[MUSIC] So that's a good list of faults I think for you to get to know faults relating to oxidation. Including not only staling or Sherrification or Maderization of a wine. But oxidation due to the oxidizing of ethanol to acetic acid. In other words, vinegar formation. Then next category was the reduction of sulfur. Hydrogen sulfide, which is rotten egg stinky, or worse. Aromatics that are considered false that are caused by a spoilage yeast, Brettanomyces. Spoilage that comes from a packaging component, mainly corks. By the way, as an after thought, sometimes the corked smell in a wine is what I call environmental. In other words, it didn't come from the cork, but it comes from something in the winery environment that imparted that smell to the wine. I can think of several examples in the last few years actually. There was one where a winery was using humidifiers in their barrel room to keep the air nice and moist and prevent a lot of evaporative loss. But the humidifiers had gotten old and moldy and they were actually blowing mold spores all over the barrel room. And the barrels had a lot of mold growing on them and the wine picked up the smell. So when they bottled that wine, every bottle was corked and it didn't matter that the corks were lovely and expensive, because the wine was corked before it was even bottled. There were other examples of wine that was aging in tanks or barrels in a dark forgotten corner of the winery where there was a floor drain that was seldom used and it was growing mold and again, spores were getting up into the air and infecting the wood in the winery. So that's a possible environmental cause of the corked smell. When that happens, however, and you encounter a bottle that's corked, every bottle you open in your search for a good bottle will be corked. So you'll know that it's not just a an instance of bottle variation, but every bottle in the case will show some level of corkiness. So please remember thinking back on what we have discussed, that some of these odor components, some of the interesting ones, at low levels might comprise actually the part of a wine's personality. They might be part of the microbial terroir of a wine. I remember a story one of my professors told about a winery in Tuscany. And It had been around for a couple of hundred years. The wines were very well-loved locally, very popular. And the descendant of the original founders of the winery who was still running the winery was able to sell everything every year. And had a great successful wine business. So in the modern era, he had a couple of kids and sent them to university to study culture and when they finished college and came home, they were horrified, given what they now knew about winery microbial contamination. They were horrified at the state of sanitation of their father's 400 year old winery. After complaining for a long time, their father finally let them build a newer building behind the winery and buy some new equipment and make some wines back there. The problem was that, after they did that and bottled their wines, nobody in their local area would buy them. The question they heard was, what happened to your wines? They're not just the way they used to be. Well of course they weren't, they were made in a more sanitizable environment with new clean equipment and they didn't have that quaint, Interesting idiosyncratic taste that father and grandfathers wines always had. So they had a big problem. They weren't selling any wine. And the solution to the problem was to have the father and the grandfather continue to make some wines in the traditional winery that had it's own microbial flora growing on the walls and the floor, and in the equipment, and so forth, and bottle those wines to sell locally. Whereas the wines of the sons, the modern international style wines, were then sold for export. So it was win win, but it took a little bit of [LAUGH] adjustment and understanding. So in closing, here's a quote from a favorite author of mine, Ron Jackson who is a prolific writer of wine production and wine science books. Ron Jackson says, no precise definition of what makes a wine faulty exists, human perception is too variable. Nevertheless, aromatic faults destroy, mask the wine's fragrance. The same compounds that produce faults are often desirable at or near their detection threshold. At such concentrations they may add to the prized complexity of fine wines. This concludes our module on common wine faults. In our next and final module, we will focus on food and wine pairing principles.
