Corked!

[lleichtman]

My wife is about 3x more sensitive to TCA than I am. Our rate has been about 2% over the last 5 years. Of those, we still drank half of them because the taint was so mild.

[Oliver_McCrum]

Some very good tasters have almost no sensitivity to TCA; I know an MW who couldn’t check the wines for the MW exams because of this. (My threshold is around .5 ppt, which by extension must mean I am a terrible wine taster.)

Given that thresholds vary so widely, I imagine it’s fair to assume that we are all opening the same number of TCA-affected wines and that differences in our numbers are only indicative of our sensitivity. I find many fewer bad bottles now than I used to, but given that random oxidation caused by cork is such a huge problem I am still working to reduce the number of bark-cork-finished wines I import. We are about to receive our first glass-stoppered Barolo, which is exciting.

[Oliver_McCrum]

That makes sense, because there are two consequences of the taint. First, it has it’s own smell. Second, it can interfere with other aromas. That’s why you sometimes find a wine that’s strangely muted but which doesn’t show the characteristic wet cardboard scent. That may be a case where the TCA is below your detection threshold, but it’s messing with other elements of the wine. Because there are so many compounds in wines, even two wines with similar levels of TCA smell may be affected quite differently – one just wreaks of TCA and has no other scents and the other with perceptible, pleasurable aromas behind the TCA.

The other variable in this is that some people are really repelled by the smell of TCA while others (like me) aren’t. If you find it noxious, then you’ll probably hate a wine even if there are other aromas there. If you’re like me, sometimes you can draw pleasure from a wine despite obvious TCA if other nice things show through.

…In our early days in this hobby, the owner of a LWS let us smell a vile of liquid contaminated by TCA. Awful, but the impression of wet cardboard was a lasting one- burned in to our memory. He then presented us a bottle as John describes above in scenario #2, tainted yes, but not to the point one perceives the signature cardboard note. It was a then current release bottle of Seghesio Sonoma County zin. You know damn well there’s supposed to be fruit, but there simply wasn’t. No other obvious or perceptible issue/flaw, simply an absence of fruit. In some cases, you may be able to smell the TCA but not taste it, and others, not smell it but taste it on the palate. …

People in the trade – importers and distributors who taste their own wines often – often can tell right away when they have one of those bottles muted by TCA where the aroma isn’t detectable because they know what the wine should taste like.

I think this is true. I suspect that a ton of low-TCA corked bottles are just assumed to be mediocre.

[larry_schaffer]

Such an interesting conversation, and one that can certainly make us all spin in circles! I’m sure we’ve all been to tastings where someone is convinced that a wine is ‘corked’ but no one else gets it, right? The initial reaction is to claim ‘crying wolf’, but it’s truly impossible to know since TCA can show it self so differently. And then when it is ‘full blown’ and the assumption is that ‘everyone should be able to pick this up’, many still cannot.

This is one of the most ‘challenging’ things to me about wine - that we are all so different, our thresholds are so different, that we oftentimes see wines so differently but others try to convince us (or others) that they are wong.

We just don’t know . . .

Cheers

[larry_schaffer]

And the idea of a slightly corked wine being ‘mediocre’ - think about that statement. Does that mean the a vast majority of wines the someone may find mediocre can be ‘assumed to be’ corked? Or chock it up to ‘bottle variation’?

As a winemaker, these are the things that keep me sleepless at night . . .

Cheers

[Brian_Tuite]

I am super sensitive to TCA and find fewer tainted bottles each year.
(Or maybe I am becoming senile)

I agree!

[Oliver_McCrum]

And the idea of a slightly corked wine being ‘mediocre’ - think about that statement. Does that mean the a vast majority of wines the someone may find mediocre can be ‘assumed to be’ corked? Or chock it up to ‘bottle variation’?

As a winemaker, these are the things that keep me sleepless at night . . .

Cheers

I imagine. Most consumers don’t know what ‘corked’ means, they just assume the winemaker is incompetent.

[Ben_M_a_n_d_l_e_r]

Over the last 10 years roughly 5% of the wines I have opened have been flawed in some way. 1-2% have been corked. Bear in mind that I drink very little old wine.

[markjchambers]

My last two corked bottles: 97 Guado Al Tasso and 98 Hermitage La Sizeranne. Can’t remember the last new world wine I had that was corked.

[Scott_Brunson]

I am super sensitive to TCA and find fewer tainted bottles each year.
(Or maybe I am becoming senile)

I agree!

I don’t understand.

[John_Morris]

Some very good tasters have almost no sensitivity to TCA; I know an MW who couldn’t check the wines for the MW exams because of this. (My threshold is around .5 ppt, which by extension must mean I am a terrible wine taster

Ok, so I was only off by two decimal places in my recollection of your test results. But give me some credit — I did remember that the figure began with a five.

[Oliver_McCrum]

We are living in a post-factual world, John, you’re doing fine. You are one of those fake news types, after all.

[Bryan_Carr]

Years ago, before i really knew that much about wine and was just getting into the hobby, we signed up for a wine club while wine touring in Red Mountain. A few months later the first shipment came, 6 bottles, and the first couple were very disappointing, not at all what I had experienced at the winery, they smelled kind of funny and didn’t really taste like much, we assumed that we got charmed by the tasting room experience and just didn’t like them that much, so we ended up opening the rest of the half case at parties where nobody cared about wine, and every bottle turned out to be that way. A year or so after we drank the last bottle I was drinking wine with some friends and someone poured a wine and smelled it and recoiled, announcing that the bottle was corked. He passed the glass around, and lo and behold, this wine smelled and tasted exactly like those bottles I’d received from the wine club. It was so long after we’d purchased I didn’t think to ask for a refund, but in hindsight I should have at least let them know.

I was at a tasting room a few years back and was poured a wine that was quite corked and mentioned it to the person working there, and they smelled it and told me on no uncertain terms that it “was supposed to taste that way” and kept right on pouring it for people. Blew me away.

Turns out I’m super sensitive to TCA and before I was ever instructed as to what it is, I’m sure I’d pooh-poohed more than a few bottles as “not my taste” that were just corked!

I don’t keep track of how often I encounter corked bottles but it’s got to be a dozen or so a year, which i think works out to about 3-4%.

[Kirk.Grant]

Late last year I took delivery of several mixed cases from a well known west coast supplier. These were the first wines I’d received from them. I contacted the supplier this week after two (different) wines in close succession had been cork-tainted. I received an email back pointing out how “extraordinarily rare” this would have been given TCA taint “only affects roughly 1% of bottles”. Nonetheless they were generous enough to replace the bottles.

Looking back over my notes for the past year I have opened 225 bottles of wine and have experienced 5 that were distinctively cork tainted. Perhaps I’m a little unlucky, although there seem to be plenty of articles that suggest otherwise.

What are other peoples’ averages?

Jim,

I will often go a very long time before running into a corked wine. However, more often than not, they come in 3’s for me. I’ve had many, many times where I’ll have 3-4 corked wines in a month and then go for a year or more without any…