When the Bottle Lets You Down

Posted 02/12/2008 at 08:42 AM by Roger

One of the most annoying things that can happen to any wine lover is to open a prized bottle of wine only to discover damp, musty, cardboard-like flavors that indicate the wine is "corked." Cork taint, which is thought to be caused by a harmless but unpleasant chemical called TCA, is estimated to afflict anywhere from 2% to 12% of all wines. It's a problem that can potentially afflict everything from $5 a bottle Beaujolais Nouveau to $5,000 a bottle Château Petrus.

One might reasonably assume, based on the name of the malady, that the source of cork taint is bad corks. And by and large, that assumption would be correct.

However, recently another potential source of cork taint has been making news. It's possible that TCA is also coming from contaminated winery facilities. Several high profile wineries have taken extreme measures, including complete top to bottom renovations of their winemaking facilities to eliminate what they believe to be TCA contaminated facilities. The suspected in house sources of TCA contamination include wood preservatives used on ceiling beams, old barrels, wooden pallets used to stack wine boxes for shipment, and the wood and cardboard boxes themselves. Indeed, it seems like almost everywhere a test is run, trace amounts of TCA are showing up.

Although it is hard to believe that wineries would spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars if the TCA contamination problem wasn't real, I have my doubts. The reason is fairly simple: if the source of cork taint is something other than corks, how come I've never come across it in a screw cap or plastic closure bottle?

Over the years, since these alternative to cork closures have become popular, I've tasted thousands of wines from bottles that have never touched a cork. Not a single one has been corked. I have had bottles that have other winemaking flaws, such as oxidation or excessive acidity, or that were just plain lousy. But they were most definitely not corked. I can also attest that I am extremely sensitive to TCA generally - I find it with depressing regularity in cork-topped wines.

Now it could be that wineries that are so technically advanced as to use screw caps and alternative closures are also so advanced that they have eliminated sources of TCA in their wineries. And it's also true that less than 10% of the wines I taste in a typical year are in screw caps, making it statistically less likely that I will encounter them. But somehow I doubt these explanations.

In my opinion, the source of corked wines is not wood beams, wood preservatives, cardboard boxes, or anything inside the winery. It's what's inside the neck of the bottle--namely the cork. When the problem of bad corks go away, so will the problem of corked wines. It's that simple.

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