Making sense of scents and cents — Fundamental wine-by-the-glass disasters

Those of us who try to find new wines that we will like, often try to save money our vino-casino gamble by buying a glass of wine instead of an entire bottle. A lot of time it makes no sense because a lack of scents make us lose our  hard-earned cents.

As I’ve written recently, that often ends up as a disaster as restaurants and bars pour old stale wine. Some think that refrigeration or s few squirts of argon will safe the day. And they are wrong.

That’s bad for the consumer and Can trash your reputation.

This piece from VinePair — The Science Behind The Scents In Your Wine — offers one of the best, most detailed and yet easily understood explanations for this.

Scents -> sense of smell -> sense of taste

The simple explanation for stale wine by the glass is in your nose: scents.

As you know when you have a head cold, your sense of smell is a vital part of your sense of taste.

Smells -> volatile -> evaporate

And smells are only possible when molecules are in the air. And molecules get into the air  — and eventually into your nose — because they are volatile. And anything volatile evaporates.

Evaporating scents -> stale wine

Preventing oxidation using argon addresses a small part of the issue. But the only way to keep the scents in wine from evaporating is to maintain pressure on them so they stop evaporating.

The only other way to curb evaporation is what happens in the ullage in bottled wine. While the pressure in most ullage is one atmosphere, the liquid wine stops losing volatile scents after a brief time when the vapor pressure of the scent molecules builds up a concentration that stops the evaporation.

 VinePair – Making sense of scents

VinePair puts this into solid context  with The Science Behind The Scents In Your Wine which does a great job of describing what sort of scent results in specific sensations.