Cayuse Sues Cork Company Over 'Contamination' of Their 2015s

I was wondering where this story was going to go and kind of figured it would lead to this. And this is going to get interesting. According to the article, the Cork Council had 60 different filtered whites tested from a variety of wineries both large and small by ETS Labs and ALL wines had some level of ‘particulates’ in them, be it cork dust, paraffin, etc . . .

For those who don’t remember, Cayuse decided not to release many of their 2015 wines because of excess paraffin and an oily texture left from the insertion of corks into their wines. They refunded all purchases with interest and drew rave reviews for doing so from their customers . . .

Would be interesting to know if these “particles” are just a natural result of using cork, or unique to this case.

Dumb question; could the bottles they ‘recalled’ be emptied to tank, filtered (in some way) and then sold as bulk juice? Or was is it a complete right off?

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That is what I’m thinking as well - though they state in the article a ‘noticeable’ level of paraffin as well as an ‘oily compound’ . . .

Not a dumb question at all - if it’s just ‘cork dust’ or ‘paraffin’, I would believe the answer would be ‘yes’. And we don’t know for sure that this did not happen, do we? I’m assuming it didn’t but . . .

Cheers.

Damn shame to see so much wine lost in this manner. You would think technology advances would prevent this from happening in mass

This will be interesting to observe over time. I am not attorney but I assume that negligence is involved here.

No that we will ever know, but it would be interesting to see if Cayuse ended up filtering the wine and selling it off to the bulk market . . .

isn’t the current bulk market [over]saturated?

Yes but:

1. This would have been a few years ago and
2. Quality juice will always find a home

Cheers

Many state laws require the injured party to use reasonable efforts to mitigate damage. This would be a way to mitigate damage, if there is a way to re-issue the wine to a lower-tier market.

If only someone could come up with a closure that didn’t involve using cork at all

Like relabel and sell it as “CayJuice”?

Give me the State, I’d say “CayMoose”

Yes, We had about 14,000 cases of Santa Maria Chardonnay bottled under corks that had been rejected by another winery, which was not disclosed to us. The closures had variable levels of TCA and we won the court case after much agita. The wine was recovered by smashing it in a huge dumpster with a crusher. The wine was drained and filtered and sold for about $1/gallon. In this case, you have the solvent/parrafin that would need to be filtered out so that would likely require a tighter filtration and result in considerable stripping of the wine. Still saleable however.

I know of one guy in the valley who uses a wood chipper for wine recovery, I shit thee not.

He watched Fargo too many times?

Well, it’s another way to distinguish your “natural” wine.

This wine has not been fined, filtered, sulfured, or run through a wood chipper!

I’ve had a few Chards and Cabs that were so oaky a wood chipper might have helped.

I’ve had a few Chards and Cabs that were so oaky a wood chipper might have helped.

Not from Napa

Coming to a Trader Joe’s near you soon…