Wine faults: Mousiness

·26 min·2 clips

Tone Veseth Furholmen reveals why mousiness, a wine fault detectable only after swallowing, is her favorite to study.

The episode begins with hosts Niklas Lundmark and Anne Engrav introducing Tone Veseth Furholmen, a product manager who recently completed her Master of Wine degree. Tone's research focused on mousiness, a wine fault she describes as her favorite due to its unique retronasal detection. Mousiness is caused by compounds like APY, ATHP, and ETHP, primarily from brettanomyces or lactic acid bacteria, and is only released when wine mixes with saliva due to pH differences. Tone recounts how her interest started when discussing wine faults with a colleague and tasting a highly mousy wine at a natural wine producer in Etna, which served as a clear benchmark. Her Master of Wine project aimed to investigate whether wine professionals could improve their detection of mousiness through repeated exposures and training. The study involved 50 participants with wine qualifications, who underwent threshold tastings with eight concentrations of ATHP in a blind setup. Results showed the whole panel decreased their detection thresholds from the first to second test, indicating increased sensitivity. However, comparing a group that did systematic training over 14 days with a control group that only took the tests twice revealed no statistical difference in improvement; both groups improved similarly. Tone discusses the origins of the commonly cited figure that 30% of wine professionals cannot detect mousiness, tracing it to Australian Wine Research Institute data from 2006-2011. Her own research, involving 80 participants total, found only one person who couldn't detect mousiness even after repeated exposures, suggesting the actual rate of specific anosmia is much lower. She categorizes people into three groups: those with specific anosmia, naturally sensitive subjects, and inducible subjects who can acquire detection ability through benchmarks. Tone also shares descriptors of mousiness from her study, ranging from 'lacked fruit' at low concentrations to 'vomit' and 'dirty mouse cage' at high levels, and notes that children and cats didn't react to the aroma as expected. The episode concludes with Tone advocating for including mousiness in wine education tastings to provide benchmarks and improve detection confidence among professionals.

As heard by us

A focused wine-fault discussion that explains why mousiness can be so easy to miss until the finish.

Vinmonopolets podcast takes on a wine fault that can be hard to pin down: mousiness often shows itself only after tasting, retronasally, as an aftertaste that can upend an otherwise clean impression.

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Want to know why a wine can seem sound, then turn mousy in the finish?

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