Six Wine Flaws and How to Deal With Them

I've written before about flaws you can experience when you open a bottle of wine, but the recent issue of Wine Enthusiast had a nice summary of different issues you can encounter with your wine.
So, if you open a bottle and something doesn't seem quite right, look for these potential problems:

• Cork Taint: this is a chemical problem that can occur in any wine sealed with a cork. Look for scents of wet cardboard or wet newspaper. Unfortunately, this condition only gets worse after you open the wine. Dump it, or, try to return it to where you bought it. Good wine shops will exchange the wine for another bottle.
• Too Tight: If you can't smell or taste much after you open your wine, then it's in a tight phase of its life, or, it's just too young. Decant the wine or run it through one of the many aerateors that are available. This wine needs air and time, but it should come around.
• Too old: I guess it happens to all of us. With wine, look for orange color in both whites and reds. Whites will have flavors of vinegar and reds will take on flavors of wet mushrooms and prunes. The British supposedly prefer older wines that have these characteristics. I will be dumping my wine and reaching for another bottle.
• Oxidized: This is very similar to a wine being too old but occurs because a wine was exposed to too much air either because of a bad cork, or from being open too long. Dump it.
• Sulfur spoil: Hard to miss the smell of rotten egg. This is a winemaking issue. Sulfur dioxide is often added to wine to prevent spoiling, but too much causes a problem. Before you dump the wine, try decanting it with a clean copper penny in the decanter. The copper supposedly counteracts the sulfur dioxide compound in the wine. I've never tried this, but I've known about it for years, and it's supposed to work.
• Brett: this is a naturally occurring yeast that comes from the barrels that wines are aged in. A little brett will give wine notes of damp earth, raw meat and wet grass. If you're getting horse manure, band aid and high school locker room instead, you might have too much brett in your wine. Decant the wine. The brett will often, but not always, blow off.

These conditions are really pretty rare, and you may never encounter them. But, when you are first opening a bottle, especially in a restaurant, where prices are marked up, look for these potential flaws in your wine.

Tom