Tom S wrote:
>
> Sure, but I wasn't implying that they have a shorter _shelf_ life.
>
> It seems obvious to me that if you leave all the floating organisms in a
> wine at bottling, they'll have a jump start on spoiling the wine once it's
> opened and exposed to air - especially if it's bottled with low free SO2.
>
> OTOH, a sterile filtered wine that has sufficient free SO2 at bottling
> should be much less sensitive to air exposure, and has no intrinsic spoilage
> inoculum present.
>

I guess I've always assumed that the wine going down hill after being
opened for too long was due more to oxygen exposure than spoilage
organisms. This would definitely be hastened by low SO2 levels, but I'm
not sure that sterile filtration would really impact this one way or
the other.

Andy