My beautiful friend is every regular guy’s dream: She seeks not square-jawed Adonises but happily accepts prominent paunches, crooked noses, and protruding ears. Jowls of a scowling Nixon? Raccoon eyes of actor Vincent Schiavelli? Bone structure of Lyle Lovett? She can handle all of it, as long as the man treats her well and makes her laugh.
So it is with wine: some flaws are not fatal and can be overlooked if the underlying wine tastes good. Take, for example, bits of cork in a wine. They don’t affect a wine’s flavor and can be strained away with a coffee filter or kitchen strainer if needed. What about the white, rock salt–like crystals occasionally lurking in wine or on the end of the cork? No stress: these are just tartar crystals—a harmless, tasteless result of wine being stored at an unusually cold temperature.
How about the seemingly scary sight of a pushed-up cork or sticky streaks on the bottle’s neck? This happens when a bottle has been exposed to excessive heat. In some cases, the wine will indeed be “cooked,” that is, afflicted with disappointingly flat or stewed flavors, but in other cases it will be perfectly fine. Taste it and find out.
What if a wine has an unexpectedly Sherry-like character? That is a sign of oxidization, likely because of a faulty cork seal but occasionally because the winemaker intended the wine to have that style. So long as it doesn’t overwhelm the other elements in the wine, it can be yours to enjoy.
Even the inglorious smell of horse manure doesn’t necessarily invalidate wine’s drinkability. As previously covered, that barnyard-y aroma is often from the yeast, Brettanomyces, which can occur at several stages of wine production. When it comes in small doses, some drinkers are quite fond of it, viewing Brett as a savory, funky dimension in the wine.