Corked Wines

WINE TALK
1

Spent the last few weeks on a rather incredible cruise from Barcelona to Venice with a few days before and after in Spain and France. Officially a Siduri and Novy wine cruise, but we opened lots of other wines with day trips into CdP and Ribera del Duero. Great meals in Madrid, Venice and Eze.

My point isn’t to run all of that in, but rather to comment on the percentage of corked wines we encountered. Excluding our screw capped wines, we opened a good number of other bottles from other producers (generally current releases all European) with fully 10% being corked. I was under the impression that the situation with corks was improving, but this certainly didn’t lead me to that conclusion. A sad situation and an unacceptable percentage, IMO.

Now back to the real world.

Adam Lee
Siduri Wines

2

Interesting. I haven’t opened a corked wine (thankfully) in ages.

3

While living in Houston, around 35% of the wines I purchased were European (mostly French - Bordeaux, Burgundy and Rhone). I experienced far more corked European wines than those from California.

4

If every package of chicken from Costco or box of steaks from Allen brothers had 10% spoilage everybody would be losing there minds. I don’t know why it’s more acceptable in wine.

5

You must be living right. Had two last night. [head-bang.gif]

6

We open 70-100 bottles a week in our bar (of which maybe 20% are either screwcap or Vino-Lok) and I don’t think we get 5 a month.

7

Maybe a difference between imports vs direct?

8

We’ve got a mix of winery direct and distributor Cali stuff, a lot more of direct import Euro and SA stuff and stuff from other importers.

9

I almost never get corked wines at home, but I’d say I taste 2-3 corked wines per week that our reps sample us on.

10

My percentage has improved somewhat, but still hovers around 6%.

11

. Isn’t that pretty close to 10 percent. I mean 80 percent of 70 is 5.6 and this 5 corked bottles is close. Right?

Adam Lee
Siduri Wines

12

Didn’t go into the wine business to do no math Adam.

That being said. I find my occurrence of corked wines to be far higher with European wines. Especially no name/ random negotiant I buy one offs in burgundy

13

We opened 18 bottles last night (good night!) and had 2 corkers. One 09 Copain chardonnay bought direct from winery and other an 02 red burg bought from Envoyer. The cork taint from the burg could be smelled 5’ away from bottle, the most corky wine I have ever encountered.

14

We have had a pretty good streak of not having a corked wine but we did open one this weekend. A 2010 Coudoulet de Beaucastel.

15

70 bottles/week x 4 weeks/month = 280 bottles

5 corked bottles per month is ~2% rate of occurrence

16

Oops. Didn’t read the week/month part.

Sorry.

Adam Lee
Siduri Wines

17

Don’t forget my Poe was corked!

18

Your right Brig! So 3/18 = 17%. Not a good percentage.

19

I was at a tasting today at the CIA in St Helena and a guy from Trentadue was pouring a corked Zinfandel. I let him smell it and asked him if he picked up the TCA. His reply, “I’ve probably drank a whole bottle of that today. It’s all the same to me.”

I chuckled and moved on.

20

I suspect different tasters have varying levels of tasting experience, and the ones without expectations for a particular wine end up dismissing it as a bad wine as opposed to a tainted one. Assuming thats true, the percentage of corked bottles is probably on the higher end of reported numbers.


Meat spoilage could make you sick, whereas cork taint is merely unpleasant- but I agree with the premise that’s its widely accepted when it should not be. Same goes for light struck (“skunked”) beers. Why anyone still uses green bottles is mindboggling when its just as easy to use amber and benefit from some light protection. Consumers are too easily swayed by marketing, be it a corked enclosure or an “import” green bottle?