There is a flaw, at least in our opinion, that we refer to as stinky/cheesy feet. We have noticed this most often in older (10+ years bottle age) right bank Bordeaux. Our best description is varying degrees of stinky, cheesy feet. Most of the affected wine have previously been lower price producers, but today’s offender is what should be a tasty 2010 Chateau Fonplegade which was purchased today from a local retailer who has a large inventory of Bordeaux spanning many vintages. Is this just normal secondary flavors that just are not to my liking? Is this a flaw possibly related to poor storage conditions? Is the wine over the hill? As we have quit of bit of Bordeaux in our cellar, I’m a bit concerned. Maybe these aromas/flavors are normal and expected. Maybe we just don’t like aged wine. Thoughts?
Mercaptans or reduction.
Yeah, reduction (inc mercaptans, but they were moved into Thiols). These flavors develop in barrel, esp when the wine isn’t given enough air to its liking (& other causes, but air is key)…and sometimes continues to develop in bottle. Cab needs a lot of air, more than Pinot for example. Anyways, if it’s significant after that many years it’s much less likely to go away…but throwing it in a decanter to see if it ‘cleans up’ is always a good thing to do.
Throw in a penny. If disulfide bonds haven’t formed, it will often clean up the wine remarkably.
They make a copper stir stick too…I am sure you have seen Dan’s at M&S, John, that works well for reduction too.
Sure–used it many times. actually I think his sticks some from Chris Camarda. It really doesn’t take much copper, so the thin sheen over tin on a regular penny is fine.
Stinky, cheesy somehow doesn’t sound like mercaptans to me, which in my experience are more likely to be skunks, rubbery, coffee type aromas. Cheesy feet sounds bacterial.
Odd flaw to be this prevalent for 1 person.
Jeff-
I’m surprised to hear that in that wine which I like a great deal. Does the flaw you note blow off with aeration or persist? There are a lot of older wines, albeit a lot older than 10 years typically, that have a bottle funk that I find wanes with aeration. A dirty/mushroomy/must basement, cheesy in the worst cases, I think of as brett which tends to persist rather than blow off. I agree with earlier posts this could be a bacterial flaw. With respect to mercaptans, I find them completely different and in a lot in really old CA zins they smell like burning tires to me. A ten year old bordeaux should not have much in the way of mercaptans.
But, Mercaptans were this odd/arbitrary set of compounds (arbitrary compared to the coherence & scope of Thiols). You’re right that bacterial is quite plausible…but so are thiols and it seems like giving the wine a good airing out would answer the difference?
If it was just one bottle, and if cheesy were the predominant thing, which is more lactic than reduction, I would favor bacterial, but if as the OP says they are getting the flaw in a number of other wines, I would favor reduction. the true test is whether it gets better with air (takes a while), or copper, which is pretty quick.
Makes sense to me (note: air and copper address different & overlapping things…so one, the other or both might work…making the whole mess more complicated)
Sounds like Brett, dirty wine making facility, unclean barrels etc. Shouldn’t spread from bottle to bottle however., but might be present in an entire lot of bottles. Definitely not a characteristic of aging. I too associate mercaptan/thiol smell with rubber, or rotting cabbage.
Is there copper in pennies any more? Of course if you have an Indian Head penny, you’re good.
I’ve run into the cheesy feet thing once, on a roughly 10 year old bottle of Mayacamas. It smelled totally different from brett, and unlike brett dissipated with time.
Okay. The bottle has been open overnight and the odor remains unchanged. I dropped a clean penny into the glass. Fifteen minutes of contact with periodic swirling resulted in no perceptible change. I had a glass of the 2015 Fonplegade during September. Although a bit tight, it had none of this odor and was quite enjoyable. This 2010 will go down the drain.
modern pennies are copper coated zinc, which works just fine for this purpose, as only the surface matters
Doesn’t answer the question but instead of pouring down the drain why don’t you bring bottle back to store owner and have him taste?
Turns out the wine has brett which is causing the stinky/cheesy feet!
I stumbled onto an excellent beer faults website…it had an entry for a cheesy fault and listed Isovaleric Acid as the cause. Searching for “Isovaleric Acid wine” brought up Brettanomyces as the cause (in wine, not sure about beer, tho beer can have brett so why not, but the site below says it’s oxidized hops that’s the cause in beer). The descriptor for Isovaleric Acid is stale cheese & sweaty socks.
The beer faults website: 18 Common Off Flavors In Beer (And How They're Caused)
Brett can take on so many different characteristics, many more than just barnyard and band aid. It makes it quite difficult sometimes therefore to isolate a specific fault - and oftentimes faults are combos of many things . .
Cheers