You invite some friends over for a dinner party. The appetizers are up and you pop the cork on a nice Bordeaux in anticipation. After letting it breathe for a bit, you pour a glass and take a sip. Your lips curl up like you are eating a lemon! You've got a bad bottle of wine.

Wine may be the beverage of the Gods, but it can go bad in any number of ways. Sometimes you can visually see it. Sometimes you can take in a whiff and immediately know. Other times, you have to take a fateful sip before the problem becomes obviously. Regardless, a bad wine is usually bad for a specific problem and there are a few common ones that can occur.

El Corko - The cork in the bottle of your wine can often be the root cause of the problem. Corks are cleaned with chlorine. If any of the chlorine remains when the bottle is corked, it can create a bitter aftertaste and musty smell. This is known as 'corked wine'.

Purple Haze - You've stored a nice vintage of wine. You pull it out of the wine rack and position it vertically to let the sediment settle. After an hour, it still looks hazy. After two hours, the cloudiness remains. Houston, we have a problem. The wine is bad because something in it is still growing. Yeast may have been left behind in the filtration process, for instance. Pour it down the sink. It is done.

Blue Screen Wine - Blue screen wine gets its nickname form the fact something major has gone wrong - like the blue screen that appears when Windows crashes. This is a bottle of wine that is a disaster. It looks cloudy or brown and smells nasty. Should you be foolish enough to taste it, the lovely vinegar flavor can be tasted slightly before you run to the sink to spit it out. There can be a number of different causes of Blue Screen Wine, but the most common is oxygen penetration through a bad cork that has resulted in the wine oxidizing and interacting with bacteria or yeast that have remained behind. Whatever the specific reason, this is a wine that should be poured out asap.

Recognizing a wine gone bad is important. If you fail to, serving it too guests might be one of the great social faux pas!

Rick Chapo writes about gifts for wine lovers for http://NomadJournals.com - makes of wine tasting journals.

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