Thanks for the comment – I’m sorry that I took you as a kind of brett basher! It is a question of degree when it comes to brett. The few times I rejected a wine because of it was when it had eclipsed all the other flavors, most memorably in an Italian white wine.

Although I usually enjoy it in a wine, I have to say that if I were a wine maker I would make sure to eliminate it as much as possible.

It’s certainly not black and white!

Honestly, I have often found myself on the other side of the fence at a judging, arguing on behalf of a wine that showed a bit of horse blanket. A bit can be quite fetching. Yet it’s always a matter of degree, isn’t it? Few of us want to drink a wine that is brimming with brett and you’re right that the point where it goes too far is a matter of personal taste.

Doug’s point also reminds us that with bottle variation, we might not be experiencing the same wine. In addition to the evolution in the bottle that Doug describes, my go-to-guy for wine chemistry, Dr. Barry Gump, taught me another. He said that the bloom may vary by bottle because the distribution of brett and its associated compounds are not uniform in a tank or barrel. Thus when the wine in question is sent to the bottles, some bottles might have more potential to smell foul than others. It’s as if their starting blocks are placed at different points along the track.

Great photo of brett too!

I remember someone mentioning an experiment with controlled brett infections but I couldn’t find anything online. I did, however, find an excellent article through Able Grape about methods of brett control in the winemaking process:

http://makewine.com/winemaking/materials/brettanomyces/
“Brettanomyces tends to grow in a bell shape curve, usually with cell counts peaking six to ten months after barrelling. It appears that the cells use up a certain substrate and then die off. It is important to monitor Brettanomyces growth at each racking to see if the cell counts have peaked. Many winemakers feel if the populations of brett are decreasing prior to bottling, it is less likely a “brett bloom” will occur in the bottle.”

Still, there’s always a chance of a brett bomb or brett bloom!

But here’s the problem: since it’s a wild yeast that’s tolerant of alcohol, it can keep on chugging away in the bottle. A wine that starts with a charming “touch” of brett may end up becoming a “brett bomb” in the bottle, which is why so many winemakers consider it anathema – it’s something beyond their control that can ruin the product even after it leaves the winery.

For the same reason, it’s also quite possible that the two bottles that Jamie and Ray tasted were very different — given different conditions post-bottling, two different bottles may have had very different levels of “brett” aromas.