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 . . .
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?
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 . . .
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.
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.