This wine tastes of armpits.

Those are perhaps the most unfortunate words I've had to say in quite a while. I recently went on a little jaunt to the other side of Lake Okanagan, to Summerland, with a visiting friend and fellow wine fiend. We were hitting up our third winery, after a slightly disappointing show from the previous two. This was not because of poor quality wines -I think - but because of samples too small to allow for a proper taste of what they had to offer. How can you check out a wine if the droplet at the bottom is so small as to be almost colourless and effectively indistinguishable from a drop of water? How do you swish?! Well, you just barely do and you'd better sniff that stuff damn hard before you try it, because there won't even be enough of it to spit out. Point being, I understand full well that it costs a good deal to have a tasting room and hand out samples of your wine to strangers, but if you're already committed to the thing, don't stinge! Worse than leaving a bad impression of the winery with the customer, which it might do, it leaves almost no impression of the wine! And it's worse still when they charge you for such a piddling sample! Sorta defeats the purpose, doesn't it?

Er... Well, back to the story, then! We were at the third winery, and were rather quickly filled with hope when we saw the stunning building: think Santa Fe meets mod. Quirky, but it worked. I supposed the unreal view helped. We entered to find an elderly couple raving to the fellow behind the tasting bar about how fantastic his wines are and how they were going to buy a case with everything in it and how they were going to leave him their entire fortune... Well maybe not the last one but they really were going on. So I sidled up to the bar and asked for a taste - and was offered to taste it all. Dandy, I thought. Oh, boy, had I only known what I was in for.

After a rather stingy sample (perhaps it's a trend in that neighbourhood?) of the first two unremarkable wines, I was suddenly given a reasonable size sample of a third wine, a 2006 Sauvignon Blanc/Chardonnay blend priced at a reasonable CDN$14.90. I enthusiastically sniffed - and was horrified by the most potent smell of armpits I've smelled since that time I visited that big and incredibly packed cathedral in Strasbourg in the dead of summer. My nose just about fled my face in fury at being so cruelly mistreated.

Unfortunately, this was shortly after the raving elderly couple had departed with a caseload of goodies, and my friend had stepped out to take a call. This left me eye to eye with the man I have no doubt owned the winery. And so I did it. Putting a carved-in-marble type smile on my face, I grunted Mmm! and took a nice big sip of his armpit wine. It tasted almost impossibly worse than it smelled. He was still staring at me. Nice! I spluttered. Fortunately, his winemaker/sweat extractor chose that moment to call out to him and he turned away - at which point I hastily dumped my wine.

Still more unfortunately, he returned only a moment later, and had poured another sample into my glass before I had a chance to scream and fall to the floor twitching in reaction to my last taste. Tragically, the pit-wine had sufficiently tainted the glass (who knew that was possible?) to make everything he poured into my glass taste rather like a hockey player's skate midway through the 3rd overtime of a playoff game.

Now, I know I'm a fool to have let myself be subjected to such a sense-searing experience, but I was trying to be nice. My bad. At any rate, this tasting experience made me a little curious as to the limits of sweatiness that are acceptable in a wine, and in which wines they are expected. I poked around on the Internet, and found surprisingly little, save some rather amusing tasting notes: intense cats pee aromas - v. v. good! - I could drink this. Yikes! That's more than I ever wanted to know about that guy.

As it turns out, Sauvignon Blanc can often have a sweaty aroma, but it tends to be balanced out by other aromas. For instance, some other guy's notes said: Gooseberry, grassy, bright aromas, sweet herbal flavours, intense, lots of cats pee, quite classic. Musky, sweaty, sherbet, long and persistent. A little sweat never hurt nobody, right? But it's when it's the only smell that it is a big fault, and apparently, according to Tom Stevenson's article, Aromas & Flavours, "an unattractive human-like sweatiness can be produced by a number of compounds: Butanoic acid (butyric acid), pentanoic acid (valeric acid), octanoic acid (caprylic acid), hexanoic acid (caproic acid), 2-methylbutanoic acid, and 3-butanoic acid." There you have it, if you understood that.

Surprisingly, having looked through a good portion of my books this evening as well as Googling the pants off the subject, I haven't come to a good conclusion or understanding of this overwhelming armpit smell. I'm guessing it was bacterial, but I could be way off. I'll follow up when I find a good answer.