Cool article in Food & Wine on Sojourn’s TCA sniffing dog!
really sweet animal, i met her today.
And better looking than Craig. 
I’d heard about this before, but I have a question: Does she sniff every Sojourn cork before it’s inserted? And, of so, does she have dog breath?
Great story! Seems like this would be a good and very inexpensive investment for some of the major guys in Napa.
Sniffing through a winery for sources of TCA might make sense. But totally worthless for trying to isolate TCA infected corks. I wonder if people reading the story would think that the winery would no longer have issues with corked wine (from corks)?
Sorry Brian, meant more as a joke than to be serious about the dog possibly eliminating TCA from the cork/wine. But if you look at it that way: my understanding is that one of the ways corks are screened for TCA is to soak batches in water, then test the water. The dog might very well be able to do that well enough to substitute for GC/MS, who knows? Pretty sure that Craig doesn’t use the dog for this.
Cheers
Ziggy was “commissioned” to be trained (literally as a drug dog) to smell very small doses of TCA by the owners of one of the largest adjunct wood producers as a way to help identify lots of wood (that are air drying in their outdoor yard) that are potentially infected by TCA. As many of us know, TCA naturally occurrs in both oak wood and cork.
Although the adjunct producer has sensitive monitoring equipment to pick up small amounts of airborne bromine/chrorine which is the net result of a TCA infection, they had no way to specifically identify which lot of wood had an infection - before Ziggy. As the owner travels the world selling his products, I adopted Ziggy under the condition that they can use the dog when needed. My responsibility is to keep Ziggy’s sensory up to snuff …
Btw, Sojourn does not use Ziggy to help test our corks, nor do we use adjunct wood in the production of our wines.
Welcome to the board Craig.
The story about Ziggy shed considerable light on an issue here, when folks were discussing just how sensitive they wanted wine critics to be re: TCA, Laube, Montelena, etc.
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Go Ziggy !