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. 2019 Aug 6:3:14.
doi: 10.1038/s41538-019-0045-9. eCollection 2019.

Wine aging: a bottleneck story

Thomas Karbowiak  1 , Kevin Crouvisier-Urion  1   2 , Aurélie Lagorce  1   2 , Jordi Ballester  3 , André Geoffroy  4 , Chloé Roullier-Gall  1   3 , Julie Chanut  1   2 , Régis D Gougeon  1   3 , Philippe Schmitt-Kopplin  5   6 , Jean-Pierre Bellat  2
Affiliations

Wine aging: a bottleneck story

Thomas Karbowiak et al. NPJ Sci Food. .

Abstract

The sporadic oxidation of white wines remains an open question, making wine shelf life a subjective debate. Through a multidisciplinary synoptic approach performed as a remarkable case study on aged bottles of white wine, this work unraveled a yet unexplored route for uncontrolled oxidation. By combining sensory evaluation, chemical and metabolomics analyses of the wine, and investigating oxygen transfer through the bottleneck/stopper, this work elucidates the importance of the glass/cork interface. It shows unambiguously that the transfer of oxygen at the interface between the cork stopper and the glass bottleneck must be considered a potentially significant contributor to oxidation state during the bottle aging, leading to a notable modification of a wine's chemical signature.

Keywords: Agriculture; Engineering; Materials science.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing interestsThe authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Average oxidation score of the four wines, evaluated orthonasally (left) and retronasally (right). Means with the same letter are not significantly different according to Newman–Keuls test (⍺ = 0.05)
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Wine color as measured by OD at 420 nm and L*a*b* (with calculated value of ΔE)
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Metabolomics analyses of wine. a Principal component analysis of FT-ICR-MS data from the 12 samples (four wines in triplicate). The first two components retained 62.5% of the variation. b Hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) colored according to relative signal intensity, from blue (low) to red (high), verified by ANOVA test and p-values < 0.01 (for all four wines and each replicate R1 R2 R3). c van Krevelen diagrams (H/C versus O/C) of the elemental formulas showing significantly higher intensity (p-values < 0.01) for NoOx wines (left) and Ox wines (right), color code of van Krevelen diagrams: CHO, blue; CHOS, green; CHON, orange; CHONS, red. Bubble sizes indicate relative intensities of corresponding peaks in the spectra
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Effective oxygen diffusion coefficient and oxygen transmission rate (OTR) determined for cork stopper in bottleneck and cork stopper alone
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
Bottles analyzed in this study, from 2005 to 2006 vintages, originated from the same batch, with one suspected to be non-oxidized and one suspected to be oxidized
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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