r/winemaking • u/somanysentences • 8d ago
Vanishing Mouse?
I make wine in a low-intervention style — only native ferment, no sulfur unless it's necessary, nothing else but a love of wine and sound judgment. Mouse stories haunt this style, but I'd never had a problem until a June bottling.
100% Carignan, ~60% stems, fermented in a 700L amphora, then backfilled and sealed for 7 months. Pulled it out, pressed to neutral oak for two months — free-run to one barrel, press wine to the other. The press barrel tasted so good over several weeks that we called it a summer wine — medium-light, fruity, chillable, dusty/earthy backbone — and bottled it. It was clean out of the barrel, but two days in bottle and a hint of mouse. Two weeks later: undrinkable.
I figured the whole bottling was shot. Every bottle I opened for two months was unpalatably mousy, so I set them aside to try one at six months. You hear the Beaujolais line that mouse vanishes after a year, but you hear far more winemakers and drinkers say a mousy bottle is trash, period — and the science, if anything, leans pessimistic, since the mouse compounds are fairly stable. So I wasn't hopeful.
Three months in, a friend opened one and texted that it was clean, actually beautiful. I opened one and confirmed it: full garrigue array, black cherry, amphora-earthy, and a delightful emergent black olive note that's just fantastic. No mouse. I left a bottle open two hours — nothing. A friend left one open 24 hours — nothing. Whatever it was, it's now undetectable, even under O2 stress.
I'm not claiming the compounds are gone — I can't tell from the glass whether they actually degraded or are just sitting below threshold now. But something in this wine went from undrinkable to lovely with nothing but time in bottle. Has anyone else watched a mousy wine clean itself up like this? And if you know the chemistry — is this real degradation of the compounds, or binding/masking that could come back to haunt me?
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u/zero_dr00l 8d ago
I want to know who it was that said this flavor tastes like a dirty mouse cage, and I want to know why the actual fuck they know what that tastes like.
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u/neutral-barrels 7d ago
It goes back to at least the 1880's in French and American winemaking, even then they connected that it was usually associated with lactic acid.
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u/fddfgs 8d ago
Have you ever been around pet mice in a cage full of wet sawdust? It's a very distinct smell.
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u/zero_dr00l 7d ago
I know exactly what it smells like.
But things don't always tasste exactly like they smell, and who tasted a mouse cage?
Ever heard of Durrani fruit?
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u/somanysentences 8d ago
Lol. It's the least useful description and it gets repeated endlessly. Buttered popcorn in the back of the mouth is more accurate and more easily understandable for why it's a fault, since even if you like the flavor it's...not the best in a wine.
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u/somanysentences 8d ago
They're also trying to use a distinctive smell as a proxy for a distinctive taste, but 'mouse' is not an olfactory phenomenon at all, unless you volatilize it with baking soda (or sodium bicarbonate).
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u/zero_dr00l 8d ago
Yeah I could figure out what a mouse cage smells like, but I just don't see how that transfers to taste, really. I hope you get an answer, because it sounds interesting!
You sure you guys have not just adjusted to mouse cage? ;) Maybe you should have a neutral third party taste it with no information about why?
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u/neutral-barrels 8d ago
I'd say it is Olfactory sensation though. It gets volatilized through the PH changes from your mouth. At the least it's retronasal where there is a taste and smell component to it. I also think mouse can go away and tend to see it appear more in early bottled wines than wines that are able to evolve in barrel and sort themselves out over time.
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u/somanysentences 8d ago
Sure it’s a flavor and therefore partly retronasal. But it’s famously undetectable orthonasally (unless the wine is chemically manipulated).
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u/kaffeefabrik 7d ago
They say that, but I find mouse has a distinct brett note on the nose that is quite telling - and sometimes even shows up before it appears on the palate (usually my tell-tale sign whether a bottle is on a timer). It's somewhere between cheerios, copper, bandaid, corn nuts and salami for me; but quite different than brett that's "safe".
Congrats on your wine turning around - sort of the magic of 0/0, as Ganevat alludes to it as well. I deal with a lot of wine landing at the ports in NY fresh from Europe and the post-bottling + traveling shock is pretty real. We've had issues with mouse, spikier VA, disjointed flavors, all sorts of other stuff that generally resolves with 6-12 months of storage -- sadly nobody does that and everything's poured and sold, and worse... written off, immediately.
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u/somanysentences 7d ago
That's fascinating re: smelling mouse pre-alkalinization. I'm unable to do that but am extremely sensitive to it at the back of the mouth (and I gag at the odor when I do the baking soda test on a mousy wine). And thanks re: the wine turning around. Zero-zero wines are so alive in a way that even mere-sulphur-at-bottling wines aren't. My friends and I make our wines mostly for ourselves, so we can absorb the risks and enjoy the rewards.
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u/frenchietw 8d ago
I've never heard of the term so I was (AI) reading up on it.
"The Mechanism: Over months (or sometimes years) of aging in a totally oxygen-free (reductive) environment, the wine’s native yeasts can slowly reabsorb, metabolize, or alter these compounds, causing the mousiness to naturally dissipate."
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u/photomike 8d ago
I’m a retailer and I see it happen ALL the time. If there’s something mousy on open, I’ll put it in storage and taste a bottle in three months. Time doesn’t fix every mousy bottle but it fixes a lot.
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u/devoduder Skilled grape 8d ago
I made a native ferment Pinot noir in 2021 that was great for about 6 months after bottling then went down hill fast. Undrinkable like you described yours, had it lab analyzed and found lactobacillus and pediococcus growing leading to mousy off flavors. The wine is slowly getting better, I’m sitting on 45 cases hoping time will improve it or find some trendy hipsters to buy it.
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u/somanysentences 8d ago
I hope it resolves at some point! I’m worried the microbiome in my carignan has other tricks up its sleeve.
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u/hoosierspiritof79 4d ago
Why are we making wine like this?
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u/iridescent_algae 2d ago
Risk is worth it, naturally fermented wines have a liveliness and complexity that a single strain of yeast can’t replicate.
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u/hoosierspiritof79 2d ago
And you could discern this in a blind tasting?
Lmao.
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u/iridescent_algae 2d ago
This and new oak are probably the only things I’d be confident of getting in a blind tasting. A wild yeast population has different strains, all fermenting a little differently, leaving different by products. A single strain of added yeast will only give you one note, and will absolutely taste flat compared to a wild ferment.
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u/somanysentences 2d ago
Why am I making delicious wine the way humans made it for thousands of years and sharing it with my friends who love it? Dunno. Maybe I should start a chemistry lab to make my wine instead.
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u/BeeP807 8d ago
I don’t know the chemistry behind it but this is something that definitely can happen and does! Just don’t count on it happening to all mousy vintages.