Slowly heat up some sugar to 300-plus degrees Fahrenheit and you will soon have yourself some caramel; slice an onion and slowly cook it in almost the same manner and you will have caramelized the sugars in the onion; bake a head of garlic at 350 for about 40 minutes and you will get yourself a caramelized aroma plus a wonderfully sweet taste.
Cook a sweet brandy-fortified white wine at about 105 degrees Fahrenheit for a few months and you will have created a cooked wine called Madeira, which, to me, smells an awful lot like caramel.
Over on Robin Garr’s Wine Lovers Web site forum we’ve been discussing the subject of cooked wine. It’s quite a discussion for two reasons:
First, for an online discussion, it is tame, showing what adult communication can provide. With one or two exceptions, Robin’s Wine Lovers site is normally inhabited by less confrontational wine geek than on many other sites—certainly, it doesn’t suffer from a divisive moderator.
Second, after going around a few times with the discussion I have come to the conclusion that the word “cooked” to describe a wine that has been heat damaged somewhere in the traffic between producer and consumer may be a quick and easy way to describe the problem, but it may not be an accurate description.
Many wine geeks claim that a cooked wine smells like sherry. What they mean is that the so-called cooked wine smells oxidized. I am not so sure about that.
Granted, a wine that is exposed to heat will oxidize quicker than it normally would, but a cooked wine is exposed to excessive heat, to the point of Pasteurization.
To me, the overall smell of cooked wine is a pleasant kind of burnt sweetness. The overall smell of oxidation leans more toward acrid or decaying.
To my nose, the aroma of a truly cooked wine supersedes its oxidized component. When I smell the purposely-cooked Madeira, the more prominent among the aromas is caramel, with a hint of sulfurous reduction that reminds me of cooked onions—I pick up the oxidation but underneath the caramel.
In the first thread on this subject, someone mentioned that he has smelled butterscotch in heat damaged wine but never caramel. I find that interesting, too, because to make butterscotch you cook sugar as you would to make caramel but you add cream.
A major component in cream is lactic acid, which happens also to be a component in finished wine that has gone through malo-lactic fermentation, converting malic to lactic acid. So, it makes sense to me that the smell of butterscotch would show up in such wines if they become cooked.
Also, as a way of seemingly refuting my claim that caramel describes the smell of cooked wine, the gentleman who mentioned butterscotch also pointed out that caramel requires not only cooked sugar but also cooked amines (I presume in the sugar).
I accept that. I also accept that wine contains amines as well as sugar and ethanol, the alcohol in wine, which, when cooked, has a vaguely sweet smell. Wine that undergoes natural malo-lactic fermentation normally has a high amine count (Wikipedia provides a pretty good definition of amines—click below).
In the second thread on this subject, I recount a wine cooking experiment that I did in one of my old wine classes. You can read about that experiment in the Cooked 2 link below.
All of this leads me to believe that when people identify a wine flaw with the descriptor “cooked,” they likely aren’t always talking about a wine that has been cooked. The question then is: what are they talking about?
Copyright Thomas Pellechia
April 2008. All rights reserved.
Many wine geeks claim that a cooked wine smells like sherry. What they mean is that the so-called cooked wine smells oxidized.
ReplyDeleteYou mean, what they often mean is oxidized.
But, yes, we're really talking about three different things here: Cooked, Oxidized, and Sherry. I drink sherry, I encounter oxidized somewhat regularly (I drink old wines several times a month) but "Cooked" as in Exposed to Too Much Heat without the purpose of making Madiera-style wine...I try to avoid (successfully) acquiring any of those wines.
But, definitely, three categories, and Cooked is not Oxidized.
We have to remember that in most wine classes, they never even teach you what a corked wine is (although they talk about it, there's usually no handy example). Cooked wines? I've never heard of that being offered in a class. Have you?
Jack,
ReplyDelete"You mean, what they often mean is oxidized."
No, I mean exactly what I wrote. That's what they mean, because many geeks simply think that all sherry is oxidized, when that isn't the case. Sorry, I confused you with my wording.
In fact, I am convinced that the smell we identify as sherry comes not so much from oxidation but from the flor or maybe the flor and wood--otherwise, how to explain that smell in Manzanilla, which is not supposed to be oxidized.
As for cooked wine in class: I offered cooked wine experiments in my classes. Go to the Wine Lovers thread that I linked and see what the experiment was like.