"Sir, this wine is a dog."

Corked, battered, and fried

I've been thinking about how some wines are like stray dogs. I don't (necessarily) mean that these wines are smelly or cheap, or frisky; they may be, like some strays I've known, pregnant . . . with possibility. What I mean by this comparison is that you, the putative owner of said wine/stray, do not know its history, its true age, its potential.

Take Dio, my aging canine. Please. Dio wasn't impressive-looking when he showed up, but he turned out to be quite a dog. Like when you pay $12 for a wine and get it home and it is so much better than $12, and you're happily surprised because you were drawn to the wine but the bottle is dusty and the label unprepossessing. Although Dio is a good-looking dog, with a beautiful blue eye and a gorgeous brown eye and a big-chested body that would appear to make him a blend of Malamute, German Shepherd, and Collie. Like a baby meritage, only more expensive.

Thing is, I don't know how old he truly is. The vet examined him when first the wayfaring, slutty stranger showed up, and pronounced, "He's somewhere between two and five years old, near as I can tell." Which is not so near, when one considers that that was in 1996, and Dio is a large dog. So he's, I dunno, older than God, or at least 12 to 15 years old, near as I can tell, which means he's teetering on death. Although many days he doesn't act like it.

*WARNING: Tortured segue coming up.

Large, like the Dio-dog, only not neutered, Barbaresco* is called "The Queen of Wines," like Barolo is the King. But the 1991 Cascina Morassino Barbaresco in my wine cooler is more a stray dog than a queen. It was given to me, and I don't know its pedigree, nor what its life circumstances were before I adopted it. Is it an OLD 15-year-old wine? Has it had a rough life? Been bounced around? Stored poorly, subjected to repeated temperature fluctuations? I have to open it to find out its life story, and once I open it it's either yummy or not, and either way it has less than a week to live once I pop the cork. So I guess that means some wines are like stray dogs that you ultimately kill, or on which you perform autopsies. Eeeewwwww.

Perhaps this is an imperfect analogy. What I think I was aiming at initially is that, while I'm looking forward to trying this Barbaresco, which costs a fair amount and is rumored to be hugely tannic, I'm also fearful that it will be dead already. Corked, or mistreated and heated to the point of Thanks but NO Thanks. And a wine doesn't even have to be very old to be on its last legs, or dead already, like the 2003 Goats do Roam Laurie Lou provided a few weeks back. Determined to more precisely identify the nose and taste of said South African wine (call it my New Year's resolution, Mastering the Art of Wine Description), I pulled out a tasting wheel chart as I sniffed the Goats. Which is more accurate a phrase than you might guess, if goats are, as I am guessing, a bit musty-smelling. A definite whiff of damp cardboard. The odor of old basement. Not an aroma that induces one to plunge one's mouth into one's wineglass.

The wine smelled gamey, or moldy, something that was saying to me, without benefit of tasting chart, "Don't." I did anyway, and it wasn't awful. It was scarcely drinkable, but it wasn't deathly awful. I'm not familiar with this wine, but I think it's safe to say that Eau de Goats/Cotes du Moldy Basement is not the nose OR flavor at which the winemaker was aiming. The dang wine was corked.

What IS "corked," really? I'm so glad you asked. A "corked" wine is a wine that smells and tastes goaty, a wine that has been bottled with a cork that is contaminated with TCA (Sus, my slender chemist friend, this one is for you: 2,4,6-Trichloroanisole). This TCA contamination usually comes from the cork itself, but it can also come from the wine barrels or even the wood in the walls and beams of the wine cellars. So sometimes, a "corked" wine isn't directly the fault of the cork, a conclusion I have just drawn and find weirdly entertaining.

Still, given a winery-admitted TCA contamination rate of at least 3 percent (that's a LOT of wine bottles), many wineries are eschewing them. Corks, I mean. (Aside: I saw an actual cork tree at the Ferrari-Caranno estate, and it was way cool, not having been made into bottle stoppers. So I don't really mind if corks are replaced with plastic or even screwcaps. Long live the cork tree!)

TCA doesn't present a health risk, but it does foul the wine. Even in tiny tiny quantities, it can screw up the fruit flavors. As my preferred google result had it, "it imparts the aromas and flavors that are found objectionable." What is also entertaining, at least to me, is that most contaminated bottles are not returned to stores or sent back in restaurants. And I will just bet that that is because most people a) have lousy palates or mistakenly think the wine is MEANT to be goaty; or b) they don't want to deal with snooty servers who imply that they are wrong or morally suspect for impugning the expensive bottle of corked alcohol they have just opened. Or c) like me, they open the wine years and years after they bought it, and who knows where they bought it, or when? If it's b) for you, pal, and you're afraid to return a wine that tastes "off" because you're afraid the pretentious wine steward is gonna give you trouble, make HIM taste it. Works every time.

Did you know that the REASON one is supposed to swirl and sip just a splash of wine in the glass BEFORE sharing it with guests is precisely to identify corked wines BEFORE everyone else has a glassful? So you can replace that bottle immediately. It's corked, or it's oxidized, or lightstruck, or has "undergone unplanned secondary fermentation," which sounds like getting drunk twice in one night when you only meant to get sozzled once.

"Lightstruck" is a wonderful word, don't you think? It sounds as if one is dazzled by beauty. "Rarely have I been so lightstruck, but when that luminous redhead sashayed by the table, I fell to my knees and begged her to have my baby."

What the term actually describes is a wine that has been exposed to light (duh), causing a reaction that produces offputting flavors and aromas. The French call this ickiness "goûts de lumière," and it's more likely to happen to white wines in light bottles. A wine that is lightstruck will have a nose of what is described variously as cooked cabbage, corn nuts, wet dog or wet wool. See there? "Wet dog." I managed to get back to the topic of dogs! Oh ye of little faith. . .

You just don't know what you're getting with a wine until you try it out. Like Dio. Man, I love that dog more than all the wineries in France. And then some. No matter how old he really is.

*Postscript: This post is already too long for me to wax eloquent or otherwise about Barbaresco. Suffice it to say that it is one of the great wines of Piedmont, of ancient origin, and is, like the King, Nebbiolo-based.