© Wikimedia Commons

Brettanomyces – the wine descriptor that dare not speak its name.

Wine faults exist in the real world, but how come they never make it into reviews?

If you are North American and of a certain demographic and inclination, you will find yourself addressing your wine-related questions to a caped teddy bear with white sommelier gloves, a Zorro mask, and a bow tie.

The latter, to my sewer-like mind, lends him a disconcerting, male stripper air: I imagine a black leather posing pouch lurks somewhere out-of-frame below. But, teddy bear junk aside, one Wine-Spectator reader's question to Dr Vinifera (our cuddly, caped bear) concerned the spoilage yeast brettanomyces, or brett. What is it?

Dr. Vinny's answer (I'll leave you, dear reader, to ponder in what field he received his doctorate: I've got $20 riding on Doctor of Social Work – you don't moonlight as a furry Chippendale if you're in the ER) was well-crafted:

"You’ll recognize brett from its barnyard, cow pie, horsey, mousy, pungent, stable, metallic or Band-Aid aromas. At lower concentrations, it can add a spicy, leathery note to a wine, and I think some people like it because it’s easy to pick out, and, well, people like to recognize flavors and aromas in their wines. People's thresholds of perception (and tolerance) of brett vary – some don’t notice it, while others are more sensitive. It’s controversial to call it an outright flaw..."

This is a pretty good summary (although note the "easy to spot" vs. the "some don't notice it"). However, consider Dr Vinny's explanation and then read this (a forum post, also from Wine-Spectator):

"As I try more and more wines from Rhône and Bordeaux I always notice the tasting notes never mention anything about brett/barnyard..."

Now, before I continue, I must point out that I am using these two snippets from Wine-Spectator to illustrate my thought process prior to writing this piece, not to pick on the US publication. In fact, Vinny et al. can pat themselves on the back for some good search engine optimization, as the two examples above were the first fruits of my quest.

The question I was asking myself was this: why do wine writers not mention wine faults? If indeed brett is "easy to pick out", why isn't it spattered throughout reviews of red wines? If you talk to winemakers and writers, it's everywhere. I remember walking into the post-debrief gathering (read: drinking) of a premier cru red Burgundy tasting back when I was still wet behind the ears at Decanter. One of the old boys handed me a glass, I put my nose into the bowl and he said: "Chicken shit on a barnyard floor", and guffawed like it was the greatest compliment one could pay to red Burgundy. I don't think this comment was ever published. Why?

There are, I believe, three possibilities.

The first is that wine writers don't notice wine faults. At all. I agree with the forum poster above that tasting notes (almost) never mention brett or Band-Aid outright and, if you're reviewing hundreds or thousands of wines every year, you've got to come across quite a healthy number. But I work in the wine industry and, believe me, winemakers recognize faults like brett or VA (volatile acidity) all the time – it's our job. We will even insist it's there when all scientific analysis points to the contrary. So I would – partially – discard this notion.

The second is along the lines of "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all". I'm lukewarm about this theory but it shouldn't be dismissed. It is unconvincing because so many wine writers are remarkably forthright and opinionated. But also many are acutely aware of the symbiotic nature of their trade. You don't want producers screaming at you because you've gone to print saying their wines smell like nail polish remover. That has the potential to close doors.

The third possibility – and one that I think underpins what is really going on – is that most European and UK-centric publications have a healthy respect for libel law. You can, as a French court ruled in 2005, call a wine a "vin de merde"; you can say you don't like it; you can even say it is the worst wine you have tasted in the entire Saint-Émilion-sodden span of your time on this earth. But UK libel ruling would haul you over the coals if you said a wine had VA and the producer could scientifically prove that the VA was well below threshold levels. Because saying a wine is awful is different to saying a wine is faulty. One is your opinion and the other is besmirching the winemaker's reputation and craft. And that, in most countries, is a galloping fine and a junk-shrivelling retraction in print. If you say a wine has a flaw, you've got to be so sure of your palate, you're the kind of person who detects E.coli in the tap water.

© Brewershirts

Brewers love brett, but winemakers are less fond of its effects.

The reason people only talk about brettanomyces or VA at tastings, and yet don't put their words onto paper, is because slander is harder to prosecute than libel. This is a good moment to point out that cork taint (TCA) although a fault, is not an issue in this regard as the blame lies with the cork, not the winemaker. The same – to a degree – can be said of oxidation, although that is more contentious with natural winemaking techniques and other methods blurring the lines.

Students of law will, however, point out that the US does have something quite a few other countries don't: the First Amendment. US writers are not as constrained by the possibility of a defamation case as their European, South American or Australasian counterparts (I should state that I have a working, yet unspectacular, knowledge of libel law and I welcome any further elucidation, especially on points of US law). So why do we not see it in the likes of Wine Spectator or Wine Advocate?

In the main, I believe this has to do with the same circumspection that Old World writers show; it takes real guts, no matter how good you think you are, to say "brett" next to a wine. This is partly to do with what our caped teddy said earlier: perception varies. And because it varies, if one person says "brett", most people give that person the benefit of the doubt. It's the equivalent of calling someone a pedophile – even if they're innocent, the damage is done.

Given the US's freedom of speech, though, surely there are some examples? Even things to look for? One of the respondents to the forum post I cited above said that "...reviewers will use words like leather, wet fur, barnyard, animal, meat, bacon, etc. Some are notable [sic] unpleasant, some add characteristic complexity. You can take the hint and figure out what your level of tolerance is..."

So what are the hints, and do they exist in a formally recognizable form? I turned to the Wine Advocate's latest (interim) issue to see if I could detect any possible reference to a wine fault. Having discounted oxidation or TCA, I was going to focus on brett and VA thus keep strictly to the red wines.

I had mixed success. For the record, there was one big surprise (the exception that proves the rule, perhaps). Joe Czerwinski, who was reviewing southern Rhône wines, didn't hold back if he spotted VA. I would have expected maybe a reference to a "lifted aroma" but no, he called a spade a digging implement, mentioning "nail polish" or "nail polish remover" three times. Out of 250-plus wines, that's not huge, but I was surprised. Fair play to him.

Mind you, trying to work out his code for brett (if he even has one) drove me into a post-structuralist spiral of despair. Was it dusty cherries? Leather? Hints of clove? "...even a juniper note"? hay-like? Savory complexity? Savory? Meaty? Dusty? Spicy complexity? Spice? Did words like "spice" depend on the context? Sometimes potential Brett signifiers like clove or leather sounded positively benign, if not attractive, in context. If they did indeed hint at a flaw, I don't think Czerwinski saw it as such. He had issues with VA, alcoholic warmth and aldehydes (oxidation) in some wines but no outright grudge with any brett he may or may not have spotted. And this was the point: if he wrote a brett-associated aroma, did he mean brett even if he didn't identify brett? I was back at university, pondering Barthe's Death of the Author. Could I look beyond what Czerwinski wrote to what he smelt to what was in the wine. Did he even have to smell brett to prompt me to think brett?

It was maddening. If "spice" was the key word, like some Roman-à-clef, then Monica Larner found it in 40 of the 84 Tuscan Coast wines she reviewed. To be fair to her, I took all mentions of "spice" or "spicy" out of context and just totted them up – which seemed (a) unfair and (b) just ridiculous. I don't think I saw even a hint of a fault across all her tasting notes. When I got to Stephan Reinhardt's Austrian reds (of which there were six) I had given up.

So what did all this prove? Was there not a single bretty wine tasted by the WA team? I can't believe that. Even if brett is positive, as many people (including myself, on a more charitable day) claim, why isn't it committed to print?

No, what I think this proves (if anything) is that I could write a piece on April 1, 2018, claiming, deadpan, that scientists had incorrectly classified brettanomyces, that the morphology and taxonomy were wrong and that it didn't exist. Its metabolic pathways did not lead to 4EP or 4EG (the compounds that give us bretty aromas), that these were a natural by-product of post-ferment aging and that the whole thing was a big mistake. And this wouldn't impact on wine writing in any meaningful way (even if it was true). I might even be able to get a away with calling the whole thing a conspiracy. I could do a good line in YouTube videos off the back of it.

The other option – and the more realistic one – is going to have to be a tacit acceptance that talking about brett while tasting wine is really rather disingenuous. So few people put their moniker where their mouth is. This is going to make some New World wine shows (where winemakers are well represented and bretty wines are almost dismissed out of hand and do not rank, which avoids having to publish why they do not rank) relatively awkward. Some might even claim they are doing producers a favor. But even then, where is the accountability?

Before closing I genuinely would welcome any clear examples of a brett tasting notes to be posted by readers below. There must, surely, be some? You never know, there may be a whole world of semantics within the wine tasting note that I have been oblivious to for the last 15 years.