Sex and Wine: the (not so) Sweet Smell of Covid

A piece originally published by Meininger’s Wine Business International

For anyone who has learned the basics, the process of judging any wine invariably involves the way it smells

But, just as the advent of skin-contact and cloudy natural wines has changed the way wines are analysed visually, sniffing them is not as straightforward as it was. Previous, fairly specific, arguments about ‘acceptable’ or ‘unacceptable’ brett, reduction and VA have moved on to discussions of ‘funk’ that now include the once universally-hated ‘mousiness’.  Steven Graf in a 2017 blog post defines ‘funk’ as referring to “a characteristic known to be a flaw that can simultaneously contribute to the harmony of a given wine”; “spoilage bacteria/yeasts”, and “an agreed way of talking about a loose set of earthy, putrescent flavours and smells common in food, fermented products, beverages, soil, plants, etc.”  More