Had an experience I haven’t had before. Opened a case of wine that was shipped. Cardboard box with styrofoam partitions internally. On opening the box, I smelled an overwhelming odor of musty cardboard. Overwhelming. The twelve bottles were all intact, and upon removing them and letting them sit, I could discern just a small amount of residual cork taint smell around the capsules and on the glass of the bottles. The cardboard, with some air, also had just the slightest odor.
What is everyone’s experience? Can it just be musty cardboard smell trapped in the carton? Has to be a corked bottle or two?
No reason to think any bottles are corked, the smell typically comes from the original box (wood or cardboard) that reeks of TCA, and imparts the smell to the labels, which carries forward when repacked into a shipper. Of course, a bottle or two could still be corked, but that is most likely not the source.
Agreed. It’s unlikely you’d pick up the TCA taint from a cork that’s in the bottle and covered with a capsule, if in fact there is cork taint. I wouldn’t worry about it. And if a cork is tainted, I would think that’s independent of the cardboard, which often smells musty.
I, too, would guess it’s TCA from the box. Shipping pallets often have TCA, too.
Alternatively, it’s conceivable there might be some mold if the box looked like it had been damp. Some molds smell very similar to TCA, which I guess makes sense since TCA, as I understand it, it byproduct of mold in the crevices of corks.
Yeah, the source is often the pallets that the wine boxes are stored on or exposed to in the shipping process. It can be TCA, but also TBrA (bromide). A while ago, entire lots of an over the counter medication had to be tossed because strong odors from contaminated pallets (I think it was tylenol, but I can’t remember.)
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