Good Morning!

I was gone for a few days on an amazing girl’s getaway and received an email asking about the difference between Bottle sickness and a wine being Corked.

Great question and the answer is pretty easy for me to answer for once. While I am making wine I taste my wines from the time they are grapes all the way through bottling so I know this flavor profile so well, I bet I could find it blindfolded…kinda like you will always know your mama’s cooking from anyone’s cooking. Bottle sickness or sometimes called bottle shock is believed to happen when a wine is bottled and the agitation and movement of the wine and oxygen kinda mix during the bottling process. It will only last a few days, maybe up to a week, but the wine will return to what the taste and aroma when made. It would be rare to taste a wine in bottle shock unless you tried it right away and the wines are normally “rested” after bottling for a bit before being sold or shipped. A bottle sick wine would not have any real aroma or much taste, it tastes lifeless and bland.

Corked wine is something that once you have had a “Corked” bottle you will always know it. Corked means that a bacteria in the cork cells reacts to the wine or the residue in the bottle. Corked wine will have a musty, wet dog aroma and though they wine might taste ok, the aroma will be stinky. There is no way to tell if a bottle is corked except to open it and it can happen to value wine as well as a very expensive bottle. Many of the wines use other closures to avoid any Corked wines. I think I have ran into about 15-20 bottles in all my years of enjoying wine. Of course for many years of my “drinking” career, I am not sure I was aware of the wine enough to recognize a corked bottle, I kinda doubt it, but many people in the wine biz says it happens to about 7-10% of all wines using natural corks.

If you are unsure if your wine is corked, here is one way to check, pour two glasses of the suspect wine. Then inspect the cork itself, sometimes you can actually see something is a little off, perhaps a little moldy, funkiness. (Smelling the cork is LAME, don’t do…I know we all do it at least once to see what it smells like, but it will not really tell you much). Now back to the two glasses, sniff glass one and sit it down. Swirl the second glass a few times and then take a sniff, see if they both smell the same. Sometimes when you open a bottle, it is quite possible to have some off aromas and a little air will “clear” the aromas. If the second glass is not the smell of wet dog, musty or wet cardboard, it’s not corked. If they both smell like the wet dog/cardboard/musty thing, it is corked.

Once you smell a corked bottle you will ALWAYS know this aroma!

I hope this answers your question!

Tomorrow, I will tell you about 2 wines we had this girls week, that I am sure will make it on my top 100 list of wines for 2012.

Much LOVE and wine,

Tammi