▷S3E6 Wine Faults and Flaws with Dr. Rachel B. Allison (Part 2)

Photo by Lau James

When the waiter pours a taste of wine for you and it's your job to inspect that wine for flaws, while the sommelier and your fellow dinner guests look on, this episode is your guide to how to taste that wine with confidence. Wine flavor scientist Dr. Rachel B. Allison and Rose Thomas go over the different smells and tastes that answer the question "How do you know if a wine has gone off?" once and for all. Even better, Dr. Allison tells us exactly how those rotten egg and wet cardboard smells (to name a few) got into the wine in the first place. (What is "barnyard" in a wine, anyway?) 

If you enjoyed the first part of RT's interview with Dr. Allison in S3E5, you'll surely enjoy another deep dive into the science of wine. Let the technical information empower you as a diner, wherever you are in your journey in wine. You'll never unlearn one funny fact about baby carrots. 

Dr. Rachel B. Allison, a wine flavor scientist, educator, and competitive blind tasting champion who grew up bilingual in Canada. Dr. Allison has a Ph.D. in wine flavor chemistry from Cornell University, and an Undergraduate degree in Engineering Chemistry from Queen’s University. Her paper with Austin Montgomery on hydrogen sulfide formation in canned wines was selected as the Best Enology Paper of 2023 by the American Society for Enology and Viticulture. Alongside many previous accolades, Dr. Allison was just named one of Wine Enthusiast Magazine's Future Forty in 2024.

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Learn more about Dr. Allison's work at www.rachelballison.com.

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  there are things we don't control in wine that can produce exceptional wines like I feel like the great um the great wines like things that you're just like oh I was so overwhelmed by this one like this was so amazing there was something on it there's something unexpected there's noble rods things that we didn't plan yeah things that we're not exactly planning for but you could also get burned by that yeah that is one of the risks with things like Brett So when people say barnyard, do they mean poo? Welcome to Modo di Bere, the podcast about local drinks and local sayings. I'm your host, Rose Thomas Bannister. You're listening to Part 2, my interview with Dr. Rachel B. Allison, a wine flavor scientist and blind tasting champion who was recently honored as one of 2024's future 40 tastemakers by Wine Enthusiast magazine. You can listen to Part 1 of my conversation with Dr. Allison, which was all about blind tasting on season three, episode five of this podcast. This episode is all about that moment at the restaurant when the waiter pours you a taste of wine and you're supposed to check it for, well, what are you supposed to check it for exactly? We describe the various wine faults and flaws one by one with Dr. Rachel B. Allison, explaining not just what you taste and smell when a wine is faulty, but the science behind how it got that way. So you never have to feel weird about sending a wine back at a restaurant again. If you found this interesting or useful, I hope you'll take a moment to visit patreon.com/mododibere and become a supporter of the show so that we can keep producing it. I really want to talk to you about wine faults. I feel that this part of the wine service ritual when the waiter or the It comes in poor as a taste of the wine for the host or the person who orders the wine. That's not the moment where you decide, "Oh, I like this," or not. It's where you're supposed to be testing the wine for faults before you accept it to be poured for everyone. I know that a lot of people, my early wine drinker self -included, found that moment like really intimidating. I know that a lot of your research and work has been around wine faults, and I'm wondering if you could just explained to us some of the different wine faults that you would be tasting in that moment in the restaurant and how they occur. Yeah, so there's, I mean, a couple of key ones, you're looking for reduction, oxidation, paternal myces, volatile acidity, what else? I'd be checking if it's heat damage, so cooked, quarktane. And now you do see like mousey -ness, you can you can find that. I feel like I don't see it in too many conventionally made wines, but it can happen. So reduction. So let's talk about quarktane. What is quarktain? What are you smelling in the glass and what's the proper response when it's detected for a diner? The quarktain is like, I mean, I hear a lot of, a lot of words, I guess describing it, but it's like the, I mean, it's like wet cardboard moldy, moldy and wet cardboard basement, kind of a wet basement kind of smell. Quarktain, the compound is TCA and you see it also as a contaminant in baby carrots. - I totally smelled stinky baby carrots. - Yeah. - Okay, that's a good one. - So it's like a good, like it's a way to find it if you don't want to just keep opening wines until you find it. Like honestly, just every time you go to supermarket just kind of go buy the baby carrots. Like you'll eventually, you'll eventually get it. - Great. It is to me like wet paper. - Yeah. - Or somebody would say like a wet dog kind of, you know, basement musty. - I feel like for me, the wet dog part of it is very wine context. Like it needs the wine context versus like the compound in isolation is much more like cardboard, paper, paper. - Yeah, yeah, like if you're walking around the city on recycling day after the rain and like that smell everywhere. - Yeah, so like when you have, it's like a, oh my gosh, I don't remember the microgrindism, but it's like a bacterial contamination that will chlorinate anisol. So like you need a source of chlorine and you need the bacterial contamination. And so that's why you often don't see chlorine -based cleaners in wineries. Oh, okay, because it does something. You don't want any source of chlorine. You don't want an extra chlorine around, so you, 'cause you need trichloroenosol has chlorines on it, so you need to get rid of chlorines. You can also try bromoenosol, which smells similar. So you can have TCA or TBA, both of them are bad. - So what is TCA and how does it get there? - Enosol is like in the same family of compounds of, no, that doesn't make it easier, what I was gonna say. - Thank you. - But enosol is like, I feel like that's a compound that would be like present in wine. Wine is whatever a thousand compounds. It's just a compound, not particularly relevant. But if you chlorinate it, you add chlorines to it, which is what this microorganism can do. It adds chlorines to it. Then it smells like the wet paper, wet basement smell. So you need the bacterial contamination, which is usually found in the cork. Okay. And you need a source of chlorine to produce TCA, which is cork -tained. - Okay, so it's deriving from a bacteria that's causing a reaction in the wine that makes it smell like white paper. - Yes, and that bacteria can be in the cork, sometimes it can be in barrels, but it's mainly a cork thing. - I mean, people work a lot with the corks to try to get corks that aren't gonna have it and stuff like that, so it's like one aspect of wine science and packaging. - Yeah. - So, but once it's happened to wine. It's it's there pretty much that it doesn't really blow off. Yeah. You can try to scalp it out. So like it's pretty hydrophobic. So it'll bind to plastic. So like you see sometimes people poke saran wrap into wine and it'll that's too much work. It'll absorb onto saran wrap. That's good to know that that's a good trick. I've done it before. It does work, but like Saran Wrap will also scalp other compounds. It's just like if you really want to drink that wine and you really can't handle the cortaine, you can probably pull a lot of it from. And it's not, but it's not all plastic wraps. It's only certain polymers that seem to do that. I don't know which chemistries are which brands of pasta. This sounds like a good YouTube video, I have to say. Good science YouTube Yeah. Swirling around some saran wrap and then everybody else try it, oh my god. Yeah, we all did it. I remember we definitely did it. We opened a friend of mine, her, aunt and uncle used to own a restaurant in the city that like in like the 90s and I think they closed it after a while and there was a cellar, they had stored somewhere and I don't know if it was like a good thing or a bad thing but like or why this happened but the temperature control got turned off that apartment so all the wines were just like we don't know what this is so her aunt gave her a bunch of them because she was studying wine with us and they're like yeah you can try them with your friends and we opened this wine it was a 1975 Chateau Margot it was a mess it was the most faulty wine I've ever had in my life and we were all so sad like we're all there like poking saran wrap into it, trying to clean it up a little bit. It was so like, we were all so upset because it was like, why are we ever going to try this? Or grad students? Like, we did have some like, there were, you know, I think seven, eight bottles and the rest of them were all clean. But this one, we were just like, what a, it had, it was definitely had cork taint. It had pretty bad breath too. Obviously, like it was oxidized, but it was also like old, so we were expecting the oxidation. It even tasted like it had some like reductive compounds, like not reduced in like the fresh way, reduced in like the something reached the end of the line here and it's got a weird stink to it. - Oh, how's that? - It was just such a mess of a while. - So one can have more than one fault too, just to make it a little more fun. - Yes, it can, we can have multiple faults for sure. Okay, so we talked about quarktane if your wine smells like wet paper be like I think this is quarkt I'm not I don't I would like a new you don't open another bottle for me, please And the other thing quarkt does is it kind of it's not just that it adds that I mean adds I mean you maybe I'm using the wrong word here, but it Creates this wet paper smell, but it also kind of destroys the fruit like the wine's just not what it should be I think it's like it again like Like the hydrogen sulfide, it interferes with your ability to smell other things. Because you do acclimate to the cork -taint, but it's still, so you don't notice it as like distinctly as cork -taint, but you're still not smelling other things. It's distracting. - That's so fascinating. So what about some of those other faults you were talking about in that tragic bottle? Britannomyces? - So Britannomyces is contaminant, it's another micro microbial contaminant and it produces like what's called, I feel like it's like sweaty, horsey, sweaty horse, sweaty saddle kind of smells, barnyard, barnyard is common. You will sometimes see wines with a little bit of grit that are like okay, like it kind of fits the profile and it's well -integrated, but I don't think you can do it on purpose. I think it's like, you can get lucky if you could have a Brett contamination and get lucky, and it still works, but usually it's distinctly bad. -Not desirable. -It's where the people think it's desirable. I mean, I feel like the big example, the stark example, is Kevinny Franck, and it kind of got grandfathered in as local charm. - Yeah. - Would you consider that to be about the right way to think about-- - I think I'd say it's like a certain like, you're like, "Oh, it's a rustic wine. It's like a country wine." And it's like, "I think it just tastes like bread." And I think, I personally feel like it distracts from, like, I think it distracts from the terroir. Like some, I think there's sometimes a claim that it is the terroir, but I've always felt like it distracts from everything else that's happening, like you're so you're terroir, you're terroir enemy Britannomyces, like that's fine, but like it's not unique. You can grow that anywhere. Britannomyces will thrive in a lot of places. It doesn't make you unique. I feel like you're doing a lot of work on other things that are not being shown here at all. Britannomyces is not what you're working on. So where does that fault come in in the winemaking process? Is it old barrels? Is it dirty barrels? - Often it's dirty barrels. - Yeah, and barrels are expensive, right? - I feel like if you have a break in termination in the barrel, it's like, you gotta get a new, it's very hard to clean out 'cause it can go quite deep. - It's bacteria, is it fungus? - I think it's yeast. - Yeast. - Oh, it's a yeast problem. - I think progenomyces is yeast. - Oh, it sounds like a yeast word. This is my level of science. That the myces, I've seen that in other yeast words. - Yeah, like Saccharomyces. - Yes, yeah. - Saccharomyces, yeah. - An undesired yeast. - Yeah, I can go quite deep into the barrels, like into the woods, so it's like very hard to get rid of once you have it. And I went to a symposium about paternal myses, and I mean, the takeaway for me was that like, the only, like the most acceptable straight, like they're different strains of Brett. The most acceptable strains were the ones that were the least Brett like. So the takeaway is don't get Brett. Like that's, again, you might get lucky in the way that there are things we don't control in wine that can produce exceptional wines. Like I feel like the great, the great wines, like things that you're just like, Oh, I was so overwhelmed by this one. Like this was so amazing. There was something on it. There's something unexpected. There's noble rights. Things that we didn't plan. Yeah. Things that we're not exactly planning for. But you can also get burned by that. Yeah. That is one of the risks with things like Brett. So when people say barnyard, do they mean poo? I think it's a combination of like animal and and I to me manure as well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's kind of like a weird sort of - Sometimes like a, almost like a smoky smell as well. - But like not in a nice way. - Not in like a good way, but like a bit smoky. - Okay. So I mentioned noble rot. So would you consider that to be like a mistake that turned into something great? I mean, maybe we could briefly explain that before talking about some of the other. - I mean, like noble rot is just like, it's a lucky manifestation of gray rot. So, gray rot is like actual fungus that will ruin the grapes, but gray rot is like where it only sets in a little bit. And so, it does produce something really special, but that's pretty like, again, that is deliberately curated. And in like the perfect climate conditions of humidity and on certain grapes and in certain places. So, we're talking about - But it does, I mean, it doesn't, it's not considered a fault because it's at the grapes, it's not a wine fault, it's a grape disease. - Oh, interesting. Oh, okay, okay, that's a cool distinction. I like it though, it turns out to be something that, I feel like there's so many stories that I hear in wine history that it's like, oh, we had to go fight a battle. And when we came back, all the grapes were moldy. So we cried, but we made the wine anyway. And then we discovered Saterin, or something. I don't know I'm making this up, but I have heard you know pieces of that So yeah, well we had this we had this extra stuff So we just mixed it together and it turned out pretty good. So we kept mixing them Yeah, that's our blood, right? Yeah, definitely. Oh, that's fun. So, okay So noble rots not is a great disease not a wine fault or not a wine making issue Yeah, I mean like obviously Obviously the whole process is wine making, but like it's not considered a wine fault because it's great. (gentle music) So let's talk about mouse. What's the difference between bret and mouse? What are you smelling in your glass or tasting? For me, mouseiness is like, ooh, what do you call it, like hamster cage? Oh, like stale corn chips? And again, like, are stale corn chips the most offensive smell ever? No. But they shouldn't be in wine. And that's a mistake. It shouldn't be there. And it's distracting from all the other things that I am paying for in a luxury product. Right. So it's not that like, oh, that's the worst thing I've ever smelt like a Barnyard is not the worst thing I've ever smelled. - Right. - It's just, I didn't order a glass of barnyard. I didn't order a glass of hamster cage. - How does it get there, mouse? - That's also a microbial contaminant. I wanna say this one's bacteria. It's a bacterial contaminant. Sometimes mouseiness can also be difficult to detect on the nose and you get it more retro -nasally. I think you need the pH shift releases more of it. - So maybe you're drinking it for a second and you're like, and everybody's like, is this kind of mousy to you? - That's a tough one. - And all then the non -mine people are like, what are they talking about? - So that's one of the ones where like, when they pour the wine for you and you smell it and you're like, it's good, that's when you'd want to taste it to make sure it's not mousy. Although like, again, in conventional wine making, you don't see a lot of it. It tends to be more when you get into more like natural, but like just, yeah. - What did natural winemakers stop doing that led to wines, seeing more mousy wines? - Well, it's a microbial contamination. So you are letting any micro grow. And that's what natural winemaking is. You're not controlling the microbial environment. - I see. So there's more risk for some of those to happen. - So conventional winemaking you are doing more to control the microbial environment. So, you may inoculate or you may use SO2 to kill off whatever random stuff comes in so that only the things that you want to flourish flourish. Because otherwise, you end up with anything that is just in the natural microbiota which could be fairly isolated or could have influences from surrounding properties from people through the video. Like there could be a lot of other influences on that. And like when you have fermentation like that, you have a lot of things competing for resources and saccharomyces. Saccharomyces or resi tends to dominate, but it takes a while for its population to build. And so you have other things competing for resources with it. And so it takes even longer to build. And you have all this period where those yeast and bacteria will compete for resources and produce other stuff. And often that stuff is not the stuff we want. You tend to get a lot of like acetobactors. You start to get like volatile acidity. You start to get like the really vinegary smelling things. You can get things like Brett, Brett will compete. Um, I think particularly, oh, don't quote me on that one, but like particularly, I feel like early Brett might be pretty competitive. As far as like, I'm the strongest in the, in the group, I feel like Brett is pretty competitive, just in general. But like, yeah, so you have other things that will compete for resources. And also like, if other things flourish, saccharomyces won't, won't grow like in like in a good way, like in a good consistent way. And then you have stuck fermentations, you have saugage fermentations, you have difficult fermentations. And difficult fermentations means that you tend to produce offerings from saccharomyces as well. - Yeah, you know, I love this because I feel like some of the most incredible natural windmickers that I've had like the privilege of hanging out with are like the biggest scientists. So this weird thing where you're like, oh, I'm going back to some of these old things and trying to rediscover some of these traditional farm techniques, like, okay, here we are with horses, but then you talk to them and, you know, you, you know, like the knowledge of like, my favorite wines are natural wines. It's just the first thing they're telling you is not that they're a natural wine. They're telling you about their good wine. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a standard that we should have no matter. And I'm very fine with that. Like, I, I'm very on board with the idea that like, sure, intervene as little as, like, why would you want to, we don't want to over -engineer, we don't need to over -engineer this. Um, but on the other end, I, I guess I feel like there's just a lot of natural gets, I think sometimes misused to excuse actually poor winemaking. And it's fine, like you took a risk, you tried something new, but like, this didn't work and we shouldn't be passing it off to people as a thing that's not faulty when it is faulty like yeah I definitely had that I've definitely had that experience usually not with an actual winemaker no but more like in the business you know but yeah so talking about some of the and I think I think that the term natural tends to automatically get humans to assume that everything that's not being labeled this way is there for unnatural and sort of clean wine. - Yeah, clean and unclean and unclean, and I think it's a little moral for me when I don't think something like filtration is inherently moral or immoral. Either there might be some-- - Importance is that it can be traditional reasons why you would do or not do it that are fascinating to me but I don't need like to it to be like a sin now but it's like I don't know I mean yeah we've we've seen vineyards grapes don't grow like that that's not natural we're working with the environment but like that's not natural it's weird to suddenly draw the line at the cell would be like oh but but now we're not doing any we already intervened we're just gonna do our best to one like be and be regenerative and mindful and sustainable, but we are already intervening. There's, yeah, we're already doing that. - Yeah, I will tell you what's really clean is an incredible natural winemaker's winery. Like the amount of pristine cleanliness for any good winery, for sure. I mean, it would just say that whatever, however people are Labeling, marketing, thinking of themselves philosophically, obviously as we're talking about all of these bacteria and stuff, the cleanliness is really important as well as the temperature conditions and all of this stuff from the entire chain with shipping and this is something that I learned a lot about as I was selling wine and learning storing wine, aging wine, all of these factors. So I think there's a couple we didn't really talk about yet in faults, which would be-- - Volatile acidity, who's one of them? - Oh yeah, we didn't talk about VA. We didn't also really explain oxidation or heat. - Oh, yeah, so VA is, I mean, it's vinegar -iness, but also like ethyl acetate. So you get kind of like a nail move or kind of smell like acetone derivatives. I feel like that one's kind of self -explanatory. If it smells like that, it's usually pretty obvious. Although there are a few styles that are higher in VA, just from the way that they're made. So you have to kind of know that that's what you're getting into with that style when you order it. And like, Soeterna is one of those styles that tends to be high in VA. - Interesting, interesting. - So it's sort of contextually made enough to be a fault. - Yeah, it's the same thing with like reduction. Like some wines are just more reductive than other. Like souvenir and blonds usually made in quite a reductive style. 'Cause that will help emphasize the varietal files. - Interesting. - Like sulfur compounds or sulfur compounds, they're gonna be more stable, more favorable in a more reductive environment. - I love this term varietal files. It reminds me of my card catalog example, right? Like, ooh, TDN, ooh, pirazines. - Just going going down the little decision tree of like varietathiles. Here are the tiles. - What is varietal files? - Well, I'm thinking of like a decision tree of like, okay, we're in sulfur compounds. Now, do I want varietal files or do I want like volatile sulfur compounds? - Or like I'm watching this beautiful taxonomic tree just grow in your brain. But where does this term varietal files? - Varietal file, it's a, we use it to talk about file compounds that are characteristic of certain great varieties. So varietal as an adjective, I guess, so a thyle that is varietal would be like the styles of a Sauvignon Blanc. And although a lot of those varietal thiles you also get in other grapes, you get them in Riesling and you get them in some reds as well. It's they can impart like grape for a mage be There's grapefruit, there's four MMP, I think that's like passion fruit. There's where you get into like the gooseberry, cat pee kind of aroma gets in is one of the varietal files. Would this be short for like profile or cognate with profile maybe? The word varietal though, or what do you mean? Is it and is it file like Fi le? Oh file Okay, I take back my Take back my card for idle file. Hi. Oh, what a lovely word. Thank you. I Was hearing varietal file. Oh, I was thinking about I was hearing file that I was thinking about like a wrap sheet Like, like, this isn't-- - Although that probably does exist, also. - Okay, if I'll be different teaching me a new word. - So, volatile acidity, this nail polish, or nail polish remover? - Nail polish remover, 'cause a remover is acetone and you want like acetic acid and acetate derivative. - You want-- - Or rather, those are what you get, you get. So, acetone is like the ketone version of it and then acetic acid is the acid of that and then acetate is the ester. So when you're an ester being like just another volatile compound in this case. Esters like kind of a technical smell? Ester, honestly ester is just a form of compound. It's just a class of compounds like it just has a specific chemical activity. It has a specific chemical group on it. The way we use the word ester in chemistry is not how we typically use, I guess, the word ester in wine. - I know, I hear it in wine. - 'Cause we're talking about it in wine. - Wine is a flavor. - When people say esters, they usually mean fruity, floral compounds that you smell with them. But esters are just a category of compound that have a C -O -O -R group on them. That's what that is. - That's so good to know. I'm gonna go correct everybody. No, not really. - It's just like, they just have that chemical activity. That's where the duster is. And it's related to other compounds by like that group. - So when I'm like at the restaurant, I'm like, oh, this smells like nail polish remover. How did that get there? - So typically volatile acidity, you're gonna have like Acetobacter is going to produce like excessive acetic acid and then that's going to react with other stuff to produce your acetate esters and then your, oh my god, yeah, acetate esters and, I don't know, I guess you might have a little acetone but not really much. Acetone's not super stable there, I don't think. I guess I mean, what happened in the wine making process? - Bacterial contamination. - Bacterial, again. - Acetobacter, sorry. Acetobacter is bacteria. - Acetobacter is bacteria. - Yeah. - Okay. - Acetobacter is bacteria. - So something that-- - Usually you have a bacterial contamination that produce a lot of acetic acid. - I feel, okay, so we've kind of got some different classes of faults here. - There's microbial ones, there's chemical ones. So oxidation, reduction tend to be chemical ones. The rest are pretty much microbial. - Oh, except for maybe heat. - Except for heat, yeah. - Okay, so let's talk about oxidation and then let's talk about heat. So we talked about reduction a lot. Is oxidation the opposite? - Yeah, so chemical state opposites, so you have too much oxygen in the winemaking. You're going to end up with a lot of nutty aromas, sherry -like. So there are, again, this can be stylistic. There are wines where this is, that's what it's supposed to be. So you have to know that about the wine you're ordering. So that can make it hard to know whether you're sending something back. Although I, there are some wines where like, they shouldn't be oxidized. Right. So sometimes when I explain oxidation to people, it's like, okay, your kid wouldn't eat the apple slices in their lunch because they turned brown. Am I -- Yeah. That's the same -- I mean, it's the same process, same concept that, like, you would have colors that, like, white wines would turn brown. You would get some browning in the color, but it's -- the aromas would also -- it would be more bruised apple, it would be more sherry like more nutty, I don't know, sometimes I get kind of a cardboard -y smell to it, but like... What about in red? Uh, I mean, I still find I get the nutty cardboard -y smell, um, although... Is it a dry cardboard? I get like wet... Yeah, dry. Okay. Um, but I also get like the dried fruit, like the fruit gets more in that space, but it so it tends to not have as much aroma 'cause a lot of that is, it's opened up too much. - Yeah, I guess like oxygen does eventually react with, reacts with some compounds that then react with aroma compounds. It tends not to be like a direct oxygen to aroma compound situation. - So as far as dried fruits, I mean, some of this happens naturally, right, with the aging process and is desirable. You're like, oh, I'm noticing that the fruit's becoming more dried fruit. But then-- This is usually a case of you've wiped everything. You haven't added a little complexity. You've wiped everything out. We've waited. So I'm thinking of some of the examples that you might, again, at the restaurant, be like, you've ordered a wine that's too old. And you say, OK, past peak could mean over -oxidation, and among other things or this crisp white riesling should not be brown and smell like bruised apples, it's oxidized. Yeah and I've had that. I did have that happen once at a restaurant where I mean it was a very casual fast -editing type situation and in a very rural town and it was like oh this is not correct but you know it was it was fine they just poured us something else but it was just like, "Oh, you clearly just opened this and forgot about it, I guess, I don't know." Right, right. So that the oxidation is just oxygen getting in, right? Yeah, and in too much too soon. Changes, it will change the aroma profile. Yeah. And eventually it'll just become kind of flat. And also, oxidation tends to also push that equilibrium toward vinegar. So you tend to also get vinegariness with oxidation. And oxidation helps aceto -bacter. So if you have aceto -bacter, that'll also. - Okay, so oxidation can be a fault on its own at the wrong time. - Yeah, I feel like it's often intermingled with-- - Yeah, it's intermingled with VA. So if the wine, if you get the wine and you're like, tastes like vinegar, I want to put it in my salad dressing. The fault is actually oxidization. - It's probably oxidized. - Oxidized, yeah. - It's probably oxidized. It may be VA, but it's probably oxidized too. - Yeah, that's so interesting. So, I think the only one we didn't talk about was heat. - Heat is more of like a storage thing and like a transportation thing, it's possible that in transport, wines can get pretty hot, so It depends on exactly how they've been moved around, how they've been stored, but heating up wine is it's matterizing it, so they're again, they're wines that are meant to be this way. Oh yeah, explain that wine. So it's madeira is like a cooked wine, and I mean it helps to preserve it, but it produces a very distinctive, I don't know, the way that when you cook fruit it tastes different, it tastes different. And It's just not, I think, again, if you meant to do it, then you've kind of made up for the balance of that wine. Although I love that story, that was another mistake as far as I understand it, right? I think it was a mistake. I think it was that one, the hot side of the ship of Madeira wine, Madeira wine, was like at the end of the day. The wines would get cooked. And they were like, actually, this tastes good. This tastes good. Making them that way at purpose? Am I right about that? Is that the story? - I think it did happen on ships. - I think it did happen on ships. - That led to sort of the development of then this vineyard cooking thing. I need to learn more about the exact history. That's the story that I was told. That's what's in my card catalog. But it's not my area of expertise. - I know it happened on ships. I just didn't know if it was like, I didn't know about the hot side of the ship. That makes sense. - That was the story someone told me. It was like hot side of the ship and you Yeah, it turned out to be a good thing. You know, it's like all right. It's like no mistakes in jazz, right? Yeah I think it was like I think in general they were finding that like Wine was very inconsistent when they were transporting it or like oh sometimes it's okay Sometimes it's terrible and like but if it gets cooked and it's pretty consistently cooked that it's like okay So we'll do that. Yeah, such one. I mean Madera's awesome But most of the time if you've been - Storing your wine at 80 degrees. - Yeah, it accelerates again. - It reads Fahrenheit. - You've added too much energy to this system 'cause you've added heat energy and that will translate, it's not like the wine stays hot, it translates into it spurs on all these chemical reactions. - So what does the wine taste like when you, the diner, put the glass in and say it's cooked? It's matterized. - It's weird because it's hard to say like what it tastes, it tastes like Madeira. But - It tastes like cooked fruit, tastes like cooked fruit. - Yeah, yeah. - Which like, again, not on its own, a bad spell, just it's not supposed to smell like that. When it's not supposed to, it doesn't have the rest of the things it needs to balance that taste. Like, I mean, Madeira has typically more sugar, right? It has the acidity to hold that up. Like if the wine isn't designed, isn't planned to do that, then it's not going to have the balanced to support it being cooked. - So you've got this wine that's not that old that you're expecting to taste like juicy red cherries and it tastes like kind of dried apples and old toffee. - Yeah. - Something like that? - Those aren't quite the exact right words, but that's sort of what I would-- - Yeah, it starts to get into like, it tastes like brown. - Yeah. - Like whatever the brown is of this, it's brown. - Yeah, and you're like, that's not what I I was expecting it in my bottle of this wine in Seppia. I don't know. Seppia tone -wined. Yeah, yeah. [MUSIC PLAYING] "Motordy Berry Magazine" is the new newsletter about local drinks and local sayings. The magazine launched in November of 2024, featuring delicious writing about drinks and dialect by me, Rose Thomas Bannister, and the magazine's editor, Michelle Thomas, along with other fantastic guest contributors. Please take a moment to visit motordyberry .com and sign up for the newsletter. You'll be glad you did. My research was mostly on issues of reduction. Oh, good, because I want to know more about how reduction happens and what it is. Yeah, so reduction is, like chemically speaking, reduction is like a Lower in oxygen. So it's going to a state that is lower in oxygen is going to favor the stability of some compounds over others in the case of wine you tend to favor the stability of volatiles sulfur compounds, so Volatiles things that we can smell sulfur All the things we know about sulfur and think about sulfur in low oxygen environments you tend to favor stability of things like hydrogen sulfide which smells like rotten eggs and other volatile sulfur compounds, you can have aromas like any cabbage -y, burnt rubber, struck match. In a low oxygen environment, those can be more favorable to form. You can also accumulate things like hydrogen sulfide during, if you have like stock or sluggish fermentations, you can accumulate things like hydrogen sulfide. You can use copper treatments or something that can cause kind of metastable bound forms that can later release hydrogen sulfide. There's a couple of, I guess, different sources, but it's like if you have a reduced one, you're going to have hydrogen sulfide. By the time you're smelling it, it's a problem. If it's at very low levels, like I said, like swirling is usually enough to get rid of very low levels of it, but people have different sensitivities to the compound. You can smell it at like half a Piper -billion so some people can smell it that low so so is reduction of fault if Swirling it is gonna Disappear it depends on how much like I wouldn't call it faulty if swirling it was enough to get rid of the problem but Once it's a problem you also have this issue where like some of it's gonna be volatilized and some of it's in solubilized So like even as you swirl it more is going to replace it. Mm -hmm. So like you have this equilibrium between the liquid and the gas You would have to do that a lot before you even could get rid of it And then you also have not just hydrogen sulfide, but other volatile sulfur compounds It becomes a situation that you it's hard to get rid of all of that. So this low oxygen environment. Is this something that can happen to the wine through different stages in the whole process of the fermentation to the container, to the shipping. So it's usually like more reductive winemaking, so like low oxygen exposure winemaking, stainless steel tanks and not stainless steel tanks are bad, but like if you that's one way that you can keep oxygen out of fermentation. Obviously there's ways to add it back that people do to you know their wine making less reductive if that's what they prefer. Packaging plays a big role on whether something is held more in a more reductive state. So in general, we don't want a lot of oxygen getting into our wines. But until we're ready for it to open it up and open it up until we're ready to like aerate it somewhat, but typically The different closures have different rates of oxygen ingress, and that'll change, make the environment, again, that'll affect how reductive it is. And a good cork closure is an effective seal for the most part, but a screw cap is more reductive and a can is more reductive than that. Interesting. So I want to tell a story about me as kind of an early wine professional pouring for professional tastings. And all of these really experienced people are coming through. And it's my job to open the bottle, smell it, make sure it's OK, and serve it for everybody. And I've definitely discovered just a greater sensitization or understanding of different wine faults from, "Oh my God, is this an eye test? Is this a trick? I don't know. Shoot." Someone said this was corked and I couldn't tell to now, like, just after all this time, after all these bottles, I feel quite certain in my analysis. But one of the things I think that confused me a lot when, you know, young Psalm and this line of New York City wine buyers going through, there were some faults that were just like, oh, this wine is ruined. I can't believe you served it to me. I mean, not that people would be, usually people would be like, hey, you need to open another bottle and that's all it would be about, you know? It wasn't, I was feeling more bad for missing it than most people ever made me feel. But the other kind of thing is like, oh, this isn't a fault, but more like, I don't know, a bad teenage phase or something, you know? Or like just this wine is not in the of drinking as well as it can be there are certain things we can do it's understandable it doesn't mean it was a mistake how would you place reduction in that equilibrium between this this wine is ruined and we just need to shake it up it's in a weird aging moment or something like that does it depend on the reduction there are a lot of equilibrium wine there are some that are not equilibrium Okay, there is a rather like very strongly one direction that compound is unlikely to go back the other way that you can have some of that happening as well. So once you produce certain off compounds, including some volatile several compounds, like it's unlikely we're going to get rid of that. The cat is out of the bag. Yeah. Reduction is like when you, when people open a wine and they're like, like I can't smell anything, like oh this wine is too tight, like it needs to open up, we need to decant wine. A lot of that is about reduction, like I said, the swirling and the hydrogen sulfide, like that's about reduction, that's what decanting is often about as well. Like you're not oxygenating the wine, like oxygen is not reacting with what's in there. You are aerating it, but like that's almost physical, like a physical thing that's happening, not a chemical thing. - You're actually using the word energetic, which I don't think I've heard people use that in wine, or at least if they were, they were being poetic rather than spiritual, rather than scientific. What do you mean by energy in wine or energy in chemistry? I mean it, I guess like as a, I think this is the engineering thing where I think of all systems are some, are energy, like all systems represent some sort of energy, like systems in motion and systems at rest hold some sort of inherent energy, and chemical reactions represent energy. There is some molecules like this versus some molecules like this. There is a difference in those energy states, and because there's a difference in the energy state, there is a force that wants to push it from one to the other. And that's what I mean by, it's like energy, I mean it as a state, like a state of existence so like wine exists one way we know that when we age wine it's going to exist a different way so there is a difference in the what is called like the chemical like the chemical energy of that system this like this how it exists now that represents one energy how it was this later because it represents a different energy and there has to be an energetic change to get it from one to the other. So coming back to our our nervous diner our nervous wine host who's boldly opened the wine list, ordered the wine, and is now being poured this taste, and it smells like rotten eggs. - As a diner, I would personally send back if it was like this is rotten eggs, and I have smelled wines that are this is rotten eggs, like this is actually a problem. I've never sent back, I've never gotten a wine in a restaurant where it was that reduced. I've gotten a corked one. So, like, again, if it is, in fact, faulty, you can send it back. Often, they would have checked it too. Right. I actually like that form of choice a lot. I like that too, yeah. But there's a style where you have it on a little card, and then some taste it before they give it to you, and then there's a style where they put it all on you, and I think most of us prefer to have a little collaboration there. Yeah. I mean, like, Also like that's their job like we general people don't know about why folks like that's their whole thing They've they've learned about it so they can identify it, but again, we have different sensitivities That's why they're letting you double -check like I don't taste anything wrong with this Do you taste like you might be more sensitive or you see high -level wine people doing that all the time be like is it is it? Yeah, and you're like, oh, no, you're right, you know, and I've been We're like airing sometimes it's yeah more subtle where like three of us were like this is corked right like this is definitely corked and like but the person who bought it didn't think it was yeah and so it was like okay i guess we're just drinking this corked wine oh my god i won't do it i won't do it i like didn't have a refill of it i just ordered another bottle for the table and i was like i'll get this other bottle I think we went over the faults pretty well. I just kind of want to say like if this, I loved this, this is like bringing me to life. But if it's making you the diner feel even more overwhelmed, like, oh my God, you know, let just to review, you know, I'm the Psalm, you're the host, I pour you a little taste And you're smelling this and what you're looking for the list of kind of things that would indicate a problem would be rotten eggs Mm -hmm wet cardboard. Yep Nail polish remover nail polish remover Barnyard poo poo animal hay. Yeah combo hamster cage, corn chip, or a bruised or cooked fruit characteristic that you would not expect to be there based on what you've ordered. - Say like cooked, but like overcooked. - Overcooked, yeah. - I feel like that's part of it. It's like, it's not, 'cause sometimes a wine can be kind of jammy or like baked pie, but it's like, it's not baked, it's cooked in a negative, like overcooked. It's overcooked. - And at that point, whether you know or understand any of these chemical factors, that's when you slow down and be like, "This wine doesn't taste like I expected." And what I would say the main thing is, do not feel like you are insulting or offending the establishment or the winemaker or the region that it comes from by saying that "Believe me, any quality place will want to know that they have served you something that isn't acceptable and will immediately whisk it away and give you something else, another bottle of the same thing, try something different and that ritual is happening for you as the consumer and you should absolutely not sit there and suffer through drinking a bottle of wine that is flawed and it is not taste good and it's not taste right and you know, because what's going to happen then, maybe you're never going to order that again. I mean, if you're in the wine business, you're going to realize that something was wrong with them. You're also hopefully going to feel bolder and be like, no, no, no. I, the, the people who made this wine and the quality establishment that's serving to you want you to appreciate and learn and enjoy and experience this bottle. And if there's something in there that's not supposed to be like drinking, it is not like a badge of honor or like a favor. It's like really sad. Don't do that. Just slow down. And if you're not sure, ask questions. And you know, don't sit there and drink nail polish remover because you're scared of bothering someone. That's like the saddest, worst thing. And no one inequality, some winemaker salesperson continuum is going to want you to sit there and do that. So just that whole ritual exists so that you don't do that. I don't know, what are your feelings about that? Do you see people feeling kind of shy in that situation? And I think that people are generally pretty shy and the people, there is also a small portion of people who are too confident in that. - Okay, fair. Which like they learned just enough to get it to get a little bit of trouble. All right. All right. I mean, but if you are at all worried about how you're behaving, then you're fine. I mean, I don't know, you hear the stories of people setting things fast, insisting that it's off and it's not right fine. It's fine. They were being difficult. Or they didn't understand. They didn't understand. Or they're like, "Oh, it's quarked," but they detected a flaw, but it's definitely not quarked. Okay. And so, like, sometimes quarked is just used as the catch -all for. Okay. So if you're really excited about finding flaw detections, maybe slow down and check yourself a little bit. But if you are more of the person who's like, "Oh, I can't believe I have to ask them to maybe send this back. I'm so embarrassed." You're probably right. There's probably something wrong. - Yeah, there's probably something wrong. - Would you say that's the problem? - Yeah, like they want you to enjoy a wine. Like they don't want you to drink flawed wine. They also don't want to keep serving flawed wine. So like they need to know it's helpful. - I will let you know, I almost don't want to give this, well, no, I'm giving this away. In a wine bar situation especially, if let's say you're just wrong and the wine isn't isn't quirked, but you know what you are you not trying to trick anybody or get away with opening another bottle You just don't get it and you're wrong The worst thing that's gonna happen is that wine bar is gonna sell that bottle for the by the glass for the rest of the night Or or drink it themselves, you know But even then if let's say you are wrong and you're sitting there and you just don't get it These the restaurant still doesn't want you to be sitting there suffering or having this weird thing with this bottle. And the best thing that can happen in is if people are really stressed out about this, I think already the education level or something's wrong in the ecosystem, that there's a flaw. There's a, the energy is wrong, right? So hopefully you're in a place where you're feeling comfortable and you're feeling empowered to ask questions and discuss the wine with your psalm who's there to do that for you. And it's really excited when people ask questions. But I think the worst thing that could happen is somebody who's really interested in wine and just getting into it, getting something that tastes really weird to them, but is like too embarrassed or shy and then just sits there and kind of drinks the whole bottle. Instead of using that opportunity, that often expensive opportunity, you know, not always, but sometimes expensive opportunity to like discover something wonderful. So I'm not here to suffer. That's kind of the motto of me and the show, which I got from my friend, Dr. Pamela Henry Longsmall. So yeah, don't be suffering. - Yeah, I'd say suffering's antithetical to the drinking of wine. - I would say so, yeah. Try not to suffer. - Yeah, it's very, I don't think that's what they were after. So here you are, Dr. Rachel B. and the new Wine Enthusiast Future 40, Wine Professional Educator, what is going on for you in your career? What's new? What are you working on? - I'm working on a new project, collaborating with a couple of, one of my former colleagues from Cornal and another friend who's also a PhD in viticulture on a project in wine education. So, I'm kicking things off with my project called Psalm Science, and it's a series of talks that I've given in the past that focus on flavor chemistry, but are strictly speaking wine tastings. So, I loved hosting wine tastings, teaching wine tasting as a grad student, and we would do this for pretty diverse audiences in terms of like their background and wine level, although for the most part the wine level was beginners. But wine is for curious people, wine is for curious people and engaged people and we definitely got that in our academic setting And I've seen that with groups that I've given that talk to since. And it's a wine tasting, it's, you know, we have, we tell you all the steps of, you know, see, looking at the wine, swirling it, sniffing it, we cover different styles. We talk about where the wine is from. But we also dive a little deeper into some of the flavor chemistry behind what you might be experiencing. So when we swirl and sniff, like why do we do that? Well, we do it to volatilize low levels of hydrogen sulfide in the wine. Why do we even have low levels of hydrogen sulfide? Well, we can talk about that too. And I'm hoping to kind of bring this a bit of that, you know, my science background, my science education background to wine education and kind of blend the science communication with it For people for whom maybe Classic wine education doesn't resonate as much or for the people who for whom it does and it they just want to learn more They just have more questions. I think there is an appetite for For more technical information in wine I mean I go to lots of tastings and people people have these questions I do people have these questions and what happens but I'm not told how yeah you know I'm told this wine tastes this way when it's grown in these rocks but I'm not told how the flavor gets there you know I always have more science questions so I think this is I'm really excited about this yeah and I think it's kind of I mean like you were saying it's it doesn't is not a it's not in conflict with the idea of natural winemaking. It is very fundamentally a scientific process. And you can still, I personally think that science is very creative and very artistic, so I don't see that they're in conflict at all. And you can be doing extremely natural, quote unquote, winemaking and still be, you're still harnessing science for the most part. Can can science be misused? Sure. But I don't think that's what we're getting at here. And, you know, for the, you know, slightly more technically minded or for the technically curious, this I think is like a nice way to think about it. Like I've given this talk mainly, I get it from a couple of like STEM audiences. But also just like, I don't know, I would do this at work in my corporate job. I would do this, like I said, for grad students, postdocs, people from lots of different fields we'd kind of have different periods where we'd have like, oh, a bunch of engineers are coming to our talks or I do a talk for, I used to give a wine talk for the civil engineering department. We do one for economics, applied economics. And sometimes we get into these very interesting interdisciplinary conversations about about how wine and its whole story plays into the kinds of things they do, but we still talk about it in that structured way that you do as a scientist, as a researcher. - Wine is so interdisciplinary. I can't think of anything more disciplinary. That's why I-- - Interdisciplinary, yes. Well, I mean, there's just so many things that connect. I mean, my actual visual of it was as a river that was just gonna sweep me away when I was in cocktails I was around wine you know I started working at an Italian restaurant you know in in Brooklyn and they got me into Italy into wine and into Italian and I could just see it I was like this is gonna take over my life and finally one day I was like okay let's go and I just jumped in the river and but the reason is that there's so much learning. You know, languages, geology. I'd love to learn more about geology. Like, hats off to your mom, you know, and historic international borders and conflict. Geopolitics. Yeah. I was reading, you did this great interview with the online publication, The Grape Collective, where you said something about why I'm just attracting learners or people who love to learn. Yeah, because you can't learn it all you even if you learned it all today Like let's say you could just you tasted today you tasted every wine possible You've tried them all and for some reason you can retain all that information you learned all of it It would change tomorrow. I could not agree more We talk about wine as being like living, but it's not that it's living. It's that it's Chemistry and chemistry is dynamic. It's you know, like It's a whole bunch of equilibrium, and equilibrium reactions naturally have the two arrows. The erection goes in both directions. There's an equilibrium between the alcohol form and an acid form of a compound, and the way you write that is you put an arrow this way and an arrow that way. That's the formal chemical way. And that tells you that this reaction can go both directions, depending on the chemical environment. So you have all these things that are dynamic. - So like that this could become vinegar. - That's how it becomes vinegar. That's how things become, like the most stable form of this is like is the more stable form is vinegar down the line. This is an interim state that we hope keeps in a place that we enough of a form that we like to drink it for as long as we want to drink it. But energetically something else is favorable and it's going to ultimately go in that direction. But we've manipulated it in a way that keeps it sensorially appealing for a period. Your entree to science was both with your scientific parents, but also baking, you know, like, And that's beautiful. What have you been baking lately? And what's what's magical least scientific about about baking for you? I've actually been making like caramels a lot lately. I don't know. I just Really wanted caramels and so I started like doing a little research because it's been a minute since I've done it and it's was actually kind of a pain just because of the humidity and so Had one or two failed attempts of things But yeah, I sort of sort of got it together made some like kind of ginger -infused caramel It's made some like kind of more classic Butter caramels, but I did them with like a brown butter to kind of see how that would change the flavor because it's already like Something that is plenty of browned aromas. So you have like my reactions. You have actual caramelization Just all of these different things sort of happening And, like, I mean, a lot of those reactions are also rather-- my reactions are, like, a thing we talk about a lot in wine flavor in champagne. I was kind of thinking about that, but I don't know. I think I have a friend's birthday coming up, so I might make a birthday cake, so I'm excited for that. - Oh, that's so nice. - Yeah. - So where can people follow you and get updates about Psalm Science and your other wine communication projects. Yeah, so I'm on Instagram at SOM Science. That is the new platform that I'm starting up, but it can be followed also at my name, R Allison. R Allison. Yeah. Well, I'm dates. I'm gonna follow you. I'm gonna follow what you do because I like learning from you and thank you so much for coming on the show and allowing all of us to hear about all of this really cool scientific stuff. It was really a pleasure. Is there anything else that you want to share that you want to add about your career, wine in general, things that you'd like people to know or think about? Nothing comes to mind. I feel like we've covered a lot of things. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Thank you for being here to all of our listeners. Thank you And wherever you go and whatever you like to drink, always remember to enjoy your life and to never stop learning. (upbeat music)  

Music composed by Ersilia Prosperi for the band Ou: www.oumusic.bandcamp.com

Produced, recorded and filmed by Rose Thomas Bannister

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