Sipping on a very slightly corked Renaud Boyer bottle right now… There is lovely fruit on the palate, but no getting past the TCA note on the nose
Since I felt that I had quite a few flawed (mostly TCA or oxidized) lately, I went back and checked the percentage of flawed bottles of my tasting notes in CT. It actually seems surprisingly consistent over the years at roughly 2.9%. That may be slightly higher than the true flawed rate, because I make it a point to write a note on a flawed bottle, but don’t always write a note on good bottles.
What’s everyone’s percentage of flawed wines? Is this somewhat consistent with your experience?
When I first started getting into wine around 2008 I had about a 2% incidence of TCA. That has gone down enormously since then. I probably only had two or three corked wines this year out of ~500.
I haven’t captured any numbers, but I’d say it’s in a similar ballpark, though likely nearer to 2% than 3% (ignoring in this bottles that were merely over-mature - that’s my fault/tastes, not that of the wine)
This is obviously biased data, but still interesting IMO…
A few things to note: I started to drink more natural wines in the past 4-5 years, some of which I marked as flawed.
White Burgundy and Loire accounts for quite a bit of flawed bottles (almost all premoxed).
1989 seems to have been a horrible year for corks, especially in Rhone and Bordeaux.
Interestingly, I don’t see a higher percentage of flawed bottles in 1988 and earlier wines, but that data is probably skewed because most of those bottles came from other people’s cellars and I probably was not that consistent in marking those as flawed in a tasting note.
That’s interesting. I don’t recall many flawed wines from 1989 except that the Beaucastel was famously leaky. Even then I only had one bottle that I would consider flawed by Brett. My 89 Bdx have been pretty reliable. I’ve had more corked bottles from earlier years.
I went through the faulty wines I had tasted, based on the CT data. At 14 048 bottles tasted, I guess this sample size might not be insignificant.
Of the wines I had tasted, 327 (2,32%) were flawed or faulty.
Of these faulty wines, 151 (1,07%) were either obviously (117 or 0,83%) or probably (34 or 0,24%) corked. Obviously corked wines were wines that were showing obvious TCA aromas; probably corked wines were those that were completely flavorless, dull or slightly musty - not showing any obvious TCA aromas but also coming across as somewhat off.
The remaining 176 (1,25%) bottles were either oxidized (142 or 1,01%), cooked (4), excessively volatile (3), had refermented in the bottle (2) or were in some other way just off or flawed (25 or 0,18%).
Hey Otto, What about the Mousy OF58 point wines? It looks like they don’t get included in this analysis? Perhaps also how many wines did you score below 75 in each year would be useful intel as well
Indeed they are not included. This is because flaws and faults come from winemaking choices - oxidation or TCA happens to random bottles, so bottles that are not impacted are okay. However, when it comes to mousiness, all the wines from the same batch are impacted, so I have to rate the wines as they are - if one bottle is mousy, it’s probable all the other bottles are going to be similalry mousy as well. Hence I rate them rather than marking them as flawed.
Although there were a few so badly funky / mousy / whatever wines that were so horrible I had marked them as “flawed/defective” and are included in the “other” column.
Unfortunately there is no easy way to dig all the mousy wines I’ve tasted from CT. I might be able to comb through the wines where I’ve mentioned “mousy”, “mousiness” or “THP” in the tasting note field, but that’s going to take some work and time.
