My goes bad very quickly, why?

Salut/Hi Lester Jacobs,

le/on 23 Aug 2003 18:23:17 -0700, tu disais/you said:-

I find it very hard to believe that wine no matter HOW it's stored will go bad within a few weeks. I suggest you carry out a controlled experiment.

1. Buy 4 bottles of something reasonably priced. Ask the store if they can keep one bottle for you (with your name on. Take the rest home. Open one immediately, taste - make notes. keep one in your wine fridge the other in the kitchen, or wherever you used to keep them.

Three weeks later, go back to the store and reclaim your bottle. If you bought a white, mark the three bottles with a number (for subsequent identification), but don't tell anyone which is which. Then put them all together overnight in your wine fridge, which should be set for drinking temperature if you can - call it 10-12 C. The next evening, get someone to cover the bottles with brown paper, putting letter A, B C on the outside, without telling you which number corresponds to which letter. Then taste ALL THREE BOTTLES against eachother, in identical glasses, preferable with several friends. Get them all to make notes. Finally unveil the bottles, and see what your double blind test has produced by comparing notes a) against the wine when you first bought it three weeks earlier, b) against each other.

At least you'll then have some very clear evidence with which to proceed, if it does turn out that there's something peculiar going on.

Another possibility might just be to change your supplier - it could be that the wines arrive slightly cooked. I's be surprised, but I find it hard to think of another plausible thesis.

Can TCA be transferred from bottle to bottle? For instance, if I had one bad bottle with TCA or some other fungus/bacteria infecting the cork, could that fungus/bacteria transfer from that bad bottle to a good bottle and thus infect it?

This could be a theoretical explanation for my problem. If at one point I had a bad bottle, then could the fungus/bacteria could somehow be in the "air" in my apartment and be infecting other bottles?

Cheers Lester

Salut/Hi again Lester Jacobs,

le/on 24 Aug 2003 10:06:03 -0700, tu disais/you said:-

Please do, and please forgive me if it sounds like I was being unduly doubtful about what you said.

Which in the short to medium term is more or less what I'd expect. With the obvious exception of VERY high temperature with wide swings, which won't do any wine much good (shurrup Michael P, I know about Madeira), the only serious problems that storing wine at ambient temperatures are likely to give are for long to very long term storage, and in the case of some very temperature sensitive wines - I believe Champagne can be fussy.

This is very odd, Lester. For a wine to taste like vinegar (I hope you don't think I'm being pedantic here) it has a) to be infected with acetobacter and b) to be exposed to pretty large amounts of oxygen. I can't remember the subject of the thread, but I think I went through the chemistry of this in some detail some six months ago. Google could be your friend here. Suffice it to say that I simply can't accept that a more or less sealed bottle of wine is going to become vinegar in two weeks, it's simply not possible. I'd go further and say that no sealed bottle, no matter HOW old, can become vinegar. It can spoil, sure, and taste wretched, but the conversion of alcohol into acetic acid simply can't take place in a corked/otherwise sealed bottle. So what you describe as "tasted like vinegar" although valid as your way of describing the taste, isn't accurate. Which of course makes it hard to help decide what's going on.

And when you do so, get a bottle of red wine vinegar and compare that too. Because I am almost (like 99.99%) sure that when you actually do the comparison, you'll agree that the "offness" isn't vinegary.

You're welcome, even if my comments sound very negative! They're not meant that way.

Definitely no.

M.