Smoke Taint Treatment

Hi Clark:

I have a wine with smoke taint from a grass fire. What remedial treatments are available?  What is the efficacy, have you seen successful results on Pinot Noir?

Dave

 

Hi Dave,

Pinot Noir generally has little tannin structure, which in other wines can absorb and integrate smoke taint, so it’s particularly difficult to treat without losing the essential perfumes that make Pinot attractive, because the membranes required are much looser than those that can be used for removal of smaller molecules like ethanol and acetic acid and tend to strip mouthfeel and floral aromatics.

While the phenomenon is far from well understood, here’s the scuttlebutt.

Our reverse osmosis sublicensee David Wollan of WineNet Australia (now MemStar) first developed an offshoot of my patent to treat smoke taint.  We now know that it is a large complex of compounds and every fire is different, but guaiacol and 4-methyl guaiacol are used as an index.

In my invention, a tight RO membrane (around 80 daltons porosity) passes permeate containing pretty much just water, ethanol and acetic acid.  Ethanol can be removed by distillation and the water recombined, or VA can be removed by a resin and the alcohol/water solution recombined.

These membranes are too tight to pass smoke taint, so he employed looser ones in the 100 – 150 dalton range, running the permeate through activated charcoal and returning to the wine.  The looser the membrane, the more efficient the removal, but also the more you lose good stuff, particularly in a fragile wine like Pinot Noir.

It seems that in some treated wines, the taint recurs. It is believed that this happens if the taint elements are glucosylated, which it seems only happens early on, during the pre-veraison or immediately post-veraison cellular division time.   So if your grass fire happened in the fall, you might be okay.  If not, you might check with Peter Salamone at Laffort, who has been looking at glucosylase enzymes to hydrolyze the bound form.  I believe ETS can analyze for what you have.

Your toughest choice is who to trust your wine to.  There are four companies: WineSecrets, Winetech, VA Filtration, and Mavrik.  I have had good and bad experiences with all of them.

Direct fining with carbon can also be tried: http://wine.wsu.edu/research-extension/2012/10/smoketaintfining/

Additional reading: http://wine.wsu.edu/research-extension/2012/09/smoke-taint/

https://www.etslabs.com/resources/publications/analytical-tools-for-harvest/smoke-taint.aspx

2014 Harvest Proves Difficult

Matters this year are rather challenging all over.  Europe has sustained very poor weather, and, for example, the Italian crop countrywide is estimated to be down 13%.

 

Deep and repeated frigid spells last winter have wiped out a considerable portion of the American Midwest and Northeast, with spring frosts, poor set, mildew pressures and summer hail eradicating much else including in Texas and the California’s North Coast, where crops are in the lower areas off by as much as 30%.  California’s extreme drought challenges many growers to bring unshriveled crops to the crushing station, and the prospect of smoke damage looms large.

 

Meanwhile, demand for wine continues to increase.  None of this is good news for the consumer.  Prices are already up and are likely to climb as shortages mount.

 

The good news is that the harvest is extremely early, as much as a month, bringing about the possibility of dodging some of these perils.  Some meteorologists predict heavy rains from El Niño, much needed but problematic if it comes while grapes remain on the vine.  The earliness of the season paradoxically may result in high acidities in some cases, as the fruit has simply not had time to metabolize its malic acid completely.

In general, color and flavor are good, but tannins are low in many cases, so the prospect is for wines that are for early drinking rather than aging.