I am presently drinking a 2009 Lafon Volnay Santenots Milieu.
The recent CT tasting notes are gushing praise and 94-96 point scores. Consensus is that it’s open and ready to drink. The pro critics love it and give mid 90’s scores.
To me, the nose is very muted after 90 mins in decanter. Very muted flavor with no distinguishable notes, ending with a short, sharp acid finish. Total disappointment.
Is there a definitive way to determine if the bottle is bad/flawed vs perhaps just too young/shut down? While it’s not particularly tannic I also don’t detect ‘off’ smell or taste, just barely any smell or taste to speak of.
TCA = trichloroanisole, ie. cork taint. Basically smells like mildew, but in minuscule amounts it can just mute a wine without really smelling like anything. Cork taint - Wikipedia
Cork taint has nothing to do with how the cork looks like. It is a molecule that usually gets into a wine via cork.
This the first bottle of a six pack that arrived today. Should I risk it and try another one tomorrow to see if it is a cork issue with just this one bottle?
Definitely no wet dog/cardboard.
Wife is commenting that perhaps the sharp acid has softened slightly in the last 30 mins.
TCA presents to me like bleach or chlorine. I almost always can smell it the second I pull the cork from the bottle. As others have said, it tends to mute the nose and palate, and dominate on the nose.
I think I’m pretty sensitive to it, but there have been occasions where I was left with some doubts and, on those occasions, having another bottle of the same wine to open and compare confirmed the taint in the first bottle 100% of the time I was able to open the second bottle. And the wine in those two bottles was really remarkably different.
Definitely see where that bottle ends up over the next couple of days. A corked (i.e. TCA tainted) wine should not open up, but I’m sure a mildly tainted wine that was also a little closed, might open up a little (whilst still showing overly prominent acidity, short finish and generally dull). The taint can also be more apparent, but I’ve really only experienced that over a period of hours (after that, it’s gone down the sink!).
In general, if the bottle was corked, that should have **no impact on the chance of another bottle from the same case being corked. I don’t know what TCA rates run at these days but in times gone by c. 2% was a rough and ready benchmark. As such it can make for a useful (if expensive) comparison to taste the two side by side - perhaps the most common experience of this is in a restaurant setting, where there is some ‘debate’ with the staff as to whether a wine is corked or is “how it should be”. A side by side tasting will typically settle the matter.
** It’s a bit more complex, as a winery may have received a bad batch of corks with significantly increased rate of cork taint, and in very rare cases, their barrels may have been infected, affecting every wine bottled from that barrel.
TCA manifests itself in various very subjective ways. I’m very sensitive to it, to me its nothing like chlorine or bleach, to me its just TCA. In my nose its closer to the wet cardboard than bleach. But sense of smell is very subjective.
Definitely! A side by side comparison can often be very compelling, and assuming the two bottles taste quite different, may help you identify what we mean by saying the wine is corked.
and FWIW it took me a while to spot cork taint in my earlier drinking days, but eventually it clicked. I don’t think I’m super-sensitive to it, but it has become something of a subconscious alarm bell going off when I do smell it. Kind of ‘once remembered, never forgotten’.
Hmmm it could also just be that a vigorous decant into a decanter has locked the wine up, and it will now remain grumpy for half a day. I’ve seen that before too. Did you try a bit before decanting?