Corked!

The dinner party was carefully planned: lasagna assembled the night before, dessert tart baked earlier in the day.  Neighbors arrived and after cocktails we sat down to dinner.  I had set aside two bottles of a Santa Maria Valley Syrah to accompany the meal and opened the first at the table.  Corked!

Luckily, there was a second bottle.

A bottle of wine affected by cork taint exhibits a musty aroma that is often described as similar to a wet dog or dirty socks.  To me it smells most like wet cardboard boxes left in a damp basement or garage.  It was immediately apparent to our polite guests who were only too glad to pass their glasses back.

Most of the world’s cork comes from Portugal, where the climate favors the species of oak that surrenders a layer of bark each year to stopper wine bottles around the world.  2,4,6, Trichloroanisole, or TCA, is the chemical culprit and is formed by a chemical reaction between naturally occurring fungi in the cork and other chemicals the material encounters during processing.  The degree of fault can vary, but even a tiny amount can be detected in a wine’s aroma – as little as 3-4 nanograms/liter, according to Jancis Robinson (in the Oxford Companion).  Cork’s natural porous structure elevated it to be the world’s preferred wine closure, but it also defeats many technical attempts to eradicate TCA.

Encountering a faulty bottle does not happen too often.  In my WSET level 2 classes we opened two bottles each of about 40 different wines… and none of the 80 bottles was corked.  (I remember this because my colleagues and I were eager to smell what all the fuss was about!)  My education came courtesy of the proprietor of a local wine shop who had a badly tainted bottle handy behind a tasting bar one day when I expressed my curiosity.  Once you have smelled it, you never forget it.

Madeline Puckette surmises that the typical wine consumer will encounter about 100 bottles of corked wine in a lifetime of enjoying wine.  Earlier in life I think I probably went ahead and drank some wines that were at least lightly tainted, naively assuming that the musty odor was just part of how an aged red wine was supposed to smell.  (Consuming wine tainted with TCA has no negative health consequences, by the way.)  According to the Associação Portuguesa da Cortiça (the Portuguese Cork Association), the incidence of taint is a mere .8-1.2%.  Jancis Robinson puts it at between 3 and 5% and Wikipedia quotes a Wine Spectator study that set the rate at 7%.  So it occurs more often than we wish – and that reality explains the continuing interest in alternative closures for wine bottles.

Note to self: next time, taste the wine before serving to guests!