Oliver, the cork company that charges $0.10 more per cork guarantees their corks will test no higher than 1.5 ppt and from what I can recall, the $0.30 per cork company guarantees no higher than 1 ppt.
Ed,
My threshold is about 0.3ppt, but I know that’s not typical at all. But trade tasters would mostly notice 1.5ppt, I’m pretty sure.
I am not sure we really want more people ‘learning’ how to copper-fine their wines.
When you try to reinvent the wheel from first principles, there is danger you will only end up with a pentagon. You only find out after a decade. Corks, on the other hand, are known quantity, and improving in quality too.
There might be a few cork companies who would want to hire you at a piece rate of $0.03 per cork. You could earn quite a nice bit of change with that nose.
I only took one TCA test, 22 years ago at Fresno State. Our lower limit was 1 ppt and I could detect it. Never tried below 1 ppt, but I doubt I could detect it today, I’m getting old.
Andrew,
Agglomerated closures often have low levels of TCA across a batch, because a bad chunk gets ground up with the good and mixed in. We have had a number of batches of wine affected by this. (In 2013 we lost three batches of 100 cases each to this problem.) When that happens, I ‘calibrate’ what I’m tasting to the lab analysis for TCA for that batch; this is how I know what my threshold is, for example. We always test when we have this kind of problem, then we send the results to the producer. We use ETS labs, they have a TCA expert called Eric Hervé who is extremely helpful. We now will not work with wines closed with agglomerated cork other than Diam, which I have found to be excellent.
In my experience Twin-Top sometimes shows very low level TCA notes that presumably come from the agglomerated ‘body’ of the cork. Champagne corks certainly cause corkiness sometimes, I am not sure why Twin-Top would be any different, the concept appears identical.
I don’t want to seem all Taliban about this. I’m just a wine-lover who doesn’t want the packaging to get in the way.
I’m much more sensitive than I was a few years ago, you might be surprised at yourself. I hope this is all academic in a few years.
William, Oliver and Doug addressed your issue with reduction, but on your second point, that of winery procedures prior to screw-cap bottling, care to expand on this? You make it sound as if there’s something not-quite-right going on. Thanks.
What Doug said. If someone likes “pulling corks” for whatever reason – tradition, romance, habit – fine, but if there isn’t a good wine quality reason to use natural corks as wine bottle closures, then those sentiments aren’t about the actual wine. Ditto liking big bottles, fancy labels, etc.
From what I know, one of the most important attributes of cork is its ability to conform to the sometimes irregular bore inside wine bottle necks, and that’s not nothing but it’s pretty much made moot by other closures (if, indeed, technical closures prove competent over time.)
Nick, I’d have no hesitation buying a Peay wine finished with a screw-cap. Or a high-grade Diam, for that matter.
My Dad was a materials scientist, and he and some colleagues mentioned that aspect of cork one night, over some glasses of wine. Plus it can be compressed a lot and re-expand very quickly to the same dimension.
My understanding is that the inside of the neck is a less controlled bottle surface than the top of the bottle, because the former is not in contact with the mold and the latter is.
Wines to be bottled under screw cap are typically fined with copper to prevent (serious, potentially permanent) reduction in bottle. There are other things you can do too. Those are the ‘proper procedures’ for making wines ready for bottling under screw cap. Unless you think fining wines with copper is good for wine quality, then my point about reduction hasn’t been addressed as far as I can see.
Suffice to say that this is a question that has to do with much more than just TCA taint.
Which is why Nick’s news about cork screening which began this thread is so exciting.
William,
Thanks for taking part in this discussion. I wonder where you are getting your information from though. Back when the Aussies were starting to bottle mass produced wines under screw caps, nearly two decades ago, some experimented with copper fining as a proactive way to deal with a ‘perceived problem’ of reductive issues based on early testing.
The reality - this is not something that continues to happen for wineries now realize that the ‘reductive’ issue is not a systemic problem with screw cap wines whatsoever. If a wine is reductive in nature anyways, it will be ‘reductive’ in any closure.
I have been bottling wines under screw cap for a decade now, and I have yet to have any reductive issues with my wines, including varieties that are prown to show it, including syrah.
Let’s begin to talk what is ACTUALLY happening out there rather than ‘conventional wisdoms’ or information from a decade ago or longer.
And for those who say they need to see proof that wines can age under screw cap for decade after decade, please show me scientific reports that wine can under cork in an ‘acceptable’ manner please . . .
Cheers.
Adam Lee at Novy / Siduri has been bottling delicious syrahs under screw cap for a while now as well. I’ve never had a reduced Novy syrah.
Thanks for the information, Larry.
I appreciate your non-Taliban stance. That is a good start.
I am just a guy that makes wine and already owns the equipment to bottle with cork or cork like closures. I’d like to offer a product which is as sound and reliable as possible and make my decisions based on experience and data. FYI, there are no mobile lines near us.
I understand this statement: “Agglomerated closures often have low levels of TCA across a batch, because a bad chunk gets ground up with the good and mixed in.” I wonder about the “often” part. How often? Across all producers?
How often are whole batches of champagne corked?
I have spoken to Eric H at ETS lab. Seems like a nice guy.
I get your statement:“In my experience Twin-Top sometimes shows very low level TCA notes that presumably come from the agglomerated ‘body’ of the cork.” I appreciate that you are having your experience correlated to tests, this is good. My question boils down to how often do these issues with Twin Tops come up and when they do, who was the cork producer? Were the corks stored properly?
Do you know if any of the problem batches were sealed with Twin Tops from Amorim?
Can you share what the numbers that came in on the tests you had ETS do?
How many batches have you had tested this way and how much do the levels range?
To be clear, I am not saying that your skeptical stance on “agglomerated closures” is wrong. I’d probably make the same choice in your spot at least until new data come along that showed that certain subsets of the category were proved safe.
Thanks for the discussion.
Andrew,
Thank you too.
I am talking about twin-top type closures in my experience, but I am afraid I didn’t keep track of which brand. Hence this is not a criticism of your specific choice of closure at all, I hope it didn’t come across that way. I have no idea how the corks were handled in the winery, as I’m an importer, not a producer.
We analyse wines whenever we have a consistent problem. I have had a series of problems with Italian-supplied agglomerated corks, and I won’t accept them any more (as I said above, three whole batches of wine unsaleable in 2013). I have never had a problem with Diam and I have had a number of producers switch to the closure with very good results. Their guarantee is 0.3, which is the lowest I’ve seen.
I have a (dumb) question. When wine is bottled with cork and tight fitting foil is used and/or wax, how much O2 can enter into the wine itself?
Its my understanding foil and wax are not oxygen barriers, only the cork. And the cork itself is highly variable due to the voids in the natural product, with higher grades/priced corks being more solidly consistent and lower grade/cheap corks having more air pockets.
Yes, thanks again.
If I seemed tense, it might be because some of your comments seem to to me to paint all agglomerated products other than diam with the same brush.
More questions:
0.3 what?
Can you share any more detail on the testing that was done? I’d love to see it. I like that sort of thing.
Hi Andrew,
It’s 0.3 ppt of TCA, which is well below the detectable limit, even for sensitive folks like Ed and Oliver!
The most testing of Diam that I’ve seen (tho not the details, unfortunately) is by William Fevre. They started doing in-house tests with Diam, bottling wine across their lineup to age and later evaluate. They started bottling their chablis and petit chablis with Diam starting with the 2003 or 2004 vintage. They switched their 1er cru to Diam with the 2007 vintage and their Grand cru starting with the 2010 vintage. So they’ve done a pretty thorough evaluation into it…and the fact that Chablis provides very little room for flaws to hide is a nice bonus. It appears to have help transform their premox problem as well, which is nice.
I’m switching my wines to Diam.
Thanks Eric.
Do you know if they guarantee each individual closure to be less than .3ppt or what? Average? Is that what it imparts to the wine or how is it measured?
I have hears some issues with glue on the finer amalgamates like diam. What do you know about that?