Introduction

Wine is complicated. Almost impossibly so.

It's the result of microbial fermentation, guided by human hands, based on a natural starting product that's harvested once a year. The grapes differ markedly from season to season, and the nature of the vineyard site — the soil and climate the grape vine grows in — differs markedly over a short distance. Differences in geography and grape variety, compounded by human choices, result in a bewildering array of commercial wines. There's no product quite like it.

Because of the variability in the starting material — the grapes and microbes — winemakers can't easily follow a formula. They need to make the appropriate choices and interventions during the winemaking process in order to produce a marketable wine they are proud to stand behind. Commercial and market considerations often enter the fray. It's not a simple process.

Because nature and chance play such a significant role in wine production, it's not surprising that wine quality varies. And sometimes wines are faulty. The incidence of wines declared by professionals to be faulty in major competitions such as the International Wine Challenge is unacceptably high and probably wouldn't be tolerated in any other industry. And these are wines that have made it all the way to bottle. It's impossible to be sure how many "faulty" wines are consumed each year; it's likely that most of these are drunk, but not enjoyed, without the consumer realizing that the wine isn't supposed to taste this way.

Hence this book. It may seem a little negative to write a book on wine faults. After all, who likes to focus on flaws or errors? Does it mean the book will be a bit of a downer? Will its sales stagnate, even if it should prove to be an important text, simply because people are turned off by the term fault?

I hope not, and I deliberately chose the title — Flawless — to emphasize the positive. The absence of flaws may not actually be a positive quality in itself, but flaws prevent positive attributes of a wine from being enjoyed. It is by avoiding flaws that winemakers are free to achieve their goal. Beauty is marred by flaws, so their avoidance is a worthy aspiration. But the reality is a little more layered and complex than this. Sometimes, small levels of what might at higher levels be fault compounds can help beauty express itself — a theme I will return to several times in this book.

Beauty itself is much more than simply the avoidance of faults. To use a slightly religious-sounding analogy, there is more to virtue than an absence of sin. A wine may be flawless yet desperately dull. So my remit in writing this book is to go beyond simply the avoidance of faults and to touch on the semi-philosophical question of the nature of beauty as it applies to wine. As well as the traditional roster of faults, I will include more novel (and perhaps controversial) categories.

WINE FAULTS ARE INTERESTING

The topic of wine faults is of great interest. It's a rich, nuanced, complicated subject that strays from wine chemistry through microbiology to human perception and quality judgments. Some faults are universally agreed on: I can't see many people arguing a strong case for cork taint by 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (widely known simply as TCA) being a "complexing factor." Other faults are more a question of degree and personal preference: the spicy, medicinal, animal savoriness imparted by Brettanomyces yeast is a great example.

Some make a distinction between faults and taints. Defined as resulting from the fermentation process, faults include oxidation, Brettanomyces, volatile acidity, and reduction. A taint, in this classification scheme, is when a wine is affected by an extraneous flavor chemical, such as cork taint, eucalyptus taint, or smoke taint. "Faults are generally internal," says Adrian Coulter of the Australian Wine Research Institute, "like something microbial, or something wrong with the wine. Taints are something coming from the outside. It might still be something in the winemaking: for example, a wine additive might be tainted with a compound, and you add it to the wine, and it taints it." In this book, I refer to both categories as "faults."

Looking for the Positives

I hope that the overall tone of this book will be rather positive. I also hope that reading it will inspire winemakers to be more creative, and not just more defensive, in their winemaking. It is through a full understanding of faults, their origins, and their complexity — acknowledging that the presence of a specific character can be negative in some wines but positive in others — that winemakers can leave the overly defensive path that can result in rather sterile, clean but uninspiring, technically correct wines.

Some wines are clearly faulty to all. Others split opinion. This will be a recurring theme as I examine faults one by one. Who gets to decide whether a wine is faulty or not? That's a good question, and we may have to leave the rather handy dualistic division between faulty and correct wines and move to a worldview that offers more of a continuum — at least for those wines that fall into the gray area between the two firm positions. And it looks like we will not be able to make the following pronouncement: If a wine contains chemical x at a level greater than y µg/L, then it is faulty. It turns out there are only a limited number of instances where this sort of rule makes sense.

The Science behind Faults

While a lot of good research on wine faults has been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, there is much that is still not documented in rigorous scientific terms. So I haven't restricted my research to the published literature. This book will include the experiences of winemakers from around the globe. These people, day in and day out, come face to face with wine faults, and their accumulated experience is a valuable source of information. On many of the topics, an honest answer will be "We suspect ..." or even "We just don't know."

PERFECTION VERSUS IMPERFECTION: ON THE NATURE OF BEAUTY

I want to introduce a concept that I think is really helpful for understanding wine faults, and for grasping the notion that some flavor chemicals can be both faulty and positive, depending on the concentration and the context. This is the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi. Put in simple terms, it is the idea that flaws can bring out beauty, or that flaws are in fact part of beauty. In contrast to the Western aesthetic of striving for a beauty that lies in the attainment (or near attainment) of perfection, wabi-sabi suggests that beauty is transient, incomplete, and...