Heard stories about this but never saw it in real life.
Was at a restaurant in Paris where some high level wine people had assembled for a BYOB dinner. A 2001 DRC Echezeaux was corked. They twisted up about two feet of cellophane and inserted it into the bottle.
I asked them how long they keep the cellophane in and how well this works and to both questions, they said they don’t know. One of the guys was a chemist with experience in wine science and he gave me a fairly convincing scientific theory as to why it may work.
I left before they pulled the cellophane out but will email them to see what happened.
in my experience, it removed the cork nose but the wine was “stripped” of it’s fruit by the TCA and that could not be brought back. I’ve only bothered since then with very mild TCA bottles(that would be a sample size of 2 FWIW…) The super corked bottles just get dumped (or returned)
2003 Chateau Montelena Cabernet Sauvignon The Montelena Estate- USA, California, Napa Valley (8/6/2011) Suntacular 2011 (FMIII Home): Bummer, tainted. So I grabbed a decanter and placed two sheets of plastic wrap inside and dumped in the wine for the grand experiment. After 5 minutes or so it noticeably reduced the nose and palate of TCA/wet newspaper. Was it enough to enjoy the wine? Probably not, there was still a hints of taint but it was “drinkable” by some. Others, no chance. NR (flawed)
If it’s still tainted you either didn’t use enough saran wrap or didn’t leave it long enough. There was a product in development that used this concept to filter the wine… you’d basically pour the tainted wine through a ‘filter’ that was a LOT of the poly in a form that made the wine pass over a huge surface area. It didn’t really filter the wine, but exposed it to so much surface area of poly that the TCA was adsorbed. I imagine that you’d run it through several times if need be.
REmember, TCAed wine isn’t damaged… the wine’s fine, it’s that the TCA is binding to taste receptors in us. If you can remove all of the TCA and do so without disturbing the wine otherwise it should return to its non-TCAed state.
Good timing… got me a corked bottle that I opened and recorked immediately last night.
Garagiste, btw, credited me back for the bottle instantaneously… so now… glad wrap time… will that work??
I’m just gonna throw some glad wrap in there over night and report back tomorrow.
this has not been my my experience. Having a second bottle of the same wine to open to compare to the TCA bottle (treated with cellophane)
I found that event though the nose had improved (meaning the TCA scent was gone) the wine was no where near as good as normal bottle.
I’m glad that Rick’s experience turned out better but I just can’t back it up with my own…
Rick’s right that the wine would be fine if you could remove the TCA without removing/disturbing anything else…unfortunately that’s impossible (as far as I know). Lots of compounds in wine, including the TCA, will bond to the plastic wrap…so you’ll generally end up with what Mel describes (unless the tca was mild and the wine was massive I suppose).
Oh, I was speaking hypothetically at the end there. The first part of that sentence is just noting that TCA doesn’t damage the wine per se, but masks the flavors. Hence, if we could remove it without otherwise altering the wine…
I’ve only tried this a couple of times. Saran does make a difference, but 1) I don’t know what else, if anything it adsorbs from the wine and 2) I suspect that you can’t just rip a sheet off and leave it in the wine for a few minutes but need to do it for longer.
Remember, low levels of TCA will leave you with precisely what you had - suppressed flavors but no telltale TCA aromas so if you get that after, say, 15 minutes I’d try another piece for maybe an hour or so to see if you can remove more TCA and recover the wine better. Of course, if the Saran also adsorbs other flavors that we WANT… eh. But it’s not like the wine will be ruined by experimenting.
Many posts on this. We tried this on a corked Chateau d’Yquem–it helps a bit, taking out maybe 50% of the cork flavors and aromas, but not more. Anyway, it is based on the concept that the organic TCA binds to the non-polar Saran Wrap surface. Sorption, in other words…
A fairly simple if not scientific experiment would be to use a known good (no TCA) wine, and use the Saran wrap on half the bottle and not on the other half.
No TCA flavors/aromas to remove, but should be pretty easy to tell if it strips the wine of its fruit or any other component.
It works, but it doesn’t ultimately do you any good other than the science experiment interest. What you’re left with is drinkable, but drinkable in the sense that a $6 bottle of wine from the supermarket is drinkable, nothing more. I think some people get so excited by the transformation (which is, indeed, interesting and exciting) that they fail to notice their 97 point cult cab now tastes like a Trader Joe’s cabernet from the central valley.
It’s worth doing to see how it works, but you need to distinguish the corked to uncorked delta from the absolute measure of what you’re left with after the experiment, which is really worth little or nothing, other than something inoffensive to get a buzz from or something you could serve to your wine-indifferent neighbors or relatives.
Ah, the Saran wrap trick. Tried it on multiple occasions. Never had a bottle I wanted to drink afterward.
True story. I attended an offline once. Early on in the evening was a corked bottle of 1982 Leoville Barton. Damn shame. We pressed on. Roughly two hours later somebody hands me a glass of wine double blind and asks me what it is. I took one smell of it, handed it back to him and replied “It smells like a corked bottle of 1982 Leoville Barton that has been soaking in Saran wrap for two hours.”
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