What to do if your cabernet smells like cabbage or a rotten egg

DAVE MCINTYRE

CAN YOU tell when a wine is corked, cooked, reductive or otherwise flawed? When you get a faulty wine at a store or a restaurant, do you return it for a refund? Or do you suffer through, not knowing whether the bottle is bad or you just don’t know enough about wine to tell the difference?

The most common fault is cork taint, a chemical problem with the cork that affects the flavour of the wine. If you want to be geeky, the chemical is called TCA, or 2,4,6trichloroanisole. Some people are sensitive to cork taint, while others have problems detecting it. At its worst, cork taint smells and tastes like a mouldy basement, wet cardboard or a wet dog. When subtle, it can make a wine simply taste dull. The cork taint problem spurred the move to screw caps and other alternative closures a decade ago. Although the quality of corks has improved because of better produc- tion practices, cork taint remains the most common fault that wine consumers encounter.

A wine is said to be “reductive” when it develops sulphury odours. This condition is more difficult to identify than cork taint, and some people might argue that it’s a phase, rather than a fault. A reductive wine smells like cabbage, a rotten egg or a burnt matchstick. Maybe it is just a phase, though if you open a bottle and find the wine stinky, there’s no consolation in thinking that it might have been better if you’d waited another year. Some people say a reductive wine just needs to be decanted and aerated for a while. I’ve found that if a wine smells of rotten eggs, it won’t return to fruit before my patience wears thin and I pour it down the drain.

A “cooked” wine has been exposed to heat and oxygen over time. That can happen in your cellar if you haven’t invested in temperature-controlled storage. It can happen in your car if you aren’t careful. It can happen in a store window if the retailer is more interested in advertising than in quality control. A cooked white wine turns brown and tastes flat, like bruised apples. A cooked red wine turns brown-red and tastes tired and a bit vinegary.

What should you do when you encounter a flawed wine? If you’ve bought it recently from a wine store, the most likely fault is cork taint. If you get that wet-basement, mouldy-cardboard smell, take the wine back to the store where you purchased it. And don’t be worried about returning a bad bottle.

“If you think there’s something wrong with the wine, then there probably is,” said Vanessa Moore, co-owner of the two Unwined stores in Alexandria, Virginia in the US. “We need consumers to feel comfortable engaging in the discussion about quality.” Most stores will offer an exchange or refund for a bottle returned by a customer, provided the bottle isn’t empty. If you think a bottle is faulty, stick the cork back in and take it back to the store as soon as you can. If it’s a wine you’ve aged for a long time in your cellar, you might be out of luck.

And in a restaurant? Most sommeliers should at least smell a wine before they pour it at your table, and they will catch most faulty wines before those bottles reach you. If you don’t like a wine, Andy Myers suggested you taste it at least twice before rejecting it. Myers is a master sommelier who headed the wine programme at CityZen and now is beverage director for José Andrés’s Think Food Group. “Take two sips, and if it doesn’t taste good, say something,” Myers advised. “If the wine is flawed, it’s an easy exchange: new glasses, new bottle, everybody’s happy. If you give the wine a fair chance and it isn’t pleasing, then you should certainly speak up.”

There are tricks that supposedly help correct wine faults. Crinkling a piece of plastic wrap and dipping it into a corked wine supposedly removes TCA taint. Stirring a reductive wine with a silver spoon supposedly releases the wine’s fruit flavours. – Washington Post

SNIFF IT: A reductive wine smells like cabbage, a rotten egg or a burnt matchstick.