So I am thinking that I have never really seen any sort of study done to see exactly what trend, if any, exists for corked bottles. Based upon this, I would like to take a survey over the next few weeks of what bottles people have opened and found to be corked. As much data as possible would be much appreciated, and I will fill out a database to get some numbers.
At a minimum, these are the data points I would like to track:
Vintage
Producer
Varietal, Blend, etc.
Red, White, Bubbly, Fortified
Appellation
Sub Apellation
Vineyard
Bottle Size
Closure
Without knowing opened, uncorked bottles, the data is pretty useless.
Imagine you get a report of 15 bottles of corked Ch. Tex. And all other wines are 1 corked bottle. That appears that Ch. Tex has a problem unless we know whether 15 times more bottles of Ch Tex were opened in the same time frame and thus Ch Tex has the same baseline.
Andrew, I thought about that, and I guess producer could be left out.
I was trying to look at red vs white, still vs. sparkling, country of origin, etc. Obviously not scientific and not publishable, just a curiosity to see how many folks would post on their corked wines.
Sadly I’m wondering how many corked bottles I’ve consumed and didn’t even realize they were corked. I know what signs to look for, but I haven’t had any that I thought were off in over a year. Clearly…
I will say the bottle of 2008 Educated Guess I tried last night was quite woeful. Smelled like robutusin and didn’t taste too different from that either.
I agree with Andrew Hall. You still need a denominator to make the info useful, regardless if you were just doing red vs white, still vs sparkling, etc. Would be an interesting little study though, as I have not seen much info on this topic as far as rates go in various categories of wine vs others…
The only one I was truly upset by was an '83 Margaux for Xmas dinner. Worse though - it was obvious though not hideous and led me into delusionally decanting and hoping it would ‘blow off.’