One fruit fly can ruin your entire bottle of wine

Say wine, snacks or haute cuisine and the foodies of online food magazine FavorFlav know where to drink, how to eat it and what to cook. This time our chefs serve you: that one fruit fly can ruin the taste of your wine.

Have you done it yet? Ordered a bottle of wine on the terrace? I have. It was delicious. 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 the terrace, have ordered a nice bottle that is reasonably priced and a fruit fly flies in, then that wine is gone,” says Ilja. Fact or fiction? They asked at EenVandaag and checked the claim.

And yes, Gort is right. “It’s the virgin fruit flies that want to attract males with the emission of pheromones. And if those fruit flies end up in the wine with pheromones, you can taste that,” explains Joost van den Heuvel, who researches fruit flies, to EenVandaag.

Virgin flies
A small nuance is that not all fruit flies have this effect. Male fruit flies and female fruit flies that have already laid eggs (and are therefore no longer virgins) do not harm your wine. But the difference is not visible from the outside. Plus: regardless of whether they change the taste, wings in your wine never seems very beneficial for your drinking pleasure.

But what does it taste like; a virgin fruit fly in your wine? Do you really taste a difference? You and I might not, but wine connoisseurs do. The smell changes and the taste becomes musty. Indeed, it doesn't sound very appetizing.

Fun fact
Biologist Midas Dekkers adds a fun fact: “Fruit flies are the alcoholics among insects. There is no insect that can handle alcohol as well as a fruit fly.”

Text: Favorflav