Wicked Brew

I once heard that most cases of wine will have one bottle that's "off" in taste. If you drink enough wine you've probably encountered a bottle gone bad, but is there any truth behind this?

I've never made or bottled wine myself but I have made numerous batches of homemade beer. At least in the beginning it seemed like the simplest mistake would make my beer nothing more than a carbonated mess. So what causes a perfectly good bottle of wine to taste bad? Looking for answers I contacted my friend and owner of the Wine School of Philadelphia, Keith Wallace. Keith is my mentor and the most unassuming wine expert you'll ever meet. According to Keith the most common reason for a bottle gone bad is the cork. Apparently a lot of wine makers selling affordable wine use cheaper cork, which means lots of fissures. Because the introduction of oxygen to the bottled wine means sure ruin, the wine maker will use a binding agent to fill the fissures. Unfortunately this binding agent is a chemical and it can give the wine an "off" taste. In the case of more expensive wines, occasionally an unfiltered wine can be a little off. Because unfiltered wine carries a lot of particulate there can be some variation in taste from bottle to bottle.