I have never had a bottle of champagne corked and have drank thousands. I am not very sensitive to TCA, though and my percentage of corked wines is far less than most, though.
Yes, Otto, those were two separate ideas. Perhaps I should have made that clear.
It definitely would’ve helped, since you said “the wine in question”. I don’t know how else I was supposed to understand that. And, as I said, not all sparkling wines show autolysis, while many white wines can show quite a bit of autolysis and no-one would say they wouldn’t show much TCA.
Furthermore, as I pointed out above, from my own experience I’ve noticed that often when a sparkling wine is corked, it is often much more obvious than in a still wine, and I think it might have something to do with the CO2, as it makes any compounds in the wine more volatile, as the bubbles carry it away from the liquid.
My personal guess is that most likely Champagnes are relatively rarely corked because they wines themselves are expensive and thus the producers can afford to buy more expensive corks where the bottom disk is made of higher-quality cork, where the incidence of TCA is lower.
Not for me.
I do think it’s less common in sparkling wines, though.
I would agree with Otto in that I think corked Champagne is almost always going to be caught easier and quicker.
If Champagne is truly less often corked than other wines I would think it’s due to the amalgamated or composite corks. Those are used by everyone and it seems to be that you will automatically get less chance of TCA infection due to cleaning and having less chance of TCA infected cork touching the wine.