Wet cardboard flavor?

Yep. Wet cardborad is a pretty common descriptor for TCA.

Barnyard and wet dog flavours normally indicate other faults: brett and a volatile sulphur fault respectively.

You may find this page of interest:

I had not seen these pages, thanks for the reference.

pavane

Definitely corked.

And you might find that now that you have "gotten the nose" for this scent from a very corked bottle, bottles that are less corked will bother you as well.

e.

Yes. Wet cardboard and wet dog are both common descriptions of the smell.

Wet cardboard is excessive oxidation.

No it's not. Excessive oxidation is browning apple peels.

M.

Salut/Hi Ron Natalie,

le/on Tue, 15 Feb 2005 08:27:00 -0500, tu disais/you said:-

With respect Ron, or Natalie, no it isn't. Wet dog/cardboard is the caracteristic smell of TCA contamination or "corked" wine.

The smell of excessive oxidation is quite different. Sort of apple peel-y, or a bit like a madeira.

So, does that mean that Madiera is over oxidized?

Richard Neidich stated: "So, does that mean that Madiera is over oxidized?"

Oxidation in reference to wine usually means chemical reactions that cause some of many compounds present in the wine to combine with oxygen. Some oxidation reactions produce products that are desirable, others produce undesirable products. At least some oxidation usually is needed for red wines, which is one reason why they are aged in casks that take in a bit of oxygen containing air. Different wines, having a different distributons of compounds in them, can oxidize in very different ways. Some wines can be greatly oxidized to produce a wine that is much more interesting. Madeira is a prime example. Sherry is another. Both of these wines are fortified to some extent. At one time Madeira was put in casks and sailed around the hot tropic waters to become Madeira-like as we know it. Long ago it was found that this process could be duplicated by heating the wine in large chambers for an extended time. Of course the key here is that both Madeira and Sherry take up oxygen in the cask at a fairly slow rate. In the case of some sherry that is long-aged in cask, a flor film forms on the surface of the wine in the cask that keeps things under control. Without these special treatments that involve considerable oxidation, the base wines for sherry and madeira would just be not-very-interesting normal wines, in many cases.

For normal table wines, different wines respond in quite different ways. Some of the classic Rioja whites were kept in cask for even decades and gained great richness without a nasty "brown" taste. On the other hand I often find an over-oxidized Chardonay to be rather nasty tasting, flat, and rather bad smelling too. One of the most foul cases of bad oxidation I ever have seen was for a Barolo. It would have been a text book example of what bad oxidation is about. It stank so much that I flushed it down the toilet. Yquem, higher grades of Tokaji, and some top BA and TBA Rieslings from Germany can withstand considerable oxidation which adds to their complexity up to a point.

Oxidation is neither black-and-white good or bad. There can be too much or too little for nearly all wines.

Of course if you wish to make a fruit-juice-like wine that tastes as much like grape juice as possible, then oxidation must be severely limited. However the beauty of the classic wine grapes is that they can produce a wine with a taste and bouquet quite different from that of the grape juice from which they are made. Very controlled oxiditation is just one of many factors that help shape the transformation from raw wine to a polished finished product.

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Chuckle ... careful now .... for the great musty baryard .. even old sweat socks smell is part of my passion for great Burgundy !!!

Art Stratemeyer ============================

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