How the Smell of a Barnyard Is Roiling the Wine World

When is a wine flaw not a flaw? Some defects that can afflict wine, like TCA (aka cork taint), are always considered a fatal imperfection by experts across the board. But when we talk about Brettanomyces, it becomes much less clear. The aromas of bacon, BO, and barnyard in a wine have people retreating to camps, with one side welcoming these sometimes-pungent notes and others dismissing them right out of hand as defective.

Mike DeSimone and Jeff Jenssen went out across the wine world to understand where people stood on Brettanomyces today and if they should consider it a fatal flaw. For more on this.