Who are you calling dumb?
You may or may not have heard the term before. Perhaps you’ve come across its alias, “mute”? No? Well, if you tend to drink your wines young or tend to drink youthful, fruit driven wines, this is not a surprise. So exactlty what are we talking about here?
These terms refer to the level of a wine’s “expressiveness” - the aromas and flavors that a wine yields. But in this case, it’s more about what the wine is NOT doing than what it is…
The terms “dumb” or “mute” are usually used in reference to wines that are ageworthy that are, give or take a year or two on either side, in their “middle years”, though it is indeed possible for a very young wine to be said to be dumb. Let’s start at the beginning…
Wines that are capable of long-term aging often go through several phases of aroma, texture, taste, etc. as the many chemical processes that allow for this longevity wax and wane over time. For example, highly ageworthy wines like Barolo, Bordeaux, Port, Rioja et al. which are most often at their peak drinking form from between about 10-30 years from the vintage date, often make more pleasurable drinking on release than they do let’s say two or three years down the line. Frequently, though the tanninc structures of these wines can be fierce on release, they often retain a great deal of the “baby fat” fruit character that can balance these as of yet unrepentant tannins. These types of wines drunk in their extreme youth hardly represent these wines’ full potentials, but they can indeed be hedonistically direct and can also give a fascinating glimpse into what a winemaker encounters when all of his or her labors in the vineyard as well as in the cellar are “in the books”, and he or she has to decide “Are we ready to bottle or not”? Evaluating barrel samples is one of the last great skills that comes to the aspiring master palate, and tasting just-bottled highly ageworthy wines is as close to this often humbling experience as most of us get.
So once a wine moves out of its infancy, we begin to be able to encounter “dumbness” in the bottle. So let’s get down to brass tacks - what EXACTLY are we talking about here? At least in my definition, dumbness is the descriptor used to represent a wine that doesn’t taste or smell of much of anything, or seems to be less “expressive” than one would expect. Other descriptors that are used to denote this same phenomenon are “closed down”, “shut down”, or “tight”, though the term “tight” might be more frequently used as a less pronounced interpretation of “dumb”…
OK, you’ve pulled the cork, you’ve let the wine breathe for 30-60 minutes, you pour out the wine, swirl and sniff and…NOTHING (or not much). You let the wine rest in the glass for another ten to fifteeen minutes, and still nothing. The wine has gone dumb. What can be done? My advice is a good, roiling decanting. Sometimes, a rigorous infusion of air can wake up a sleeping wine, but then again, sometimes not…and if not, there’s really not much that you can do. For whatever reason (and the science is STILL not yet clear) wines that have gone dumb cannot be revived with a short term “fix”…whatever has happened or not happened in that bottle cannot be remedied with a post uncorking aeration or not at least before the air begins to turn the wine into vinegar…If you get to this point, you’re just plain S.O.L.
But there is a way to make at least a LITTLE sangria from sour grapes…One can learn a bit about the wine, and hopefully use this knowledge to avoid this problem in the future. Questions/notes that one can ask/record oneself that can be helpful are:
- What kind of wine is this EXACTLY? - Note this, and try to retain it. You may begin to find patterns.
- What is the VINTAGE of the wine? - Experiment with another wine from the same appellation and the same vintage from a different producer - are you still noticing “dumbness” or not?
- Whatever small amount of aroma IS emanating from the glass, note this as well - REALLY awkward aromas (ones that are not bad per se, but just strange) may indicate that a wine has a LOOOONG way to go before it begins to “speak” again. A wine that is just a bit “shy” might be about to wake up sooner than later…
- If after a decent aeration session has occured, and there is still no satisfaction, let the wine continue to breathe in a COVERED decanter for 24 hours, and then re-taste. Carefully note any further change, and try to make inferences (read “educated guesses”) about the wine’s future drinking window.
- Talk to others that have purchased the same wine. Have they had a similar experience?
- If you cannot find any other buyers of this same wine, if you dare, are able to do so financially, and actually HAVE another bottle of the exact same wine, open it too…in some cases, dumbness is the problem of this or that individual bottle rather than a function of producer, grape, vintage, etc. Clearly, if the problem persists, its a generalized problem rather than an isolated one, and you then know that any further bottles of this wine that are in your possession should be shuffled into the back of your cellar and forgotten about…
When all is said and done, opening up a truly DUMB wine is just one of those unfortunate events in the drinking life of the oenophile It’s not not QUITE as bad as corked wine, which is simply unredeemable, but the net effect can be the same if the wine has truly shut down hard.
So if you find yourself sitting in front of a dumb wine, try as many little wine CPR tricks as you can devise, and if nothing works, chalk it up to experience, learn as much as you can from the disappointment, and move on. One of the best things about wine is that there’s always another chance for a great experience just over that viney ridge…
TOM CIOCCO
“Reduction”? - Augment your understanding…
Grapes and wines are the heirs to a bevy of diseases, pests, and flaws. The identification of “corkiness” for example has become quite easy to for many wine drinkers, but other flaws in wine are a bit more difficult to identify in the glass, and perhaps even less well understood on the “theoretical” side. Here’s a look at one of these “classic” flaws in wine: reduction.
In order to not get sucked into too much technical language, the simplified definition of reduction is a wine that has been deprived of oxygen at the wrong time, and reduction can also be said to be the opposite of oxidation. Things that are “reduced” (in this case, wine) have gained the electrons from the things that have been oxidized within the same closed system. One reaction cannot happen with the same amount of the other happening on the other side of the “equation”.
Now the word “reduction” used in the sense of “reductive winemaking” is the current modern standard for making wines, and most contemporary quality-minded winemakers take full advantage of it. In employing this technique, towards the end of alcoholic fermentation on into the aging process, reduction is a most desireable state to cultivate. The presence of reduction in these stages of winemaking protects and preserves the acidity and fruit flavors that modern drinkers consider to be a baseline requirement in well made wines. Reduction protects wines from oxidation. Wines that have oxidized (unintentionally or intentionally - many old-styled wines are purposely made in an “oxidative” style - Sherry and Madeira for example are highly oxidized wines) often lack primary fruit flavors, and are often said to be “flat” in the mouth.
So why is reduction sometimes good and sometimes bad? Well, like so many things, its all a matter of degrees. Reduction is a good thing until there’s too much of it, and then it’s bad. Simple, right? Fundamentally what happens is the wine’s tannins become polymerized (small molecules combining to produce large strings or clumps of molecules) and when this transformation has occured, the conditions favorable for the formation of sulfer compounds like mercaptans (the smelly compounds added to natural gas by the way) and hydrogen sulfide gain ascendance. So essentially, too much reduction creates the conditions for the formation of these stinky compounds. The reduction reaction itself, especially at lower levels, is harmless and olfactorily undetectable.
So enough with the organic chemistry lessons. Let’s cut to the chase - What does the product of reduction smell like, and what can I do about it if I meet it in a dark alley? The descriptors utilized for the resulting smells vary quite widely, but the biggest “basket” into which most fall could be said to be “funky”. Specific aromas like rotting vegetation, a just-struck match, hardboiled eggs, sewage, and burnt rubber are the most commonly cited in specifically describing what the effects of reduction smell like in the glass. So what can be done about this? In some cases, absolutely nothing. In certain instances the level of polymerization is so high that the process cannot be reveresed with anything less than a BIG chemistry set. But in many less grave cases, all that is required is AIR - remember the relationship outlined above - when one compound is reduced, another is oxidized. The stinkiness that results in a wine is the product of the wrong things being reduced and oxidized, and your job to to set things right again. In many cases, reductive smells dissipate naturally over time as the bottle remains opened. If you’ve ever heard people talking about funky smells “blowing off”, the reduction of reduction is almost surely to what they were referring. If leaving a bottle open for 15 or 20 minutes doesn’t do the trick, take the next step - decant! The more air one can introduce into the wine, the better chance one has of de-smellifying the wine in question. But, if after an hour or two, there’s no perceptible change in the smell of the wine, until you can get back to the shop where you bought it for a refund, the prescription is opening another bottle.
PS - In my experience there are certain grapes whose wines tend to reduce more frequently, the two most common being the Italian varieties of Dolcetto and especially Montepulciano d’Abruzzo. Exactly why this is so, I’m not sure, but it does indeed seem to occur more with these two than many others that I’ve encountered. Give wines made from these varieties the benfit of the doubt if you do come accross some “off” smells when the cork is first pulled…
TOM CIOCCO
