By Monte Belmonte
For the Valley Advocate
Cork taint! It’s just fun to say. But when it comes to drinking wine, it is a less fun experience. When casual wine drinkers think of wine “going bad,” they often talk about it turning to vinegar. If wine is way too old or hasn’t been stored correctly, I suppose it’s possible to experience the “vinegarization” of wine. But what is more common, in my experience of imbibing, is cork taint.
During Game 3 of the recent Red Sox/Yankees Wild Card series, I treated myself to a 2016 Laland de Pomerol Chateau La Croix St. Andres. It’s not a bank breaker. It’s about $30 a bottle. But it was a little pricier than I usually pay for an early October “Thursday on the couch” wine. It’s a Merlot heavy Bourdeaux. I was looking forward to drinking it. I was also looking forward to the Red Sox winning. But I was disappointed twice over. / Photo by Monte Belmonte
Cork taint is essentially just what it says it is. The cork taints the wine. How? The main culprit is 2,4,6-Trichloroanisole, or TCA, an organic compound that is a component found in some drinking water. It has sometimes been found in blood. But it is the main offender in creating the perception of something being “off” in a wine. If the cork in your wine bottle is made of actual cork from the bark of a tree, the material that has been used to stop up wine bottles for centuries, your wine is much more prone to be tainted by TCA hiding in said cork. If you have a plastic or composite cork or if you have what wine snobs call a “stelvin closure” (screw cap), your wine is less likely to experience the effects of TCA. It is possible for TCA to infect a whole winery and systemically taint the wine, but what is much more likely if your wine is ruined, is that it is the cork’s fault.
The wine industry estimates that as much as 1% to 7% of wine with corks is ruined by cork taint. That is a lot of loss. So much so that the eccentric California winemaking iconoclast, Randall Graham, held an actual mock funeral for the cork at Grand Central Station back in 2002. It was an attempt to lure the wine industry away from using actual cork and to embrace the screw cap. To a certain degree, his stunt was successful. There was a time when a screw cap on a wine was a surefire indicator of the juice inside being rot gut. But now there are many high quality wines from all across the world that come in bottles with screw caps. Although the world of European wine, in particular, has been slower to abort the cork.
How do you know if a wine is suffering from cork taint? It starts with the smell. To me, and many other wine snobs, cork taint smells like wet newspaper. If you are reading the print edition of The Valley Advocate, run it under the sink. Then let it sit outside in the sun for a bit. And then smell it. Look at that! Now we have an immersive experience. Who needs digital technology or the internet to get interactive? You can use good old fashioned print media to teach you about cork taint. Wet newspaper, wet cardboard, wet dog, wet basement. Something wet and mouldering means something is off. The wine is probably, as wine snobs will often say, “corked.”
Maybe you’ve been to a restaurant and the server has opened your bottle of wine in front of you and set the cork on the table. We are culturally conditioned to pick that cork up and smell it. Is this how you can tell if a wine is corked? Maybe if you are a master sommelier. But most people, myself included, can’t tell if a wine is corked by smelling the cork. If you look at the cork and the wine has left a stain nearing the top of that cork, it may mean that more oxygen than one might like has penetrated the plug. And oxygen is not something you want in that wine. At least, not until you are ready to drink it. Looking at the cork is going to tell you more about the wine than smelling the cork will.
If you want to know if a wine is corked, you must smell the wine itself. And if the wine smells like must, itself, your wine is probably corked. What do you do if your wine is corked? Put a cork in it and bring it back to the shop where you bought it. Now, I’ve spent enough time at the checkout counters of wine shops to witness people bringing back bottles of wine, claiming that they are corked. The wine purveyors are often very polite and either replace the “corked” bottle or offer a refund. And many times, I’ve asked the purveyor if I can smell the wine to see if it really is corked. Almost every time I’ve witnessed this, the wine wasn’t actually corked. Remember — you’re smelling for wet newspaper, wet cardboard, wet dog. If you smell that, bring the bottle back. What you are not to do is to bring a wine back to the hard working people who run wine shops and claim that something is wrong with the wine just because you don’t like it. “I don’t like it” does not equal “bad wine.” It equals someone’s bad choice.
Given the amount of wine that I drink and the number of years I’ve been drinking, I have run into surprisingly few examples of cork taint. The first half of the previous sentence may have much more grievous implications, health wise. But the second half seems in line with the industry research that says about 1% to 7% of wines have cork taint. Those percentages are just about on the money for me, especially given that not every wine I have purchased has had an actual cork. But recently, during Game 3 of the recent Red Sox/Yankees Wild Card series, I treated myself to a 2016 Laland de Pomerol Chateau La Croix St. Andres. It’s not a bank breaker. It’s about $30 a bottle. But it was a little pricier than I usually pay for an early October “Thursday on the couch” wine. It’s a Merlot heavy Bourdeaux. I was looking forward to drinking it. I was also looking forward to the Red Sox winning. But I was disappointed twice over.
Immediately, I smelled wet newspaper. (How’s your experiment going, by the way? Have you smelled your Valley Advocate yet?) Anyway, what do you think I did when I smelled the cork taint? I declared out loud to the rest of the family that “this wine is corked!” And then I proceeded to drink the whole thing while watching a Massachusetts-born player pitching for the Yankees evicerate the Red Sox playoff hopes. I was too lazy to get off the couch and bring it back to the store and I didn’t feel like opening anything else I had on hand. Also, I had the opportunity to complete my own experiment. Another thing to keep in mind about cork taint, it won’t hurt you. It smells bad, yes. It kills the fruit profile of the wine, yes. But from everying I’ve read, it won’t harm your person in any way. There was only one way to find out if corked wine was really innocuous when it comes to your gastronomic health. And I’m pleased to report, there were no ill effects from the cork taint. Ill effects of the Red Sox losing to the Yankees, on the other hand …
