SC - Old, old wine
Leslie Lansdowne
lalliepop at netzero.net
Sat Aug 26 20:27:29 PDT 2000
Hi everyone!
I am de-lurking once again to ask what may be a silly question. I don't
know a thing about wine especially the part about making it, but I was
reading an article in the paper today about a wine tasting in the
Netherlands. To paraphrase from the article, a 300-year-old bottle of wine
recovered from a 17th century Dutch warship was found by divers July 7th
off the coast of the Wadden Sea.
When the wine tasters were given their samples, the noticed a strong,
rotten egg odor, or as one connoisseur put it, "it smells like cow dung!"
Despite the horrible smell, they couldn't resist tasting it and apparently
it was very good. A comment was also made that the taste improved as the
wine mixed with oxygen.
Now, I have had bottles of wine that turned to vinegar---not only did they
taste bad but they smelled bad as well. My question is--how could this
wine taste wonderful--it was described as having a hint of fruit in it, of
orange peel, marmalade and caramel--and smell of awful? Quoting from the
article, "members of the team guessed the recovered wine was an early
variant of a dry Port that had been colored with a small amount of
elderberry juice." also, "almost no oxidation had taken place, so then the
bottle was uncorked the taste had been preserved reasonable well,
considering the wine's age."
So, what exactly is causing the bad smell, or could it just have had a bad
smell from the beginning?
As I stated earlier, I have no knowledge of wine making--so this is a
puzzle to me. AND, if presented with something that smelled so awful--I
wouldn't be inclined to taste it!
Ok, back to my little corner of lurkdom,
Leslie:-)
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