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.

Champagne and sparkling wines don’t ever get “corked.”

Answer: False.

Both sparkling wines and Champagne can be “corked”—that is, tainted with TCA, the chemical that creates a funky odor that makes wines smell like a wet dog sitting on wet newspapers in a damp cellar. In fact, according to the French consulting oenologist and TCA expert Dr. Pascal Chatonnet, TCA is actually easier to smell in sparkling wines than in still wines. This is because sparklers are more aromatically delicate and also because the bubbles have the effect of volatilizing the compound, that is, making it smell more pronounced.

According to Dr. Chatonnet, TCA can be smelled in still wines at a threshold of 2 to 5 nanograms per liter, whereas TCA can be smelled in sparklers at a threshold of 1 to 1.5 nanograms per liter.

Mocha Tequila? Painful.

Call us old-fashioned, but we like the idea of things tasting like the thing itself. Sauvignon blanc like sauvignon blanc; tequila like tequila, and so on. Here’s where we part company with ParTea, a new… Continue reading

Bottle Sickness

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