I had a bottle of Napa cab last night $100ish. When tasting/gulping I caught a huge wiff of a chemically, linoleum, wood polish smell. I remembered an article I had read years ago, I think by Blake, who described the smell of mega purple as gymnasium floor. Is it possible thats what i was smelling? Can you really smell or taste mega purple?
I’d guess that might be volatile acidity, not mega purple. To me, when I suspect I’m tasting it, it’s the Welch’s grape juice flavor. I very well could be wrong, though.
Open a can of frozen grape juice concentrate. Let it thaw. Reduce said can in a saucepan by half. Taste it and you’ll have a light-bulb moment that a lot of the $10 -$20 bottles of California reds we drink, in particular Cabernet, Zinfandel and Merlot have a similar flavor profile on the finish. Unctuous, hyper grapey sweet manipulated taste.
Sometimes I wonder about this … Mega Purple being a hangover catalyst … I drink a lot of Napa cabs and sometimes I end up with just brutal hangovers after 2-3 glasses and then there’s nights like last night where effectively 3 (plus my pregnant wife just tasting) of us split a bottle of Rivers Marie '17 pinot, Bevan '12 cab, and Bond '04 St Eden (and I probably had more than my share lol), and I woke up this morning without even a hint of a headache.
Another potential reason could be histamines. For me there are times when the environmental allergens are sufficiently high than any red wine and even some white wines just kick me over some magical threshold and will give me a horrible hangover. I don’t even know if I should call it a hangover as it can happen after minimal consumption. And then at other times, let’s just say I wake up surprised.
Drinking any wines or spirits with a lot of new oak aging is going to cause worse hangovers than the same amount of wine or spirits without oak influence. The congeners and other toxins from wood are more difficult for your body to process.
Teobaldo Cappellano told me once that you can drink as much traditional Barolo as you want and not get a hangover. He said that he and a friend went through 8 bottles of old Barolo one night between the two of them and felt great the next day.
I would venture to say that the mega purple isn’t the reason for the hangovers directly. Rather, the use of mega purple most likely is highly correllated with high alcohol and higher-than-normal residual sugar levels. The alcohol would be the likely culprit…and hangovers are a result of dehydration caused by the alcohol.
I also would guess that oak treatment has very little to do with hangovers and, once again, (in the old Barolo example at least), the low alcohol is to what the lack of hangovers were attributed. If I drank a lot of vodka (which has zero oak), I’m going to get a hangover.
Wood polish does sound like VA/EA. It doesn’t blow off, although may be stronger in the first whiff.
Not sure why mega purple would give hangovers or headaches, I also suspect it’s something else.
To be honest, I don’t think I’ve had a lot of wines where mega purple was used. For higher end wines, the style of wines I favor wouldn’t be enhanced by it. I also don’t drink a reds target for the US mass market where it is supposedly used.
Gotcha. I won’t argue that…not going to experiment to try, either! I guess my point was more that eight bottles of Barolo didn’t lead to a hangover (ostensibly) not because of low oak, but because of lower alcohol.