How to do this: add your answers by cutting and pasting Post #2…if someone wants to put up a post describing how to identify these flaws i.e. what they taste and smell like, I’d appreciate it; maybe add a flaw or two…I did it, giving my own experiences and evolution, and accidentally deleted it
Scale of 1 to 10, “1” being I’m not very sensitive to it and/or I don’t mind it, can guzzle a wine like this with pleasure, “10” meaning I detect it readily and it makes me vomit and give up wine forever if I have one sip.
My definitions are wildly inaccurate but it’s to give newbies an idea and to help them recognize these flaws:
TCA (“corked”), a chemical derived from washing a fungal cork in chlorine…that can also spread throughout the winery for some reason… the #1, and possibly only, reason to return a bottle in a restaurant or to a store…8 percent of wines under natural cork are corked…symptoms vary wildly
Brettanomyces (“brett”), a yeast which can grow in a warmer bottle, or in a barrel that wasn’t topped off, and ruin the wine in larger quantities…in small quantities, some people like it, especially in red Rhones
Prematurely oxidated (“premox”) or just oxidated (“ox’d” or “maderized”): white Burgundy, which is Chardonnay, or other white wine which tastes really old and like sherry or Madeira
Cooked: a wine which has, sometime during its life, been exposed to intense heat, either because you bought it at a winery in Napa in the summer and then stored it in your trunk over the muffler pipe for the rest of the day [DON’T DO THIS], or it sat on a loading dock in the sun in Florida…telltale signs are a drip down the outside of the bottle, a soaked red cork, a bottle that causes blisters when you touch it, or a perfect seeming bottle but the guy next to you spits it out and yells “It’s had it” and you say “yeah” as if you already knew it was cooked
Mercaptans: People in charge of sailing vessels who smell like onion skin, or something
Diacetyl: you open the bottle and the room smells like margarine
All sorts of other things that are probably biological type flaws like a banana smell
Herbal or vegetal (“green”): Herbal can be lovely (1994 Bryant for some people) or horrid (the near-identical 1994 Colgin for some people). A bit of veggies (green pepper eg) can be lovely (many Calif cabs, like 1997 Togni right now, or 1992 Groth reserve) or horrid (Groth Reserve 1990, Togni 1994, Monterey cabernet in the old days)
Oaky: this means the wine is “oaky,” which is a way of saying that it is “oaky”
Surmaturite (“Parker”): very very ripe, a lot of alcohol and/or sugar, some people love it, some hate it…
— see Residual sugar: (“RS”): the yeast did not turn all of the grape sugar into alcohol so there is some sugar left, maybe because the grapes got very ripe and sugary
— see Detectable alcohol when tasting the wine: (“Heat”, “warmth”, “hot,” “Barossa”): almost always a real flaw, and often indicative of a vintage which for that whole region was too hot that year for that grape
Spoofilated: a wine dressed up to seem much richer than the grapes themselves could provide, by doing all sorts of nefarious but legal things to it
Ladybug shit or something (the “green meanies”): found in 2004 red Burgundies, but it showed up after the critics tasted the wines (seriously), some wines are undrinkable, some just fine; there is an ancient legend that the 2011’s may have a little of this also.