First I’m sure someone from a market dominated by the screwcap, ware this issue of TCA is nearly nonexistent, who tasted a whole lot of wines from under cork all at once, may be shocked by how bad the problem still is. Not just in Sonoma, or California, or the US, but anywhere the cork still dominates. The problem is only intensified if the bottles or events are special in nature. To that point, the tasting group I am a part of held a special event ware the host assembled a tasting of 12 wines, one from the birth year of each of the group members. This spanned four decades from the 50’s through the 80’s. Of these wines, 3 had cork issues. 75 Palmer Corked. 82 La Dominique Corked. 84 Dunn Howell Mountain leaky and oxidized. Three potentially great wine experiences lost to cork.
So I ask why more producers are not leaving the cork behind? I get why “big wine” is slow to change, but what about the small, young wineries out there. They are all about embracing the “better ways of doing things”. I know a lot of small, forward thinking winemakers follow these chats, so it would be great to here from a few more on the subject.
This was a shit-time for the cork industry due to many reasons, both economically and politically in Portugal, and why there are so many bad corks in the mid 1970’s to the mid 1980’s.
Really? There were many estimates from responsible people that it was 10%-plus a decade ago. And in a tasting group I’ve hosted for 20 years, we had one corked wine out of eight in almost every monthly tasting for years and years. It’s markedly better in the last five or seven years.
I said more on Larrys FB post, but wanted to reiterate what Oliver mentions. I do believe the agglomerate and 1+1 corks are skewing the overall numbers. These are usually used on sub $20 bottles and are notorious for 10% plus rates. If you make coleslaw with 50 heads of cabbage and one has salmonella everyone gets sick. If there are 50 chunks combined into a cork and one is tainted you lose the whole cork. Diam and the like use micro agglomerated particles that are first sterilized.
I have seen our rate go from 1-2% to below 0.5% in the last decade. We open about 100 bottles a month in the tasting room so I think we have a pretty good feel for the percentage as we track it our POS. In the last year we did 2 10 year verticals opening a little over 100 bottles with not a single one corked.
There is no perfect closure, screw tops do not have a 100% success rate and neither do corks. I am still not comfortable with the potential leaching of ingredients from the plastic liner into the wine as they don’t disclose the proprietary compounds they are made of.
The IWC in London opens c 15-25 k bottles each year and has 10 years of data on faults. It’s sensory, but rigorous, with all reported faults reconfirmed by one of the co-chairs. This weeds out false positives. Cork taint still too high but running under 2% - so I’m surprised by LPB’s bad luck getting 7%
Since we switched to Diam 2 vintages ago our corked rate has dropped to zero. I am confident we have opened well over 2,000 bottles of wine at tastings, events, dinners and such and not one of the 14s or 15s has been corked or leaking (if you ever felt a Diam cork you would know why). We are going to run a trial with the company that is guaranteeing natural cork at sub-0.5 PPM on a bottling we will do in the next couple of weeks. Half the run will get these corks and half the Diam 10. I have very much enjoyed not having corked wines at all for the past two years.
DIAMs and Nomacorks will continue to gain ground against regular cork which will be largely constrained to high-end bottlings where TCA detection technology will get rid of contaminated corks. DIAM will continue to penetrate high-end as well as will Nomacork (but probably to less degree due to perception issues…I use Noma on all our high-end Cabs very successfully, however, and not one complaint FWIW). Corks not going away anytime soon. Screw caps not good alternative for US supply chain (to easily damaged), have generally lower consumer acceptance rates, and the oxygen transfer technology is way behind what can plausibly be presented to winemakers.
We have 12 people in our tasting group and go through 10+ bottles per tasting. Our tasting notes seem to show. Our TCA sensitivity rate seems to be evenly divided among sensitive, not sensitive, and moderate. We have looked over notes from 3 years and rarely go above a 2% rate of TCA as decided by consensus. Our rate on screw caps and diams is zero TCA contamination though we don’t see that many diams yet. This group has been together for 6 years and we have tasted through about 1200 bottles in that time frame. Good notes only for the last 3 years.
I agree. The accusations of her lying to get attention or for any other reason are absolutely absurd. It doesn’t surprise me at all that one person might find a far higher rate than most other people. The Wine Spectator statistics and others mentioned here are coming from groups of tasters. People here saying they are “sensitive” might still only be able to detect TCA at a FAR higher concentration than the most sensitive people. I mean even 2-3 times as much, even if they’re more sensitive than anyone they regularly taste with. Sensitivity to TCA varies that widely. What I take from this is that Perrotti-Brown is extremely sensitive to TCA, and that rates of infection are probably actually far higher than most of what’s reported. Neither of those ideas strikes me as implausible in any way, and the latter is something that I already thought was the case.
Two people sharing a bottle will often have very different descriptions of what they are tasting. When reading other people’s tasting notes, I often wonder how much of the difference in what they are describing compared with my own experience has to do with our differences of perception/experience vs. actual bottle variation. Slight cork taint, improper storage, different temperatures of wine and setting not to mention what was being eaten or not eaten can all influence the differences. Over the years this understanding has influenced how I read other tasting notes.
No one is calling her a liar or “thrashing” her. However, she is the one that wrote what she did without any further statistics to back it up. What would you say if it turned out that all the corked wines came from, say, two wineries? As that wouldn’t indicate an overall issue in all of Sonoma like she is alluding to. I don’t like when people come out with a general negative blanket statement without at least having some detailed information about what exactly they’re claiming. So please don’t write an article slamming corks without far more details to back up your slam.
In non working life I would agree not much Plonk. In professional life they taste everything that is sent to them, I am sure they’re is plenty of not great wines one must get thru to find the gems.
I agree with you, except for TCA. Your threshold is not something you can increase by practice. It is my understanding you are born with your threshold for TCA which is why there are so many in the industry that get tested to find out what that threshold is. Many producers employ folks with very low thresholds to do sensory evaluation of cork lots prior to ordering. There are/were at least 2 dogs in Sonoma County, if I recall correctly, that were trained to detect TCA in tasting room samples. Talk about a expert with no bias, no idea if the results were more or less than with a very low threshold tested human.
Hi Oliver - sorry, what I , meant to say is that the data on the various oxygen transfer liners that are now being built into recent screw-cap offerings is simply too new to be “plausibly” presented to winemakers as having much track record.
What does this last part mean? How is it implausible?[/quote]
It means that he isn’t using screwcaps.
Adam Lee[/quote]
I got that part.[/quote]
The ease with which you both impugn my motives is disturbing. I bottle numerous wines under screwcap. Having said that, I stand behind the drawbacks to screw-caps I outlined earlier in the thread and why they will not become the de rigeur closure for wines that many people seem to yearn for.
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