What's wrong with this wine?!

You know sometimes when you take a sip of a wine, and you immediately don't like it.  You can't quite put your finger on why, but you know it's not tasty.  Have you ever been curious as to what's really going on with a wine you really don't like, right off that bat?  The wine may suffer from variety of very simple issues.  All of which are very discoverable.  Just hold the bad wine in your mouth for a second and it will become very obvious-




1) It's too sour.


Explanation:   When a wine has too much acid in it, it causes a visceral reaction in your mouth.  If you hold wine with too much acid in your mouth for a few seconds, you'll notice your mouth salivating towards the back of your jaw.  Almost the same sensation as you get when you think of eating something really sour.  Wine shouldn't be THAT acidic.  That's a winemaker's mistake.




2) It makes your mouth too dry.


Explanation:  When you hold a wine in your mouth for a second, and notice that your tongue and your mouth feel unpleasantly dry (like cotton mouth), you've probably got a tannic wine on your hands.  Tannins are these astringent, bitter kind of molecules found in wine which can really enhance the wine, or really detract from it.  If the fruit is picked at the wrong time, the tannins can be overwhelming, which causes that terrible, dry mouthfeel.




3) It smells and tastes kind of musty.


Explanation: You almost definitely have a 'corked' wine.  Corks are used to seal wine bottles, and they can be defective.  The contaminated cork gives the wine the taste of the wet, old, messed-up cork.  Sometimes it might not taste terrible, but you know it's just not right.  It's estimated that maybe up to 5% of wine you buy is corked.  Thats over two bottles of every fifty you buy!  Don't hesitate to take a bottle back if you think it is corked.