The Second Glass

Okay winos, here’s a little trick I learned at 7:30 in the morning (it was a long session) while drinking an Australian Viognier with my wino roommates. One sniff into the glass I picked up the familiar rubber smell I have gotten in so many screw capped wines. My Italian friend promptly said… “ahh that is the smell of reduuuction!”, and he swiftly threw a penny in my glass (or a Euro-cent as it was). Instantly the rubber smell was gone, and the floral aromatics of a great Viognier started to shine. Like a stone killing two birds, I learned both what the pesky rubber smell I hated was, and how to remove it! I immediately proclaimed “I’ve had too many wines ruined by this – We must inform the people of this, and change the world!” And so, put on a mission from god (or Baccus), I wrote this article.

Not jumping too far into the boredom of chemistry, reduction in wine is the combination of non-smelly sulfur compounds into smelly sulfur compounds (think cabbage) due to a lack of oxygen. Since screwcap wines allow close to zero oxygen to enter the bottle, this is becoming a prevalent dilemma, and has been called by some people as the cork taint of screwcaps. Not to mislead, this predicament can also be found in corked wines. The good news is that unlike cork taint, the problem is fixable as copper in a penny reacts with the sulfur compounds to remove them. Oxygen will do the same thing, so a good general rule is to let a screwcap wine breathe, or decant it – after all it hasn’t seen any air since it was bottled. But if you come across an aroma of rubber, burnt match stick, or cabbage at a wine or dinner party, put a penny in your friend’s glass and impress them with the difference. Just make sure nobody drinks the penny!