Sometimes when you open a brand-new bottle of wine, it can smell like rotten eggs.
This obviously ruins the entire drinking experience, since a wine's smell is such a big part of how it tastes.
But there is a weird, almost free trick to fix the smell, and keep you from having to throw out that bottle.
All you need is a penny.
I know it sounds weird, but stick with me here — there's a chemical reason why this works.
During the fermentation process, when yeast turn grapes into wine, sulfur can sometimes get turned into compounds called thiols that can make your wine smell terrible.
Winemakers often spray sulfur on vineyards so mildew doesn't grow on the grapes. Most of the time, they'll stop doing this a few weeks before the harvest so that excess sulfur doesn't make its way into the fermenting wine.
Some of the sulfur can also come from sulfites that winemakers add as a preservative (you've likely seen "contains sulfites" that's required for labeling in the US).
Our noses are so sensitive to hydrogen sulfide — the source of the rotten egg odor — that we can even smell concentrations as low as one part per billion.
So if your wine smells bad, author Jeff Potter suggests in his book, Cooking for Geeks, that you get a penny, wash it, and plop it in your glass. As you mix it around with a spoon, the copper from the penny will bond with the stinky thiol molecules, resulting in odorless, harmless copper sulfide crystals.
Remove the penny, and drink up! (Responsibly, of course.)
This trick, sadly, doesn't work on a bottle of wine that has gone bad from being left open for too long.
You can see the full explanation from the American Chemical Society here:
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