Light strike is a flaw that’s immediately apparent to me in Champagne and sometimes trickier for me to find in other wines, but I think the consensus at this point is that it constitutes a flawed bottle. Would you consider light strike a valid reason for either (or both) 1. Refusing a bottle at a restaurant after the sample pour or 2. Returning a bottle to a retailer or producer?
My understanding is that light strike can happen virtually any time from the bottling line to distribution, retail/restaurant environment or consumer storage. And obviously there’s no way to prove when the damage was done (or perhaps is it possible for there to be a cumulative effect). This of course makes it very different than TCA corked wine which is flawed from the minute it’s bottled and indisputably NOT the fault of the consumer.
I’m also curious if any retailers or distributors are willing to chime in with how wines are treated up the distribution chain? For retailers, will distributors replace light struck wines? Distributors, can you run it up the food chain to the importer or producer?
This video does a great job explaining it. He even blinds the same wine with different levels of light exposure and found it to be quite obvious. Definitely not something I could confidently identify, unless I really knew the wine, but very educational.
So for me in Champagne it reminds me of a “skunked” can of Natty light beer. It still has the yeasty flavors of Champagne but the fruit is completely gone. That - to me - is why it’s so easy to identify in Champagne. In other bottles, I really have no idea if i suspect light strike if it’s an “off bottle,” a lackluster wine entirely, all in my head/something I ate earlier, or another flaw.
Is this because you don’t think the flaw exists, believe the customer is likely at fault due to the way wines are shipped/stored, or some other reason?
I’ve had to warn one of my siblings off a certain local retailer because they were having a fairly high rate of flawed - which were light strike IMO - bottles. It was usually the same profile: a top shelf Champagne that had slow turnover. So an $80 Champers would suck/off/flawed, whereas if they’d just picked a quick moving middle shelf California sparkly there would have been no issues.
I can’t remember which podcast covered it, but there was a good episode on wine flaws (beyond TCA). Worth a listen.
He’s wrong about green bottles. They aren’t much better than clear.
When Heineken was new in the American market, they did often sit on display for a long time. In pop culture imported beer had a reputation for being skunky for quite awhile. It was lightstrike.
I always cringe when people have well lit display cellars or glass door wine fridges.
Tasting clearly different to how it should taste, and with that difference being unpleasantly so, should be ample reason for returning. Consumers should not need to be experts or even competent in identifying wine faults, though it is sensible that retailers / sommeliers aim for at least competence in identifying them.
I recall one ‘pour down the sink’ experience with champagne bought from a supermarket (Bollinger GA). Whilst it could have been a different fault, I had assumed the vegetal / cabbage profile was from light damage.
I think it’s self explanatory, this is a wine flaw that afflicts so few bottles I think giving it extensive discussion is silly given it’s not as easily identifiable as is TCA, cooked wine, etc. I think it’s just going to amplify a confirmation bias that any off bottle of wine in a clear bottle must be afflicted by it without being able to actually identify that it is the true cause of the wine lacking soundness.
I’m not sure how you can attribute light issues to the bottling line or distribution. Wines are generally bottled in a truck or in a cellar, then go into boxes immediately. Distributors deal in boxes. If your retailer stores your bottle in a window, it isn’t the distributors fault.
Is that what it is for? There is a higher-end gourmet store down the road from me with very well priced bottles of Cristal and Dom, among other higher-end CA Cabs, but all right next to large, west-facing floor-to-ceiling glass. Tons of sun exposure. The store can even get warmer drying later afternoon summer hours. I’ve looked, but never bought I thing. They even have a wine person in that store. I’ve debated making a comment but just passed on saying or buying anything other than food.
More broadly, as with all variants of heat damage, it can be difficult to ‘prove’ that the problem did not arise from something the customer did once the bottle left the store. Which is why TCA is the baseline for returning wines, and even that is controversial for some.
Right, this makes things tough. It’s like a customer bringing in an “off” bottle that’s been open for several days. Obviously it smells oxidized. I have no way of knowing if that’s what it smelled like upon opening.
No one has ever told me light damage was the reason for their return, but if someone drinks the same rosé regularly, I don’t doubt that they might notice something being wrong with a bottle, even if they don’t know what it is.
If someone wants to return a bottle, and there might have been something wrong that might not have been their fault, I basically have to trust them, or at least recognize that not believing them when they might be correct creates a much worse potential error than believing them when they might not be.
Distributors take my word for it. They get so few returns that I get the sense they don’t really care what the reason was. Even if cork taint affects 0.1% of bottles under natural cork (I think it’s much higher than that), only a small portion of those actually get returned, in my experience. That’s not even accounting for oxidation and other faults.
One wine rep was very honest with me. He told me (blank) winery had come out with their first blanc de blance. They had decided to use clear bottles when every single other bottle they’ve used for their champagne has been dark colored forever. I’m sure the clear bottle was someone’s idea in marketing or since the son of this champagne house has now taking over… could’ve been him. My rep said “DO NOT” order this wine. He said 5 minutes with sun exposure destroyed the wine. I believe a few months later he told me they’re recalling all the BdB.
I never tried it, so I’m not sure what it really tastes like other than maybe more oxidation?
