r/winemaking • u/somanysentences • 9h 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/photomike 4h 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 4h 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 3h 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/frenchietw 5h 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/zero_dr00l 9h 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.