Glossary

posted by mark in Website Updates, Snooth, Wine

Part of what I love about Snooth is the community. People are here to learn and grow together, to talk about wine (and sometimes about other stuff) in addition to buying wine to taste offline. One of the best stories I have to date started here and ended up on this thread.

Well, many thanks to Snooth member extraordinaire oceank8 and our new designer Mike, finally the Snooth glossary has been realized. It’s still in feature infancy. I imagine soon users will be able to add definitions, comments and links directly into this page, but it’s a great start. I know I’ve learned a bunch about wine by picking through it.

We appreciate every wine, tasting note, image, winemaker’s note — anything that the community adds to Snooth. We’re so happy to have your support — it’s making Snooth better every day and has us working even harder not to let you down!

Struck By The Light

posted by mark in Snooth, Wine

Way back in June, we talked about running a little experiment. The details are here. The basic idea was to test how light and heat effected wine.

We used the 2006 Kenwood Sauvignon Blanc for the test. The control wine stayed in my wine fridge. The heat struck wine sat in a closed space outside, exposed to heat but not light. The light struck wine was exposed to UV beams from a few small lamps we purchased. I measured the UV output, which was roughly equivalent to what you might experience from the sun on an average day. (Before you cry foul, the UV lamps had this effect directly next to the lamps, and the sun is 1 AU away.)

How did it go? Here are my tasting notes for each wine. We blind tasted them so we wouldn’t be swayed by knowing which was which to start with.

Wine A) Flat and watered down. Flabby with no flavors. Fruit is completely washed. Heat damaged.
Wine B) Metallic with slightly more fruit than Wine A but basically still tastes watery. Light damaged.
Wine C) A little more spice / less washed out than the others. Control.

My guesses? Wrong. The real answers were:

Wine A) Heat.
Wine B) Control.
Wine C) Light.

Blind tasting is never easy, so I’m not sure how accurate this was going to be. To be honest, I think light damage is not nearly as bad. The wine was definitely drinkable, and still had some degree of acidity. On the other hand, I found the heat damage absolutely killed the wine. There was no fruit left.

I think we all already knew not to expose our wines to excessive heat or light. But now I do know better what to look for if I do come across an afflicted bottle.