Spoiled Wine? Tips to Know if your Vintage Wine is Still Drinkable

Tasting expensive wine is a wonderful experience. But you can sometimes pay a lot of money and still end up with one that is spoiled. Unless you know how to detect spoiled wines, you will be wasting your money on something that is a step up from cooking wine. So it is important to learn how to detect if a wine has gone bad or not.

If you already know how particular wines taste and smell, and if your particular bottle or glass tastes or smells different, then this is a sure sign that something is wrong.

Corked wines can sometimes go bad when they come in contact with a wild fungus that produces a chemical called TCA. In such instances, the aroma of fruits and berries would be missing, assuming there is slight TCA contamination. If the wine has totally gone bad, the smell of the beverage itself would be strange. Almost 5% of wine bottles that use real corks get infected. So you need to beware of this when you see bottles sealed with real corks.

Exposure to heat can sometimes "cook" a wine. When it is stored close to an oven in some restaurants, it is possible for the wine to get cooked (Cooking easily destroys a wine). The tell tale signs of cooking are a cork that protrudes above the bottle's lip.

Sometimes, the foil or capsule might be bulging as a result of cooking as well. Once you open the bottle, look for signs on the cork that indicate that the wine has escaped around the cork's sides. This is a sure sign of cooking. A broken seal can also give rise to oxidation, as we will see next.

Although a little amount of oxidation is desirable for the breakdown of tannins as the wine ages, too much oxidation will spoil the wine. A properly corked bottle will not allow air to interact with the contents of the bottle. A poor seal, however, can allow oxidation to take place. But how do you find out if the wine has indeed undergone oxidation?

If the wine tastes like cheap sherry, then this is a sure sign that oxidation has taken place. The interaction of oxygen with the wine can also sometimes change the color of the wine to a noticeable brown. Both these signs are an indication of oxidation that you need to look for.

Wines that have been aged and stored for many years often collect sediments at the bottom of the bottle. When serving such aged wines, the bottle should be decanted gently in order to avoid the sediments from rising to the top and being poured into the glass. Presence of sediments can make the wine taste chalky and dry.