Was this Bret?

Brett to me always smells faintly of bandaids. When I try to describe barnyard in wine the best I can come up with is the smell you get around a farm or cattle yard.. I've had barnyard smells in reds but haven't associated that with brett.

A little bit of either character in wines shpuld not make them undrinkable and in fact I've heard people proclaiming the barnyard aroma as a positive feature in red Burgundy. Author Anthony Hanson once famously declared that Burgundy smelt of s**t!

Yours sounds like a faulty bottle.

Cheers!

Martin

When I think of Brett I think of a sweaty wet horse blanket or the mousey smell of a damp basement. Some folks describe it as wet newspaper or bandaid.

Brett is really the yeast. It can produce a whole range of chemicals with different smells. So it is not so much a question of how people describe the same thing as there being many different things to describe.

(Having said all that, I don't think I have seen it described as wet newspaper before - if I smelled that I would have guessed it was TCA.)

I'd agree that wet cardboard/newspaper or mildew is more likely TCA.

As Steve says, brett comes in various strains. And people are vary in sensitivity, not just to brett but the various strains. For me there are strains that smell like cow manure, horse sweat, damp leather, bandaids, and sewage. Small amounts of the first four don't bother me, and in fact can add an attractive layer. A lot of any of them can become a fault to me.