I cannot remember, sorry. That was a long time ago, but it did come in small packets. You don’t need much! I suggest a internet search. Maybe I will take a look…
Ok, I looked and not much luck. Sigma aldrich scientific has it, but it would be a $40-50 purchase and probably yield enough to poison the worlds wine supply. I am starting to wonder if my original purchase was not internet-based but an advertisement someplace, maybe the back pages of Wine Spectator or the like. It was a long time ago, 20+ years. I just don’t recall.
TCA is exceedingly strong in its solid form, I would never go near it without the proper fume hood and ventilation. At parts-per-trillion, you could spike every wine made in California with a few grams.
Advice from a chemist: don’t mess with TCA, it’s like having dozens of skunks in your house. There are suppliers of already made dilute solutions you can buy in test kits, or the approach mentioned by many above of asking to smell a corked wine at a restaurant or retailer.
Jerry Meade used to send around small vials of 2,4,6 trichloroanisole. That’s what did it for me. If you have a Sigma-Aldrich account you can order it.
http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/catalog/product/aldrich/235393?lang=en®ion=US
Something about spiking wine with TCA feels very Breaking Bad for some reason.
TCA is exceedingly strong in its solid form, I would never go near it without the proper fume hood and ventilation. At parts-per-trillion, you could spike every wine made in California with a few grams.
Exactly. Why would anyone want it around the house?
I don’t get the people who taste it. Once I learned what it was many years ago I don’t think I’ve ever tasted it without smelling it first and if it is showing on the nose, why put it into your mouth?
I do agree that there are degrees of it - sometimes you take the cork out of a bottle and the entire room smells, other times you pour it into your glass and wonder for a minute or so, but I can’t imagine not smelling it. If a wine is stripped of fruit, I figure that’s because it’s a root day or the sun is in Aries or one of those things. I’m reluctant to attribute it to TCA, given that we can detect it in such miniscule amounts.
Larry - “I get earthy” is exactly what I was told once when I was having dinner with a buyer for a big wine store. The wine was corked to smithereens and you could tell as soon as it was poured into the first glass. The buyer told me that it was just the earthy, Piedmont terroir showing through. And that store sold millions of dollars of wine every year.
Haven’t you ever had the experience of having a “dumb” bottle, then opening another bottle of the same wine and finding it alive and as expected? Those seem like very plausible cases of TCA flavor killing, since this can happen to wines served side by side at the same time.
There are chemicals that enhance the perception of other flavors and aromas, and there are chemicals that have a suppressing effect. It seems like TCA probably falls in the second category, in addition to having its own aroma if it exceeds a certain threshold. It seems reasonable to think it may have more of a muting effect on some flavors than others – and hence on some wines than others.
You may need to drink a lot of wine to pick it up but once you know it you know it.
The problem is that a ‘dumb’ bottle can be caused by lots of things, not just TCA. It may be oxidized barely enough to ‘mute’ the wine; or perhaps there’s a bacterial issue that is presenting itself by causing this but nothing else . . .
The continued challenges of this thing called Wine. . .
A fume hood? Why would you recommend that? I may not be a chemist, but I am a toxicologist, and as I see it, TCA has a low vapor presure…which means it is not going to end up in the air at noteworthy concentrations, and it has a low order of toxicity, which mean someone would need to eat an awful lot of it to suffer any adverse effects. It is an eye irritant, so my apologies for not providing proper warnings if someone were to try to repeat the experiment I did a long time ago. But your point is well taken and good advice would be not to fool around with chemicals you know little about. For reference, here is some information 2,4,6-Trichloroanisole | C7H5Cl3O - PubChem
It’s not dangerous unless you get it in your eye, and even then a quick rinse makes permanent damage extremely unlikely. I imagine getting it in my mouth would ruin the taste of food for the rest of the day. The smell is extremely potent (it only takes a few parts per TRILLion to detect) and your ability to smell it will quickly fatigue after a sniff, so you won’t notice until later if you’ve let a bit escape from the container. Just be careful not to spill it on carpeting where it can be tough to clean it all up.
If you aren’t sure what TCA smells like, you will never forget it after smelling it. The vial I got from Jerry was only a few grams and I kept it sealed and wrapped in foil in between uses to show friends what it smelled like. I never had a problem with it, and eventually flushed it.
A safer alternative spillage-wise, but it can take a while, is to ask a friend who’s knowledgeable about TCA to save you the bottle the next time he encounters a horribly, disgustingly obviously corked wine.
Yes, it’s a solid, and not very volatile as such. And no, I’m not so much concerned with toxicity as with the fact that our sensitivity to it is very high (thus being able to smell it in a wine at just a few ppt). It’s volatile enough to escape solution at that low concentration, and it’s volatile enough even in the solid state to make a mess of your house if you just open a jar of powdered TCA. God forbid you accidentally spill some on the counter or floor, you’d probably have to burn the house down 
If I don´t smell it immediately - which is easily possible if the level is quite low, but when the wine nevertheless is aromatically muted, I taste very carefully for the typical “short, bitter, dry finish” … if it´s there I swirl the glass and put a paper tissue on it to capture the smell … and usually a few minutes later I can in fact smell it …
Sure there can be other issues with a wine, but I think I can distinguish these very well …
Another fact: TCA will always get worse with air … so of the wine is improving it´s not TCA …
In our monthly tasting group we have a food chemist (unfortunately he´s not always there) … if we meet a suspicious bottle he takes it with him … and a few days later we´ll get an email with the result (nanogram per liter TCA) … almost always there was some … usually in the low range below 3 or 4 ngr/l …
Above 6 ngr it´s usually easy to detect (depending on the taster) …
4-6 ngr: experienced tasters usually detect it
2-4 ngr: the wine is muted, but TCA is hardly smelled …
below 2 ngr: hardly detectable, but the wine nevertheless can be “different”
2005 Rol Valentin and 2007 Joseph Phelps cab both corked and fairly badly on Saturday night. Luckily, the Bolly, 2003 Insignia, and 2002 Chappellet Pritchard Hill Estate Cab Franc were rocking. Interesting wines. The 03 Insignia lacks the power and structure of the 2002 or the purity of fruit of the 2001, but is still a very nice wine. The 02 Cab Franc was surprisingly fresh, with a lovely bell pepper note complimenting hints of plum and blackberry, herbs, and soft oak. A very good wine holding up very well.
Gerhard,
thank you for your post. Human threshold for TCA is an interesting topic; the cork industry says 2.0 ppt, as in effect does your post, but in our office we’ve sent suspect wines for analysis and found anything about 1.0 gives clear identification, and 0.5 to 1.0 obvious difference but not obvious ID. The lowest we’ve suspected and tested was 0.3 ppt.
It would also be interesting to have he TCA levels in bottles you gave the all-clear. How many of those would be at the 0.3 level…?
Great point indeed!
Remember, there are different degrees of taint.
By the way, when a wine has low levels of TCA it might not stink of the aforementioned aromas. Instead, it will just have no fruit and floral smells and very little flavor. You might think the wine was just boring. Review the checklist below to confirm TCA as the culprit:
In that post we are told that Saran wrap no longer works to remove TCA, because it is not now made from PVDC, but polyethylene. Strange, because all the other sources I have seen say that it is polyethylene that removes TCA. I have also heard the plasticisers used in PVDC film mean that is not a good idea to stick it in your wine.
Difficult to believe I know, but could it possibly be that Wine Folly has got it wrong?
The Saran wrap thing never made the wine drinkable. It could help eliminate the TCA but the wine was usually horrible afterwards regardless.
These guys have a way of filtering it that they claim doesn’t harm the wine:
Oliver - when you say “suspected” do you mean it seemed dirty somehow, or just that it wasn’t showing what you thought it should? You and Gerhard have the luck of having chemists do some analysis for you. It would be great to have that kind of access. I usually go with my first impression. After that I’m not sure I’m trying to convince myself or if I get accustomed to the aroma.
The problem is that a ‘dumb’ bottle can be caused by lots of things, not just TCA. It may be oxidized barely enough to ‘mute’ the wine; or perhaps there’s a bacterial issue that is presenting itself by causing this but nothing else . . .
I think that last is more common than people realize. Years ago there was a winery we worked with that made great wine but there was something a little off and there was never any evidence of TCA. It showed up only if you were paying attention as you tasted and it came in only on the back end. Turns out there was a bacteria problem. I don’t know how it was ever resolved or if it was.
That is my experience too Greg, but I know others claim success.
If you want to try it, use polyethylene sheet of any brand. I used a cut-up clear food-grade plastic bag sold in the UK as a sandwich bag. No idea how long it needs to be in the wine. I left it overnight, but some say it only takes a couple of hours. It’s a bit of a black art.