Something's been bugging me lately, namely Brettanomyces otherwise as Brett. Let me explain, I offered a friend a glass of an old vine zinfindal that I was enjoying and he said, "I think there's Brett in the wine". Now, by the way he was saying it I felt like he said, "Hey did you know you were eating yellow snow?" "Hold on one minute," I said, "as brett is not all bad and in fact I'm willing to say that most of the time a little brett is a nice flavor enhancer."

Ok, let's have a little history on Brett. We have our friends in the beer business to thank for its popularity as it was long ago called the "British brewing fungus" or Brettano for brewer and myces for fungus. It was used to improve the flavor beers i.e. make them taste more like wine. Brett is found in and on goat cheese, honey bees, fruit flies, tree sap, cocoa and coffee bean fermentations as well as wine. It terms of wine it is usually found in wine barrels up to 8 mm deep in the staves and can trace its formation to diseased or injured fruit, stuck fermentations, too much nitrogren, not enough SO2 and/or poor topping technigues. Did I mention fruit flies? It can take over the good fungus in a wine where there is an abundance of food or an abundance of Brett. There are many many causes and most wineries surveyed have brett running around the drainpipe so to speak.

So, there's brett everywhere. Don't Panic and thank goodness for the technical tasting on Brett at the recent Oregon Wine Association meeting and Oregon State Univerity Department of Food Science and Technology. They've done the scientific work to back up my claim that Brett's been getting a bad rap. They have conclusive studies that show there are as many good flavors and aromas (spice, clove, cinnamon, leather, smoky, earth) as there are bad flavors (band aid, sweaty socks, rotten flowers, putrid, horse sweat). So, the next time someone says a wine I like has Brett, I'll know he means it has a nice earthy profile with hints of cinnamon and clove.