Question… you say it could be one batch as low as 3000 in one day. But since they might not have really known about the issue until someone bottled and saw the issue, isn’t it possible that batch after batch would have had this issue for weeks on end? You can’t fix what you don’t know about.
And how do we know the issue STARTED with Cayuse’s batch? We don’t. And since most wineries bottle in May-June-July, even a few weeks of such production could mean entire swaths of wineries affected.
it’s really hard for me to say because it wasn’t my company and i am not intimately familiar with that cork suppliers QA practices. I have no knowledge if they test a couple times a day or every single batch or???
If it is a cork issue and was due to lack of adhesion or excessive coating it should have been easy to detect by technicians on the bottling line.
Incredible, mind-opening information that I had no idea about. I rely on my cork supplier to supply the best cork they can. I love cork, as a wine consumer and as a wine producer. Others may find that screw caps suit their needs or desires, but that is not where I am as a consumer or a producer.
I am sure that nobody is more shocked and horrified by this than the folks at Cayuse. But agreed that this was handled very professionally and with class. Add to that an informed discussion here, filled with facts from experts. Great thread and discussion on a rough topic.
I can’t imagine how upset the folks at Cayuse must be. Christophe is a perfectionist and speaks about raising his wines and vines as if they were children. Even with full insurance coverage and no financial loss, the pain of losing a years worth of work is rough.
Now I have one more reason to hate cork. I had a corked '07 Rayas 2 weeks ago, a totally oxidized '01 Rinaldi Barolo le coste on Saturday, and news that I won’t get to drink any '15 Bionic Frog today. Three totally different cork failures.
If you think screw caps don’t have issues you’re kidding yourself. I know a producer who had a whole lot of bottles with defective seals and they all leaked. Thankfully it wasn’t a large lot. Nothing is perfect.
I agree with you Andy, but with screw caps, glass caps and crown caps, you know they have failed before you open the bottle. Cork is awesome ~93% of the time.
In theory your argument makes sense David but in practice the ship has already sailed so to speak. As you say, this is the way of the Internet. Obfuscating facts regarding defective products (which I believe we can classify Cayuse’s wines in that manner) doesn’t really work anymore. Cayuse opened this can of worms when they proactively sent out the incredibly informative email regarding their decision to pull the affected wines. And I feel like that was the only option they had that wouldn’t damage their brand. If they wouldn’t have pointed the finger at cork issues people would have invariably made up their own reasons or justifications for why the decision was made. I expect most of that conjecture would have centered around Cayuse and suspected mistakes they made. So the transparency is a good thing for both customer and producer.
It’s obvious there was an issue with the corks supplied. Logically consumers as well as producers will want to know how far and wide this issue goes. And whilst the propensity of people to pick up pitchforks on the Internet is real I’ll take that over all of us collectively having our heads in the sand over this issue.
Can Andy or David elaborate on this? I have no idea about how these things work, and my uninformed sense was similar to that of Travis – that with screw cap and glass you were concerned about seal and not contaminants – and that it was relatively easy to assess that early rather than waiting until you pull out the cork. But I am not in the business and really have very little sense of the risks associated with non cork stoppers.
Ron,
Our esteemed Board winemaker Larry (he makes awesome wines BTW) is by far the better expert on screw caps than I am. Consider me having a little bit of knowledge, which is dangerous, LOL. That said, Screw caps can have issues sealing that aren’t always visible by leaks. Thus causing oxidation issues. If the bottle has a manufacturing issue the cap may not seal well. If the cap doesn’t go on right, you’ve got issues. Pick the wrong membrane to use in the cap, you’ve got issues (though this is much less now as time and experience has largely weeded out the poor performers…at least from what I’ve read and been told). All can have some type of issues. Arguably, screw caps are more consistent when they perform well as it’s a known product for every cap unlike cork which is a natural product.
While all of that might be valid I’ve never once run into any of those issues with a stelvin enclosure. I have had oxidised wine out of a screwcapped bottle only once in probably 14 years of drinking them. The faulty bottle had a noticeable dent/damage on the screwcap where the threading interfaced with the cap. I suspect the damage occurred from poor handling at the retail level but I can’t be certain.
Neither have I. Between my job, tasting groups (present and former), teaching wine classes, years of study, and drinking wine at home, I have opened a LOT of bottles of wine and continue to open many bottles every week. I encounter oxidation and TCA with cork-sealed bottles quite regularly, and those have added up to a ridiculous number of faulty bottles over the years. I’ve never had a faulty bottle under screwcap that wasn’t apparent before opening the bottle, and even that has been extremely rare and probably due to poor handling rather than a failure of the closure. I have found some reduction, but I believe that is a winemaking issue rather than a closure issue. Plus it’s rarely so bad that it doesn’t get better with air. It’s obvious to me that problems with cork are thousands of times more common than problems with screwcap, at least those so severe as to cause faulty bottles and which are not identified before the wine goes to market.
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