shameful.
This doesn’t surprise me, as I still believe that out of every case I buy, I’ll get at least one corked bottle. Been that way for years, with very few exceptions.
You guys know that Roberto likes funky wines. He accepts a little TCA! It’s like mushrooms to him!
I opened a bottle tonight. A producer from Lodi. Makes over the top wines, adds MegaPurple, etc. Totally NOT a wine for the anti-flavor-wine-elite. But you’d think that a technically perfect wine would be free of defects.
Nope. Very slight corky nose. Palate is so huge that you almost miss it but I didn’t, neither did my wife.
Happens in CA, WA and Europe. Until people get over the idea that cork is such a great closure, you’re going to get corked wines.
Im betting that the higher the quality the cork, the less likely the wine will be corked.
As for Europe, maybe the bottles that you opened were more of the general population wines in which the locals are more used to this.
Yikes! That’s far worse than my experience, and I drink mostly European wines and host several tasting groups. In our tasting groups, the incidence of TCA dropped dramatically over the 2000s.
Did you see any regional patterns (e.g., worse luck with Spanish or French or Italian)? Were these expensive/cheap? Can you name some names?
I’m actually very sensitive to TCA and hate it. “Funk” is something else entirely.
Im betting that the higher the quality the cork, the less likely the wine will be corked.
Joe - part of the quality check for everyone these days is some kind of TCA check. But if you’re getting TCA from corks, you’re less likely to get it if you use a plastic cork, which is the cheapest way to go.
You can still get it from other sources of course. One problem is that you can’t test every cork. Best you can do is test batches of them and get probabilities.
The way cork is graded has more to do with freedom from defects, holes, etc., e.g. kind of like lumber. They don’t really grade regarding presence or absence of TCA although that would be nice!
Having just bottled 3 cases last night, this makes me realize that I have never had a corked bottle of my homemade wine but am running about 2% of all purchased wine which does not account for whatever portion of that is screwcaped. Maybe its just the small sample size of homemade since its probabaly less than 200 consumed so far. Will see if that changes as production ramps up. I can’t think of any reason why it shoudl be less than commercial wine corked rates.
Yes, my recent foray into Italian wines has stalled after realizing the rate of corked wines, 1-2 per case.
With CA wines it’s been more like 1 in every 5 cases.
Italy is the king when it comes to corked wines. I don’t know why that is, but it’s been unmistakeably true for me in my years of experience (not to say someone else’s might not be different).
Speaking of corked wines, our California-France blind chardonnay tasting on Saturday revealed two badly corked wines out of the fourteen bottles opened – a 2012 Poe Ferrington and some 2002 1er Cru Red Burgundy whose name I didn’t write down. The latter may have been the most corked wine of all time. The moment the cork came out of the bottle, the blast of TCA smell smacked me over the head; I’ve never had an experience like that before. On the plus side, we never had to pour a drop of it out of the bottle.
But we did get something out of that corked burg, we passed the bottle around the table as a perfect example of “wet newspaper” flaw, something my wife and Jill hadn’t experienced before.
I know screwcaps don’t guarantee 0% TCA, so I’m curious how often are you guys running into screw cap bottles with TCA (looking for a number similar to Adam’s 10% of the bottles they opened).
Screwcaps should be 0% TCA, unless the wine was corked before it was bottled.
I hate to hear that, Chris. In my experience as an Italian wine importer some Italian producers used to be far too trusting of the stories told by cork suppliers (there is a special circle of Hell for cork suppliers). Now the people I talk to are way more likely to do their own quality control, thank heavens. The DIAM cork is gaining ground, which I think is a good thing (this is the only brand I have any faith in). A surprising number of producers are starting to use screwcaps, surprising given that the Italian market is very behind in accepting the closure; lately we’ve had Verdicchio di Matelica, Barbera d’Asti, Dolcetto d’Alba and of course wines from the Alto Adige all under screwcaps.
That eliminates the bottle variation. ![[wink.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/04707e6a7bbb03e0153e349d8a9270d30e1e9525.gif "wink"){kind=small}
Twice in the past year I’ve had winemakers pour me wines that were horribly corked. I find it awkward to have to ask the winemaker directly if this is how the wine is supposed to taste. Always a bad impression.
That IS discouraging.
Exactly.
Bad agglomerated corks can give the same impression, though; every bottle of the batch slightly corked. I’ve only had one case of ‘environmental TCA’ in my 20 years, but I’ve had 3 of the agglomerated cork problems in the last 12 months.
This may have been alluded to earlier but there is no way to get a read on % cork taint based on each guy’s anecdotal evidence. I’ve heard countless folks say “I’m hyper sensitive to TCA” while drinking corked bottles. I nail it sometimes when others don’t, and I’ve had cork taint pointed out to me (which is more frequent if it’s a type of wine I’m unfamiliar with). I’ve seen a world-renowned expert on CdP swear up and down that he’s the expert on corked CdP wines only to miss a corked bottle, deny the bottle was corked after having it pointed out, and refuse to acquiesce when gradually noticed by more folks at the tasting as the wine took in more and more air.
It’s a horribly inexact experience observed by people who are drinking with various tolerances for the contaminant.
I don’t get to 10% on the wines that I drink, in fact had a very good run for a few months with no corked wines, until last week: 2006 Raveneau les Clos was corked. Bummer, for some reason when I have a corked wine it is always one of my better wines…