How one fruit fly can ruin your entire bottle of wine
Do you do it regularly too? Order a bottle of wine on the terrace? I do. Lovely. But did you know that a single fruit fly can ruin the taste of that entire bottle of wine? At least, that’s what wine expert Ilja Gort claims.
“A fruit fly can ruin an entire bottle of wine. If you’re sitting on a terrace, have ordered a nice bottle that’s reasonably expensive, and a fruit fly flies into it, that wine is done,” says Ilja. Fact or fiction? EenVandaag asked, and checked the claim.
And yes, Gort is right. “It’s the virgin fruit flies that try to lure males with the release of pheromones. And if those fruit flies with pheromones end up in the wine, you can taste it,” explains Joost van den Heuvel, who researches fruit flies, to EenVandaag.
Virgin fruit flies
The small nuance is that not all fruit flies have this effect. Male fruit flies and female fruit flies that have already laid eggs once (and are therefore no longer virgins) won’t harm your wine. But the difference can’t be seen from the outside. Plus: regardless of whether they alter the taste, wings in your wine never seem very conducive to your drinking pleasure.
But what does it taste like; a virgin fruit fly in your wine? Can you really taste the difference? You and I perhaps can’t, but wine experts can. The smell carries over and the taste becomes musty. Indeed, that doesn’t sound very appetizing.
Fun fact
Biologist Midas Dekkers adds one more interesting fact: “Fruit flies are the alcoholics among insects. No insect can tolerate alcohol as well as a fruit fly.”
Read also:
