Ever try and convince yourself a wine isnt corked?

WINE TALK
1

I just faced reality. That nice burgundy I was planning all week to drink tonight has TCA. It was just enough that I hoped I was imagining things at first but…

At least I have some Donnhoff to console myself with.

2

Berry,
Yeaaaaup!

I just did it at our deparment Christmas party. I brought 10 bottles for the non-winos to try. One was a 1995 Ch. Lagrezette (Cahors) that I have drank two cases of over the years, mostly in the last 5 years. Bottle variation sure but, all have been good and some have been absolutely stunning. This particular bottle had a bit of funk that blew off in an hour but, the wine was just a shadow of the worst of the others. I kept coming back to it hoping for it to magically fill in – see I was trying to convince people that you can buy a $20 wine and hold it for 10 years, allowing it to become so much more than it was upon release. Thankfully, I brought a 98 St. Hallett Blackwell Shiraz. It was excellent (a bit more residual sugar in the mouthfeel for my liking now but, damn good for a $15 wine) and won many fans.

3

All the time. I hate it. But whenever I have any doubt it always ends up corked. Just open another. Sux. :frowning:

4

Frequently. The good thing is that it almost always gets worse so you don’t have to go to bed wondering if you were right or wrong. The answer usually manifests itself with a little time.

5

My backup had reduction

[suicide.gif]

I cant win. With cork I get TCA and with screwcap I got reduction that wouldnt blow off before dinner. I cant believe we can fly robots to mars and drive them around for months but we cant invent a closure that actually works well.

6

Tres bummer. :frowning:

7

+1.

8

Most recently, with the 1990 Yquem I opened for my birthday last weekend. Pretty sucky!!

sent from my iPhone

9

Frank,

Was that a birthyear wine? neener

Berry,

All of the time.

10

At a Phoenix offline a couple of years ago we were doing the Italian theme and I brought a Pertamali Sassiti 97 Brunello with a 97 Ciacci as back-up. They were both corked. I was swearing in Italian. headbang headbang

11

The only time I do it is when I open a bottle that is corked! A couple of months ago, we opened one of two bottles of a very rare Shafer Cabernet port we bought. We were so looking forward to it. It was corked. My wife was sad and gave up on it, but I kept going back to it all night thinking “maybe I am wrong and it is just barrel stink and it will blow off”.

12

Are you sure that wasn’t simply the smell of Nero d’Avola and Primitivo? :wink:

13

Dan, you are confusing me with Eric.

I doubt if you sell anything from my birth year!

14

Another Eric presumably. I just turned 40, now an old fart.

15

Compared to whom?

16

I never try to convince myself it’s not corked.

I embrace corkiness. I just think about the ritual of cutting foil, and how that links me to centuries of winemakers and wine drinkers. And I revel in the act of pulling out a cork, much as I love opening the bubble pack on the new nylon cupboard door bumpers I bought. I think about the wonder of science and how we reached the pinnacle of engineering and bottle closure back in the 17th century and there is no need to search further, for our closures are, in fact, perfect.

Besides, it’s only the “new world” mentality that seems troubled. In fact, in places like Spain, France and Portugal, they’re so completely satisfied that they even have laws prohibiting the use of other closures. I know that those laws were carefully considered and were put in place to protect me, the consumer. And if the price of perfection is the occasional bad bottle of wine, I reach a near-orgasmic frenzy of satisfaction knowing that I’m going to pour my money down the drain.

Because you see, I am already satisfied by the tradition and ritual.

17

My kids.

18

My backup wine last night was a burgundy under screw cap. The relevance of this to your post is:

A) There is obviously is no law in france against screwcap unless Patrice Rion is somehow breaking the law. I know Ponsot has bottled under screwcap as well and some Drouhin Bougogne Ive had has also been under screwcap.
B) Said backup wine had a defect (bad reduction) produced by this screwcap closure. So its not perfect either.

And get beyond the snarky point you were trying to make, tradition and aesthetics are not the only reason people want corks. It has a wide track record of allowing wines to age gracefully. This is not a black and white issue.

19

[rofl.gif]

I had a corked wine yesterday. Merry Christmas. At least it was a daily drinker and not a spendy, rare bottle I’d cellared for the past 20 years.

David [drinkers.gif]

20

Another interesting thread indeed . . . .

Berry - it’s impossible to say that the closure caused the reduction issues, unless you have a bottle of the same wine bottled under cork nearby to compare and contrast . . . It’s easy to assume that if a wine is reductive and it’s under screwcap that the closure caused it, but more often than not, it’s poor winemaking that led to the problem - NOT the closure . . .

And Greg, I’m a romantic as well - but that ‘romanticism’ ends when I open a bottle that I paid a pretty penny for a decade ago only to find that when I open now, most often on a ‘special occassion’, that the wine itself has been ruined by a 2" piece of cork. . . .

And now that I make my own wines, and help make wine for others, you would not believe how disheartening it is to baby a wine, from harvest through bottling, ensuring that I’ve done all I can to ensure that the wine exhibits all of the qualities that I want it to, only to have these walloped by said piece of cork . . . All I can ask is to transfer this concept to whatever business you’re in and see how you would feel if this happened to you . . .

Just another datapoint this morning . . .

Cheers!