When floral goes funky

Davis, Calif. — WHEN a waiter pours a sip of wine for us to taste from a just-opened bottle, he's offering us the opportunity to judge whether it's flawed. We swirl and sniff. But what are we supposed to be smelling? If it's corked, would we know? Unfortunately, the opportunity is usually wasted. Relatively few diners can tell a corked wine from one that is merely banal. And funky smells? They might not indicate a flaw, but rather a hint of appealing complexity.

To appreciate good wines, you need to know how to spot the bad ones. It's not just an issue for diners; wine industry professionals have just as much trouble detecting flaws. That's why legions have trekked to UC Davis Extension over the last 26 years to take John Buechsenstein's "Introduction to Sensory Evaluation of Wine." This crash course about wine's worst failings has become a rite of professional passage.

The sharp smell of a mildew-infested gym hits your nose the moment you step into the classroom. The aroma wafting up from the dozens of wine glasses on the tables also smacks of wet dog fur, dirty socks and soggy cardboard left out in the rain. Now that's corked wine, says Buechsenstein, winemaker for Sauvignon Republic Cellars.

Buechsenstein favors a hit-you-over-the-head approach. Forget the rhapsodic wine poetry, he instructs the room of 50 students, each with an odiferous semicircle of half-filled wine glasses on the table before them. "Defects are in the nose of the beholder," says Buechsenstein. "To make intelligent decisions about buying wines, you need to know about flaws. On the other hand, we have to be cautious with this knowledge. The most beautiful objects in the world are not perfect."

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Six to avoid

TO teach his students the difference, Buechsenstein boils down the definition of bad wine to a set of six foul flaws. These are the most common problems that have persisted despite the best efforts by the modern wine industry to establish uniformity.

Cork taint, what is often referred to as "corked" wine, is the world's most prevalent wine flaw. According to industry estimates, one in 10 bottles of wine will have a touch of the mildew stench that Buechsenstein's students smelled when they entered his classroom.

The next most common flaw is the presence of \o7Brettanomyces\f7, a kind of spoiled yeast that, at high levels, can give off a Band-Aid/medicinal smell or a barnyard/compost funkiness. The rest of the list includes volatile acidity which causes vinegar or nail polish aromas, the nose-burning presence of detectable sulfites, the rotten egg stench of sulfides, and oxidation indicated by cooked-fruit odors.