Wine Tip – Adjusting for Acid in Wine

Acidity is what makes foods palatable, but too much acidity makes wine taste tart.  If you’re tasting too much acidity in a wine, here are a few ways to adjust or adapt:

• Your first sip of the day will always be the most acidic.  Try not to judge your first wine of the day until a few sips go by unjudged.
• Chilling any wine will help dampen the perception of acidity.  Even 15 minutes in a refrigerator will help.
• Red wines above 70 degrees will be very acidic.  There’s nothing wrong with chilling them down a little below 70 or keeping them in a cooler when you’re out at a picnic on a warm day.
• Eat cheese, tomato-based sauces, or vinaigrettes to tone down the perception of acidity in wines.
• It’s possible you have an ‘oxidized’ bottle if it is overpowering and smells of vinegar.   It’s important to keep your bottles at a stable temperature under 70 degrees until you open them.  Temperature fluctuations will cause oxidized bottles.
• There’s always the possibility that you’ve purchased bad quality wine!  Be sure to shop at reputable, reliable local wine stores!

Wine Tip – Stem Marker/Monitor

Trying to keep track of how much you’re drinking at a party?  You can use your paper wine glass tag!  

After one or two drinks, not only is your driving and judgement impaired, but your ability to keep a mental number of how many drinks you’ve had becomes difficult.   By keeping track on your stemware tag you can be confident throughout the night knowing how much you’ve had to drink.  Just use a pen to make a tick-mark for each glass you’ve had, or, in leiu of a pen, simply make a tear mark for each drink.

Our stem marker even includes handy reminders to drink a glass of water between each drink of alcohol.  This habit tempers your drinking, rinses your teeth of stains, helps you enjoy the flavors of each wine more, and is an outstanding method for staving off headaches! 

Print our marker on your choice of paper to match your decor or event for a touch of festivity and as a tool for your guests, or just print some for yourself to use.  Enjoy!

Recognizing Wine Flaws – V.A.

Learn how to recognize wine flaws

VA, or Volatile Acidity refers to a set of specific types of acids in wine.  When imbalanced (when any of the volatile acids are dramatically recognizeable) it becomes a wine flaw, and the wine noticibly tastes or smells like vinegar or nail polish remover.

All food items have acidity to make them palatable.  One look at a pH table shows how what we eat varies in acid content.  There are many different types of acids, including the Malic and Lactic acids which are ever-present and vital to the enjoyment of wine.  Malolactic Fermentation is the common process of using a certain bacteria which eats one and turns it into the other.

But the presence of the “volatile acids” Acetic Acid and Ethyl Acetate (and others) give a flavor and aroma of vinegar.   In fact, this is the method for making vinegar!   Usually, it occurs as an infection during the winemaking process.  This specific bacteria only grows in oxygen and when sulfites aren’t present, especially when care is not taken to remove moldy grapes from harvested crops, or to keep a ferociously clean winery.

If you taste or smell vinegar, it’s important to know if air & bacteria got into the wine through a faulty cork or storage.  If it got in during winemaking, there’s little hope that other bottles will be any better, and there is reason to suspect all other wines from the same winery! 

If a bottle of wine smells or tastes strongly of vinegar, you should return it immediately, and only if you purchased it within a few days prior.  Select a different wine entirely as its replacement, unless you’ve tasted or know other bottles have been just fine.

Would you like to know more?  There’s a complete and more scientific discussion of these acids at the website for UC Davis

Wine Tip – Bottle Sizes

In the 1700’s, new advances in technology finally enabled glass manufacturers to mass produce bottles…but marketing methods and shopping habits had not yet caught up. A visit to a wine store meant bringing your own bottles (which were too expensive to throw away or provide to customers for free) to have refilled from the wine purveyor’s full barrels!

To combat the rampant dishonesty from both customers and shopkeepers in determining the capacity of the bottles, the English developed a standard bottle size of 750ml. The size was determined from the average capacity of a glass-blower’s lungs, and therefore was easy to reproduce with some level of accuracy.

With a few years of progress, other bottle sizes were developed. Today, Champagne is regularly bottled in up to 15 different sizes, with corresponding names:

Quarter bottle – 187ml
Half bottle – 375ml
Bottle– 750ml (25.4 fluid ozs, 4-5 glasses)
Magnum – 1.5 liters
Jeroboam – 3 liters (Champagne) or 4.5 liters (Still wine)
Rehoboam – 4.5 liters (Champagne only)
Methuselah – 6 liters
Salmanazar – 9 liters (equal to a case of 12 bottles)
Balthazar – 12 liters
Nebuchadnezzar – 15 litres (20 bottles!)

(The three largest sizes are rarely made today, as the bottles alone cost several hundreds of dollars and are very difficult to lift or pour)

Large bottles are hard to find on store shelves, but are regularly available by special order.  Plan ahead for your next large event, and order a large bottle to add to the atmosphere of your festivity!

Recognizing Wine Flaws – Cork Taint

Learn how to recognize bad wines

TCA (Trichloro-anisol) or “Cork Taint” is a musty creation that affects an estimated 1 in 20 bottles (or more) of wines sealed with natural cork.   It’s not the fault of the winery or winemaker, and doesn’t indicate anything more than a fault in the cork itself.

The chemical is created from reactions either in nature, or during the processing of cork bark into wine corks, but detecting it before the cork is used to seal a bottle is just not possible.  Eventually, contact of wine with cork will result in a wine that is tainted with the chemical.

One part per million in any wine is easily detectable by a large percentage of wine drinkers…but most people don’t know it’s not the wine’s fault.  The wine will smell and taste like wet, musty newspapers, or sweat socks, or wet dog.  I usually tell people to imagine finding a sleeping bag resting in a mud puddle under a pile of logs on a hot day.  Not a pleasant aroma, but not the wine’s fault!  Whether you smell it just a tiny bit, or a lot, it’s not going to taste good at all!

The correct response is to return the bottle to the place you purchased it, still full and with the cork intact.  It will be replaced so you can taste a new bottle…one you may love!  Don’t miss the opportunity to exchange the bottle and taste how the wine was meant to taste.

I discovered an in-depth listing of the most prevalent wine faults at http://www.bcawa.ca/winemaking/flaws.htm, written from a competition judge point of view, but it’s a great way to read a full list of wine faults & flaws to learn.

Knowing these faults and flaws will help you avoid the impulse to drink bad wine, or to pre-judge wines that might just be fantastic.  You can save money by exchanging bad bottles for good, and enjoy your wine drinking experiences much more fully.

Wine Tip – Aeration of wines is finally in vogue!

Getting oxygen into your red wines is a vital part of your enjoyment of each bottle. As wines aerate, the flavors soften, blend, and bloom over time. Our wine culture in America hasn’t been nearly emphatic enough about allowing the process to happen, until now!  The problem is, if you pour wine directly from the bottle into a glass, the tendency especially for guests is to drink immediately, before the wine is ready.

After reading quite a few pages trying to describe the process of “decanting” and “aerating” wines, I think the most helpful and accurate information can be found at http://www.wineloverspage.com/vino101/decant07.phtml.

Also, Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV constructed a video info-demo episode concerning decanting: 

The market is full of great tools to help you drink no wine before its time (usually about 10-25 minutes).

Wine Decanters

Pouring wine into any glass vessel will allow the wine to breathe without people drinking it early.

Wine Aerating Funnels

Wine funnels give a larger pouring area than the opening of a decanter allows, and add a filtering screen to take out the sediment from unfiltered or aged wines. It also injects the wine with more oxygen as you pour wine into the decanter. Its a great addition to anyone’s wine tools.

Wine Aerating pourers

The newest gadget helps aerate wines as they pour from the bottle into the glass, bypassing the need to decant most Under-$20 bottles! From $24.99 to $40, these are fantastic gifts for any connoisseur.

So if you’re trying to add to your wine gadgetry, or want to get something to accent someone else’s collection, try one of these ideas, or even a drying stand for the decanter, or some cleaning brushes or crystal rinse.