We’ve all had instances where a wine is massively corked and you can smell it immediately. However, I’m curious about the phenomenon where a wine can go from not appearing corked, or only very slightly corked, but as time goes by, it becomes more and more obvious that it is corked. This happens to me quite a lot, and I assume others as well. Case in point, last night, a bottle of 1999 Leflaive Chevalier that I opened for a friend. I splash decanted, took a sniff, smelled great. Another wino took a sniff and raved about it. I poured a small taste a few minutes later, and it was fine. Then just a few more minutes, and I got the first hint (very slight) that it might be corked. My friend whose bottle it was shows up 10 minutes later, he’s even more sensitive to TCA than I am, and agreed it might be slightly corked. 10 minutes later, it was clearly corked.
Now I know that not swirling will let TCA seem more evident, since swirling can release other aromas that can to some degree mask the TCA. That’s not what I’m trying to get at. TCA is volatile, obviously, but I don’t know anything about the chemistry of the molecule to think that it changes with air. Does the introduction of oxygen or some other component of being exposed to air cause TCA to become more evident? If anything, your sense of smell would desensitize to the smell of TCA over repeated short term exposure, so that should actually work against TCA expanding in the glass. Any explanation you can think of?
It’s always irritating when you decant a bottle to take to a restaurant or tasting, it smells fine, but an hour later when you get ready to drink it, the TCA monster has reared its ugly head. Or, you buy a bottle in a restaurant, you get your first whiff and it’s fine, only to explain later to the wait staff (2 glasses in) that it’s corked.
Every time I have a corked bottle of white burg, I find myself thinking ‘Why can’t the corked bottle have been one of the pre-moxed ones as well?’ Anyway, the second bottle that was opened was killer.
It would be nice to know something about physical chemistry. I’ve always assumed that it takes a while for the volatile compound to reach equilibrium in the air above the surface of the wine in the glass, and that’s why it gets more and more noticeable with air, but this may not at all be true. I know there are some chemists on the board so maybe they will chime in.
Not to hijack the thread, but we had a 1999 Leflaive Clavaillon last night and didn’t particularly like the style of the wine (a little flat and phenolic from the midpalate on and a little waxy) There was discussion about selling off what folks had left of their 99’s. It doesn’t sound like that’s what you were experiencing.
I’m not a chemist, but airing up a wine allows many scents to emerge that are not detected when the cork was first pulled. Why should TCA be any different? Also, warming up from cellar temp allows smells/tastes to emerge.
Lewis, good point, but while some smells wax and wane, TCA aromas grow but never seems to dissipate.
John, I’d be more worried about Leflaive from 2002 onward, as the wine making seems to have changed and premox seems to have increased about that point for the domaine.
as the temperature increases, so does the vapor pressure of tca. it would be interesting and easy to test this. open a tca tainted bottle in your walk-in cellar (not mine because i do not have one) where the ambient air and wine temp are identical. pour half out into another bottle and keep it somewhere at normal room temperature. taste both wines every 15 min and see what happens.
Not sure of the reasoning behind it, but I experienced this about 2 weeks ago with a 1982 Grand Puy Lacoste. It took about two hours for the tell tale corked scents to fully emerge.
Well, I am a physical chemist, but I don’t really know the answer. Possible it’s something as simple as time to equilibrate due to low vapor pressure, but my hunch is that’s not it. My guess is that TCA is somehow bound up with other compounds in the wine, and aeration changes that. I’ve definitely had experience with wines having smoke taint that became more obvious with bottle age, or air time, and the compounds are somewhat similar (smoke taint is much closer in chemical structure to the compounds associated with Brettanomyces, but TCA is a related phenolic).
i always thought along with other scents aeration lifts TCA notes too.
question: are TCA molecules by any chance multiplying when they receive lots of air? or their population stays same after in glass? what do they feed off of?
It wasn’t total innocence. It drank like a mid-80 point wine, and we knew that it was likely corked because the bouquet on the nose was mostly tertiary, with the fruit very muted. Didn’t get any of those wet cardboard/moldy basement notes up front, but they did emerge around the second hour. Quite strange, and gives me some insight in to past experiences where wines didn’t quite show how they were supposed to.
Very interesting question and discussion. I think I may have a solution (or, if nothing else, a contribution to keep the thread going).
When I think of TCA, I think of the imbalance it creates … and balance depends on both the TCA and desirable volatiles.
Here’s where I’m going with this: it may not be the absolute behaviour of TCA that matters here, but how all of the other volatiles are behaving relative to the TCA. Perhaps after many of the desirable volatiles have begun to disappate, one notices the off-putting nature of the TCA more. In other words, because the desirable stuff fades faster than the TCA, the TCA seems to get worse with time (this would certainly help us avoid trying to state that the TCA is increasing).
Just a guess … and my first posting here (it’s getting very lonely at eBob).
I know what you’re getting at and have experienced it numerous times - I use it as a lithmus test when I’m not sure a wine is corked. There is also the real situation where you take a fine wine and pour it into something that is contaminated (decanter/glass) and thus taint it. I know that once I’ve had a corked wine in a glass, I have to really wash it well to get the taint smell out of it. Pouring a perfectly fine wine into the glass results in the impression that it is corked too, likely because of the residual volatile aromatics in the atmosphere in the glass. Would that blow off eventually? Perhaps, but I now generally set aside any glassware that got exposed to the corked wine.
The warming up IMHO is the biggest contributor. I have smelled and tasted when decanting inside our cellar and have missed some not so obvious TCA infected bottles. It is not until the wine warms up that a slight taint reveals itself.
Thinking about this topic might explain the reason corked Champagne bottles aren’t as widely encountered. Most never get the opportunity to warmup and the slightly corked bottles never emerge. I have only ever opened one corked Champagne and it was awful from the starting blocks.
I think Scott nailed it. When a wine “opens up” it is dissipation and oxygen related changes mellowing the wine. So the TCA may just be sitting there unaffected and it’s our own perceptions that awaken to its emerging relative prominence. (And certainly, as a wine warms up, the rate of those changes will increase, so there’s a correlation there, but time alone will do.)