How can I see wine bug?

One can assume that every 10th to 20 Bottle of wine is bad. Therefore, this topic is really important. At the same time it is also a very difficult issue, because you really need to experience wine bug to detect it at some point fairly reliably by themselves. I will confine myself to the easily recognizable and common mistakes and what is often considered an error.

What one sees

You will experience, that fall into the bottle or glass in small, clear crystals on the ground. Here is cream of tartar . Weinstein is not an error and affecting the taste of wine in any way.

Even before opening the bottle you should look at the cork. Mold on cork is common and is no cause for concern. But you can see that the cork was a bit forced out of the bottle, the wine was probably exposed to high temperatures. A cork must not extend beyond the bottleneck.

For older wines should be on the level of the eighth bottle. Sometimes the bottles are no longer full. The level is very old wines at an important criterion that determines the price. For wines that are younger than 15 years, is likely to occur, however, not then and is a clear warning sign that the wine is well fit only with restrictions.

Sometimes wine is cloudy clear (unclear) or has fuzzy or cloudy precipitates. This is often already in the bottle, the latest in glass can be seen immediately. In young wines turbidity is always a mistake. For older wines, especially in red wines, it can also be whirled custody act. Let the bottle stand quietly for a while and wait to see if the depot sells. If not, the wine is too old barely edible, probably.

One more thing: If swimming in the glass crumbs from the cork, then try to fish out this simple. Anyway, it is not "cork" that is, the famous cork taint.

What you smell

"And he has cork" © Dirk Becker

Embarrassing it is by the way, if you complain in a restaurant, the waiter pours you cork taint and then out of the bottle with screw cap, a new glass. I'm sure many sommeliers can tell such stories. However: It should also be cases in which the board serves as a seal for screw caps, with TCA (trichloroanisole - this is the substance that caused the corked) is contaminated and then leads to a real corked with the same faults.

Relatively rare, it is the way so that corked pretty good disguise. Sometimes the nose is OK, the taste you notice any abnormalities, but the reverberation (the smell that comes directly after swallowing from the pharynx to the nose) then appears Korkgeruch. Sometimes you take the cork taint also not true as such, but the wine is just "different" or "worse" than a bottle of comparison. This is called then usually a "hidden cork taint".

Another error that manifests itself in the nose, the sulfur sulfurous off . The wine smells unpleasant then sulphurous. There is actually a proven trick on how to identify Schwefelböckser: a copper coin (eg dime) into the glass, and some swing. When the sulfur smell disappears, then it is a sulfurous off.

Also an increasingly important wine error UTA (Atypical age grade). UTA shall meet as previously anticipated by the stress of the vines (eg drought), on to high yields and an early harvest to date. The tone is reflected in the nose and mouth with flavors of mothball and wet cardboard.

There are many other wine faults. Who wants to know more, find the glossary more than 20 other errors. But I think over 90 percent of all errors occurring are covered by the cases described here.

Utz Graafmann