burnt match taste

Hmmm. Sulfur on the vines usually translates to H2S, i.e. rotten egg, not burnt match. Burnt match to me is excess SO2 added to the wine. What are your total and free SO2 levels?

Regards,

John

Burnt matches means excessive sulfur dioxide. It could possibly be related to sulfur use in the vineyard if it was done too late in the growing season but a better guess would probably be too much SO2 added during winemaking.

- Mark W.

Joe,

I've added a lot of SO2 to batches of high-pH wine, and also added high amounts to test samples to see at what levels I found the SO2 noticeable in the wine. I've never noticed anything that I would call a burnt match smell.

However, your description doesn't sound far off of what I described as "burnt rubber" in one of my red wines this year. This seems to have been caused by disulfides, which started as a huge H2S (rotten egg smell) problem that I didn't treat early enough. I got rid of the H2S with copper sulfate, but not before some of it reacted to form disulfides. I'm pretty sure my problem is indeed disulfides because I treated it last night with ascorbic acid and by this morning the burnt rubber taste and aroma were already greatly diminished.

It could also be that the problem is H2S and not disulfide. If you search the newsgroup archives for H2S and copper, you'll see lots of posts about that topic. If you search for disulfide and Margalit, you'll find a post with an excerpt from a book that describes how to test a few samples with CuSO4 solution and ascorbic acide to determine whether the problem is H2S, mercaptans, disulfides, a combination, or none of the above.

Good Luck!

Richard

Thanks for all your great input. The flavor is more like this...you strike a match and you happen to have your nose close to the match and that first whiff of smoke is the smell/taste. You can kinda taste it in the back of your upper palate. Reason I ask is because I got grapes from the same vineyard this year but obviously don't want the same result.

Thanks!

Joe

If you want to know, ask the vineyard for a record of their dustings.

Pambianchi has the little gem: "late application of S in a vineyard in a bad year" as a possible contribution. The sulfur is not completely washed off the grapes, and adds all kinds of odours depending on the other chemistry (sugar, TA, possible presence of mould, pressing procedure, etc).

Joe, The best thing to do is look at adding nitrogen (DAP, amino acids etc) or finding a yeast that has a low N requirement to stop this happening again...

Simon