Don’t Pour That Bad Wine Away…

winepour

We’ve all had the experience. Slamming the apartment door on the world after a miserable week at work, grabbing that special bottle of wine you’ve been saving from the rack, yanking the cork from the bottle with a satisfying pop, pouring it out and… The unmistakable aroma of rotten eggs. It’s corked. Ruined. Pour it down the sink, head angrily to the liquor store and hand over a few hard-earned dollars for another bottle.

But sometimes, another bottle isn’t necessary. The word ‘corked’ is an umbrella term for several different faults that can affect a wine, sometimes making it merely dull to drink, other times turning it to vinegar. The rotten egg smell is the signature of hydrogen sulfide, one of the winemaker’s oldest foes. In the winery, wine can be passed through copper pipes to eliminate any trace of hydrogen sulfide, but for various reasons copper has fallen out of favour with winemakers, so it’s up to us as wine drinkers to take action where possible rather than tearfully pouring the stinky liquid away.

When you sniff the rotten egg odor in your wine, get a couple of one cent coins – these are coated in copper – and drop them into your glass of wine (probably best to rinse them under a tap first – you don’t know in whose sweaty hands they’ve been clasped). The copper on the coin removes the sulfide by reacting with it to create copper sulfide, an insoluble black precipitate that will sink to the bottom of the glass almost immediately.

Foul aroma banished, wine rescued, money saved. Time to kick back, drink, and leave the working week far behind…