased the use of cold stabilization, and thus increases the incidence of the crystals. While they are not detrimental to the wine, some consumers believe them to be glass shards and return the bottle. This, of course, is not the case and usually they are harmless.

More often than not, your nose knows. Smell and appearance and, of course, taste should be your guide. Often times just giving your glass of wine a good smell – burying your nose in the glass and inhale deeply – will help you decide.

Admittedly, this is wine 101, and there’s a lot more to it, but this should help you.