My wife just read this, stared at me, and snickered.
Why? 
Very strange. If there were systemic issues, there would have been more news, no?
And price point shouldn’t matter here . . .
I will say that I have encountered restaurant and catering glassware that mimicked TCA taint. At a Champagne event in 2018 I took my provided glass and washed it thoroughly, and suddenly wines that tasted like crap were back to normal.
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Had that happen as well . . .
Agree on rarity these days as winery hygiene has improved over the years. It must be an infinitely small number of people still using chlorinated sanitation agents or are on chlorinated water sources.
Not saying price matters, that’s just how I roll ![[wink.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/04707e6a7bbb03e0153e349d8a9270d30e1e9525.gif "wink"){kind=small}
but it was surprising to find it in such commercial plonk. At a friends family gathering a few years ago, there was a magnum of Barefoot Chard (yeah, I know) where I took one sip and declared it corked and told him to open another to prove the point. Several glasses of the first bottle had already been consumed by guests, of course with no one noticing. Second bottle was clean and featured all those wonderful attributes that Barefoot is known for lol.
Bob,
I’m not denying this - just saying how truly rare it would be for a screwcap wine to show TCA unless ALL of them do . . .
Cheers
As I’ve previously mentioned more than once, one of the corked wines I’ve had under Diam was a bottle of sparkling under Mytik. So, to the extent that makes a meaningful difference to anyone, there you go; in my mind, the products (Mytik and Diam) are the same – they’re both conglomerate corks. It was a bottle of NV Mumm- Napa Valley Brut (and I’ve specifically mentioned that before, too; I fail to see how specifically identifying the wine changes anything).
Noah, first off thank you for sharing this. We switched to Diam after a conversation with our friend Dominique Lafon back in the summer of 2015 while tasting through the 2014’s in our cellar. He mentioned that he had had it with opening older bottles he had made, only to have them be corked. Diam was to be used at both Comtes des Lafon and Domaine Dominique Lafon from Bourgogne & village level wine up through Montrachet! He was confident in the quality and consistency. Our thought was that if Dominique was using Diam for all of his wines then why wouldn’t we.
We had already planned on trialing Diam following a marketing trip to Seattle that spring. After pulling multiple sample bottles from the same case, we discovered an incredible amount of inconsistency. Nothing was ‘corked,’ but the lack of consistency was clear. This was very troubling especially when you consider that we had made as little as 100 cases of some of these wines. This was not up to our standards!
There is so much effort that goes into every bottle of wine we produce. From pruning, through the growing season, harvest, fermentation, the care of elevage for up to 18 months and finally bottling. To then have a consumer open the wine and have it be ‘corked’ or ‘off’ is unacceptable. Making the switch to Diam real easy. We felt that we owed it to our growers, our team and our CUSTOMERS to finish our wines under the best closure available to us.
This is not the first bottle of our wine to be ‘corked’ under Diam. But, it is only the second that we know of. The Wine & Spirits tasting panel claimed to have had a ‘corked’ bottle of X Novo Chardonnay some years ago. To our knowledge these are the only bottles to have been ‘corked.’
If the problem was some reduction, splashing the wine into a decanter would have helped it integrate or ‘blow off.’ We bottle with a higher level of trapped CO2 in the wine and Diam keeps that CO2 trapped, which also would have ‘blown off.’ With the wine being ‘corked’, decanting would only make it worse! Cork taint does not go away. My guess is that if you still have the wine that the taint is worse now.
Diam’s use by wineries around the world has grown exponentially in the last several years. With increased demand and therefore increased production, one might ask if quality control has declined. It’s fair to ask as it’s unfortunately a common occurrence for a product’s quality to decline as demand or greed forces increased production. I don’t believe Diam is one of those companies. Their dedication and commitment to quality may be even higher now, especially at the Origine level. Which we switched to with the 2019 vintage.
My thought is that a bad one slipped through the cracks and wound up in your bottle. Diam is still cork after all and this cork (the best part of the bark is where it is sourced from) is manufactured by human beings. So shit is going to happen. But, Diam is still the most consistent closure we have available to us right now.
The unfortunate part of this is that you did not get to enjoy the wine as we intended. Our hope is that we never have a consumer experience a ‘bad’ or ‘off’ bottle. As we sell everything we produce, we are not sure we can replace this vintage of Freedom Hill Chardonnay for you. Our library is only 1-2 cases for future events and or tastings. We will make it right for you, even if it’s a bottle of a different vintage.
Thanks again for posting this!
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Ken, bravo for your post. The level of customer service from both you and Erica is incredible. Happy to be a long time customer of yours, especially with the knowledge that when things go wrong, as they sometimes do, you take care of it. Keep up the amazing work and thanks for being part of this community.
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You’ve never encountered a case box that was corked? I have a few times, here or there. That includes a couple times on a bottling line (we pulled and disposed of those). I’ve heard tale of a whole pallet of empty glass where all the cardboard and the wood pallet reeked of TCA.
I’ve had corked shippers, along with a bathroom faucet and a toilet. I blame the use of bleach on the last two.
Maybe in the US this is true (you would hope so, after Chateau Monthelena, Gallo, Hanzell, etc) but I have had two Italian producers tell me in the last few months that their enologist instructed them to use a chlorinated cleaning agent. One of them had an environmental TCA problem, the other hasn’t.
The wine was definitely corked. I kept the bottle for two days and it never got better. Time in the decanter did make it a bit worse. Also, reduction and cork taint taste different- this was TCA.
Thank you very much, I appreciate the offer. These sorts of things happen from time to time so this is a very nice offer. PM sent.
Noah–what’s “cork taint”? (cork taint to me is TCA).
I haven’t run into any, but it makes no sense to say it could never happen. There’s no doubt that DIAM is far superior to natural cork for rate of TCA contamination, but I don’t buy that it never happens. I’ve had at least 1-2 bottles per vintage of our wines that are flawed with Diam(not corked per se) and am VERY happy with it over all but no closure is perfect(neither are any winemakers to be fair).
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You can add to your list:
Carrots
Bananas
Apples
Pallets
Cardboard Boxes(no it wasn’t wet or moldy)
Edit: Somehow I forgot that we had a box of corked screwcaps on a bottling we did for a client. Custom caps, and definitely not the box.
We have had a number of corked gins in the last year; apparently the juniper berries somehow acquire TCA, giving extremely high levels in the final product.
Naaaah, that’s just the flavor of gin. 
