Ten Aromas

Top ten aromas you don’t want to smell in your wine this fall.

Compound	What it Smells Like
Acetaldehyde	Stale straw; roasted nuts
Amyl-acetate	Fake candy banana flavoring
Brettanomyces	Barnyards, fecal matter, gamey horses
Cork taint	Damp dog in damp basement sitting on damp cardboard
Butyric acid	Rancid butter
Ethyl acetate	Weak vinegar, paint thinner, nail polish remover
Hydrogen sulfide	Rotten eggs, garlic that has gone bad
Mercaptans	Burnt garlic or onion
Oxidation	Cooked bruised fruit and walnuts
Sulfur dioxide	Burnt matches

The Academy Award-winning film, The Revenant (2015) starring Leonardo DiCaprio, about a frontiersman on a fur trapping expedition is partially based on:

A. Writings by an early Napa Valley pioneer

B. The life of an early winemaker in the Pacific Northwest

C. A myth of revenge from the Piedmont region of Italy

D. A California miner who became famous during the Gold Rush and eventually became a judge

Napa Valley’s first non-Native American settler, George Calvert Yount was a fur trapper and a friend of fellow fur trapper Hugh Glass, the subject of the film The Revenant and the book of the same name. Some of Yount’s writings helped inform the true story of Glass and fur traders in the West. Yount settled in the Napa Valley in 1838 and his first production of “wine” was allegedly fermented in cowhides hung from trees. In 1860, Yount hired a young Prussian immigrant named Charles Krug to help him make better quality wines. Krug went on to found his own winery, Charles Krug, in 1861. After Yount’s death in 1865, the United States Postal Service renamed the town where he lived “Yountville” in his honor.

“We entered the wine industry when there were no wine magazines, no wine critics, no 100-point scale—all 23 of us vintners in the Napa Valley in the 1960s. What we learned, we learned from the vineyard itself. Back then, it seemed like less was better.”

— Janet Trefethen (Trefethen Family Vineyards is 50 years old this year)

Ten Aromas

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