Bottle Shock Part 1: Why does this wine taste like $#!&? The New Bottle.
Full disclosure, I shouldn’t love wine. Shocking! Alcohol was the devil’s brew, the easiest way to the Pit. Tis a lot to put on a beverage humankind fermented for thousands of years. Maybe someday I’ll traipse down the history of abstinence and prohibition to find where my well-meaning but strict parent learned her hatred of Bacchus’ brew, but today I wanted to reflect on a question I’m asked more than any other in my viticultural career:
“If this tastes so good now, why is it when I get it home, the wine tastes awful? They switch the bottles, right?”
or,
“How do I keep a bottle tasting this good, once I get home?”
Bottle Shock is a condition which can unsettle the flavour compounds in the liquid suspension we know as wine. From the luscious and complex flavour experience in the tasting room, or that glass at dinner; the newly opened wine takes on flavours of muted tin, under-ripe acidic fruit. It’s as limp as laundry out of the washing machine. Sometimes temporary (especially with more mature wines), bottle shock can also happen if a wine is too new in bottle.
Heat damage and negative food pairings can radically change the experienced flavour of a wine, too, and we’ll get to those in other articles.
We’ve all had that friend… we might have been that friend, who moves into their first apartment and a few weeks in realize nobody is coming over to do the stack of dishes, fold the laundry or, eep, scrub the bathroom. The place is a mess, there’s some form of microscopic organized religion chanting their name on the dish ware.
This friend hasn’t figured out the basics of living in their own space yet, just like newly bottled wine. The good news is, wait a month or so, and the next time you approach that friend, it’s a different experience. They’ve discovered candles/room spray. The dishes are neatly put away (maybe one or two is in the sink). A peek through the open bedroom door reveals laundry neatly folded and away (or shoved into a ‘clean’ bin).
The Bottle Shock is over, and when we pour that glass, it’ll be as right as the rain which fell in springtime on a blossoming tree or bud-breaking vine. As gorgeous as we remember. Sometimes the addage ‘hurry up and wait’ is the most important one we’ll hear, and can excite even the best connoisseur to set down those fresh new vintages in favour of the ones which have been around for a while.
And sure, not everyone who drinks wine is going to have the luxury of waiting, but if we know which wines are going to be ready off the line, it can inform our choices. Odds are, by the time the wine gets to the liquor store, it’s well on its’ way to being fine. When we’re buying wine from the winery, sometimes it’s a good thing to ask on a new vintage, or be prepared to set something aside for a week or three.
We can also ‘shock’ a wine through transporting them home. Where some wines depending on age, varietal and winemaker methods of choice might be more susceptible to needing a figurative sit down and cuppa to settle the nerves, or in this case the bottle, before they go on the centre stage at your dining table.
I hope you enjoyed this introductory article on Bottle Shock, from a WSET Level 3 Wine Nerd. Come by again when we’ll discuss mature wines… aka, another question asked frequently: “So my elderly family member left me a whole bunch of wine, and…”
