The Cork Examined
What is a "corked" wine?
When I was on the nursery slopes of the wine world, I attended an international gathering of wine writers somewhere in the north of Italy. My badge read “Tom Doorley, The Sunday Tribune” and my opposite number from down South was sporting one that included his publication, as it was then, “The Cork Examiner”.
When we were joined by an American delegate he looked at this and said “Jeez, I had no idea you Irish take wine so seriously! A dedicated periodical about corks!” He was not actually joking, I’m afraid.
Years ago, when I was with The Irish Times, I was asked to interview Jancis Robinson who had just published, with Hugh Johnson, the latest World Atlas of Wine. I met her and her husband, Nick Lander, restaurant critic of the FT at the time, for a late dinner in The Winding Stair. We enjoyed the robust food and a fabulous Australian Riesling (I think it was Grosset Polish Hill) and were mildly disappointed by a serious Chianti Classico Riserva.
She suggested that we not bother with the interview there and then but instead do it by email in the morning, which we did. The first thing she said, having slept on it, was that our Chianti may have suffered from subliminal TCA, a new concept for me back then. I knew that TCA, or trichloranisole and related substances, give wines that repulsive “corked” smell and taste, but subliminal?
Well, it’s very much a thing. It means that you can’t smell it or taste it but its presence, undetected by the nose or palate, kills the fruit. The wine tastes flat, thin, dead. And that’s what our expensive Tuscan tasted like.
Once you’ve encountered a corked wine, you will forever recognise one. It’s the mouldy, rotten, woody aroma and taste that comes from a faulty cork, i.e. one that is infected with TCA. This chemical is produced when mould, bleach and steam come into contact with each other - something that can happen in certain water processing plants, incidentally. Yes, there is such a thing as “corked” tap water. But what concerns us here is how these factors coincide in the processing of corks.
It is estimated, currently, that about 3% of wine corks are contaminated with TCA. At least, noticeably so; there is a theory that virtually every wine in the world contains a tiny trace of the stuff, not enough to have any real impact. It remains to be proven.
That means that most wine drinkers will encounter a corked wine at least once a year. I’ve had two since January. In a restaurant, you just need to point it out and a fresh bottle should be opened. Shops and supermarkets should replace your faulty bottle without question - but make sure that it’s almost full.
It’s true that TCA seems to become worse on exposure to air so it can happen that a wine that tastes and smells doubtful at first will get worse pretty rapidly. Once again, a decent restaurant will understand this but not if you have plugged half the bottle.
If the corkscrew has dislodged a fragment of cork and it ends up in your glass, it does not mean that the wine is corked! Stick your -clean- finger in and scoop it out.
Screwcaps, of course, are a solution, but not an infallible one. Very rarely TCA can be endemic in a winery, or at least part of it. I once declined four bottles of the same wine in a hotel restaurant in the Rioja region because they were honking with TCA. My host was bullied into paying for them while I was keen to call the police. However, I took one with us and drove to the winery where we were told “That batch was destroyed. At least, we thought it had been. It was all infected with TCA”.
And the biggest wine producer in the world, Gallo of California, some time ago found that several of its screwccapped wines were corked. Again, it was endemic in one of their wineries. And as one very famous wine writer commented, in private, “well, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer company.”