Bottle Sickness

Bottle sickness is a temporary condition that occurs following bottling. During bottling, wine is jostled and exposed to oxygen as it is transferred from barrels or tanks to bottles. This can cause the wine to temporarily taste neutral or out of balance. Bottle sickness (also called bottle shock) usually goes away in a few weeks, occasionally months.

Of the following famous grapes from the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of northern Italy, which is not a white grape variety?

A. Vitovska

B. Ribolla Gialla

C. Schioppettino

D. Picolit

Schioppettino is one of the top red varieties grown in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, a region famed for its white wines. However, schioppettino nearly disappeared from Friuli in the wake of phylloxera. The owner of Ronchi di Cialla winery, Paolo Rapuzzi, rescued the grape in the 1970s when he collected 100 extant vines and clandestinely had them grafted to make them available for propagation (schioppettino was not an officially allowed variety in Friuli at the time). Wines made from schioppettino can be startling—hauntingly dry with sharp peppery, spicy, black cherry flavors and a tight, angular body. The word schioppettino comes from scoppiettio, to “crackle” or “pop,” a possible reference to the grape’s or wine’s fascinating texture.

“It’s hard to talk about flavor. Tasting something is such a direct neural jolt; words will always seem clumsy and vague. ‘Spicy’ does not begin to express the riot of electrical fires sparking through your skull after you eat a Thai chile. ‘Sour’ hardly touches the way a fresh lemon grips your whole consciousness and squeezes until it weeps.

So we turn to metaphor. Elderflower kombucha is a bottled Scandinavian summer: mild, light, yellow, easy. Coconut water is a Caribbean afternoon. Chianti, as any sommelier will tell you, is the blood of a mortally wounded Vespa. … Coca-Cola is all the gallons of lighter fluid harvested from discarded Bics in the aftermath of a Bruce Springsteen concert.”

—René Redzepi and David Zilber in The Noma Guide to Fermentation (Artisan 2018)

Bottle Sickness

Get WineSpeed